Summer Reeding

It was actually kind of embarrassing. There I was at the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival Tuesday night walking away from the sweet sounds of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band after just two songs, so I could go next door to the National Arts Centre to see Branford Marsalis and his quartet. How often in life is one faced with such rich choices?

But it’s even worse than this. Just an hour earlier I saw the great tenor sax man, Seamus Blake, with Toronto keyboard master Robi Botos. And at 10:40, after Branford’s searing 90 minute set, I headed a couple of blocks south to the Laurier Avenue Stage near City Hall to catch Moon Hooch, a trio with two sax players and a drummer who started as street musicians in New York and have been banned from at least one subway station because their crowds got too big.

Quite simply, on Tuesday night, Ottawa was a sax fan’s paradise. It’s fun to think that this was just dumb luck that so many great horn players performed within a couple of hours of each other in a four block area, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the festival’s Programming Manager, Petr Cancura, knew exactly what he was doing when he booked these stellar acts on the same night.

Curating a 13-day festival is a lot about logistics, but it’s also not unlike programming a radio show. You have to know what music works well with other music, and always keep your audience’s enjoyment the #1 priority. Petr (a fine saxophonist himself) seems to have a real knack for this.

The four sax-heavy acts Tuesday night were quite varied, but complemented each other beautifully. The energy and joy from the evening fueled my drive home to Pierrepont, and made me glad there are such fine curators of jazz just a couple of hours up the road in Canada’s capital.

Tags: jazz, music, ottawa, saxophone