Jazz fest recap

So, summer has been busy as usual and I am finding myself not blogging nearly as often as I want to -- there's a lot to talk about!

The Vancouver International Jazz festival was fantastic this year. There was a whole bevy of good free shows around Gastown and such, and the evening concerts were great. I managed to catch:

Above is John Scofield. The video was actually from the concert I attended (though I wasn't the one who took it). He plays around with pedals a lot and has a really interesting sound -- harmonically, too; he plays with lots of crunchy intervals that give him a really unique sound. Energy-wise this was a great show too, as you can see from his solo.

Alas, there was a bit of tragedy associated with that show. It was originally scheduled to be a double bill with the group above, The Esbjorn Svensson Trio. However, about two weeks before the show the bandleader died in a diving accident. It's truly a shame -- Esbjorn Svensson was one of my favourite pianists of all time (certainly my favourite pianist post-Bill Evans), and there would have been many decades more of truly innovative, interesting, and fun music from him.

Brad Mehldau has gained recent fame (and notoriety) by covering popular tunes -- sure enough, as an encore for his Vancouver show he played Radiohead's Exit Music for a Film, from Paranoid Android (the version I put up here is from another show, but it's the same tune). This concert was kind of weird; there were two encores, and really it took until then for the group to really get into it, it sounded. The start of the show was very low-energy and abstract, and I think the vast majority of listeners just weren't ready for that -- I know I found myself drifting off. But it's more on this stuff that the trio sounded more together and interested (not to mention interesting).

I absolutely cannot wait until I head to New York for a few days in August -- the sheer amount of excellent music that I will be able to catch while I am there is staggering!