One thing I’ll say for Montreal audiences, they’re definitely enthusiastic. I haven’t seen this many standing ovations since I lived in Seattle, where listeners routinely gave standing Os to whatever artist was on stage, the coat check girl that handed them their furs, and the cab driver that got them home.
Back then, it got aggravating, but here there’s something endearing about it – these are in large part people who’ve planned their vacations around music, so for the next week, anyway, they get a pass, whether the shows deserve it or not.
Not that anything has been undeserving. Took in two ticketed indoor performances last night – the headliner of the evening being Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, whose performance is something of a Montreal must-see given the fact that his country of origin prevents him from showing up Stateside too often. And the crowd was so appreciative that they not only stood repeatedly but dragged his quartet – quintet with the brief edition of Chucho’s vocalist sister Mayra Caridad Valdés – back for four encores.
Valdes gave the type of performance that inspires such a vigorous reaction, full of keyboard pyrotechnics and impossibly agile runs. Unlike many a crowd-pleasing musical gymnast, however, Valdes comes from the Tatum/Peterson school of remaining musical no matter how high the accelerator climbs. The independence of Valdes’ left and right hands was a marvel to see – at times I wondered where he was smuggling the third hand from.
The set kicked off with a muscular version of “Satin Doll” that eventually morphed into “Caravan”, a clave on steroids, a tribute to Joe Zawinul, a rendition of “Besame Mucho” with his sister’s intense vocals, and an encore performance of “Blue Rondo a la Turk” that framed an acrobatic percussion duet.
Earlier in the evening, a very different performance met with a similarly enthusiastic audience, as Angele Dubeau led her string ensemble La Pieta through the Philip Glass repertoire from their recent CD Portrait. I’ve always found Glass’ music to benefit from the live setting; releasing his repetitive figures into the atmosphere seems to allow them to breathe in a way that recordings seem to suffocate. And Dubeau, who has worked with Glass since the ‘90s, did these selections the same service.
The group played with, as oxymoronic as this may sound, a lush rigor throughout. Even a lengthy suite from the soundtrack to The Hours, which I’ve never much cared for on CD, was rendered with a porcelain beauty, particularly in the hands of pianist Marie-Eve Scarfone. The set also featured one Arvo Part composition, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” which in La Pieta’s rendering became a drifting, soft-hued watercolor, utterly entrancing.
Dubeau met the enthusiastic ovation by slipping into platform flip-flops (the ensemble was otherwise decked out in the usual black, each trimmed or accessorized in bright reds) and picking up her electric violin for a crowd-pleasing Abba medley, complete with shreddy distorted solo.
Of course, none of it was anywhere in the neighborhood of jazz, which is a habit picked up by nearly every festival bearing that name – virtually anything can be folded in as long as there is a core of actual jazz performers (and sometimes not even that), which always begs the question of why anyone still bothers to include the name at all. Given the enthusiasm for the actual jazz I’ve seen thus far, the tactic comes off as condescending and not quite necessary – granted, no one on Blue Note then or now is going to attract the kind of crowd that Stevie Wonder did on Thursday, but who says every festival needs ‘em?
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