Vancouver Jazzfest

So I'm holed up here at 7th and Oak in Vancouver, a neighborhood known as Fairview Slopes. I know I'm in Vancouver because, even though the weather is a bit chilly (believe me, I appreciate it. It was 103F the day I left New Orleans) every second person I pass on the street is wearing shorts, hiking boots, a North Face fleece vest and some variety of expensive, designer baseball cap. I'm doing the Vancouver thing, getting up in the morning and hiking up the hill to Broadway for coffee at Starbucks, reading the paper, like that. It's nice, you know? It's funny because I used to live in this neighborhood in the 1970s, when it was a radically different place. Nowdays it's all ticky-tacky but very expensive condos, many of them leaking due to poor design and construction. Back then it was filled with beautiful but run-down Victorian and Queen Anne period houses inhabited by slackers like me. In 1971 I lived in a three bedroom house at 2328 Willow Street with my girlfriend and two other people. The rent was $150 a month and my share was $25. We made our own beer in the basement crawl-space and shared a communal can of tobacco. My total monthly nut; rent, food, beer, smokes, was about $70. All that's gone now. In the mid seventies real estate developers went through this and other Vancouver neighborhoods like the Four Horesemen of the Apocalypse, flattening hundreds of beautiful period houses and replacing them with expensive (though often poorly designed and cheaply constructed) condos. The irony is that in the long run (though, of course, they had no interest in the long run) there would have been more money to be made renoing the existing housing stock than in flooding the market with cheapo construction. The architectural rape of Vancouver is one of the great untold stories of the 70s and 80s. Because of my long history in the city, playing the Vancouver Festival is much more than just another gig to me. I've played it every year since 1997, both as a "local guy" and an out-of-towner, and Ken Pickering and the folks at the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society have been very supportive of me all that time. Unlike the New Orleans festival, whose artist passes are only good on the day of performance, CJBS hands out passes good for the whole festival, giving me the opportunity to catch a lot of music I'd otherwise be unable to afford. And the opportunity to play with and socialize with my many friends and colleagues in the Vancouver jazz community is a treasure beyond price. My gig on Staturday was with singer Colleen Savage, whom I have now known for...good lord, 33 years. We first met as students in Vancouver Community College's fledgling Jazz and Commercial Music program in 1976. When I recorded my first CD as a leader, 2002's "One Up, Two Back," Colleen guested on two tunes, Jobim's "Djindi" and a great arrangement of "Time After Time" that Colleen has in her book. We played that same arrangement at the gig Saturday night, at the tempo I should have recorded it at back in 2002. It's hard to record slow stuff slow enough, you know? It really takes nerves of steel. I chickened out on that session seven years ago, and counted it in too fast. Last Saturday Colleen nailed it dead solid perfect. Speaking of hard, Colleen's book is hard. I'd forgotten just how hard it is. It would be a real mistake to go on a Colleen Savage gig expecting just another My-Funny-Valentine-chick-singer kind of job. She's got a lot of tricky arrangements and obscure, oddball tunes in there, stuff like Eartha Kitt's "I Wanna Be Evil" and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames' "Yeh Yeh." A tune like "It Could Happen To You," which most singers take at a medium swing, Colleen does in it's original form, as a sloooooow ballad. Gigi Gryce's "Music In The Air," with it's constantly cycling key centers, is taken at a blistering tempo. This is the third year I've played the Capilano Suspension Bridge stage with her, and I talked to several people afterwards who'd been in attendence every year. Despite the rain and cool weather we had an excellent house and Colleen had them eating out of her hand by the end. I doubt anyone there would have guessed that she was just getting over a terrible cold she'd brought back from California. My own gig on July 1st at the Railspur Alley Stage is with what I've been referring to as the "mystery rhythm section," because I haven't met them yet. Actually I do know bassist Jen Hodge fairly well, but I've never played with her. I'll be meeting up with drummer Mike Ardagh and pianist Cat Toren on the day of the gig. I've had some very, very good experiences playing with fresh rhythm sections in Vancouver over the last few years. In 2006 Cory Weeds offered me a date at the Cellar and the band I was using in Vancouver at the time (Tony Foster on B-3, Joe Poole on drums, and Jon Roper on guitar) was unavailable. I considered calling up the "usual suspects" then remembered that Morgan Childs, a young drummer I'd worked with once on a casual big band date, had been playing regularly in a trio with pianist Amanda Tosoff. Along with bassist Josh Cole they made up the rhythm section on that Cellar gig, and it was one of the most fun experiences I had playing jazz that year. I'm hoping for a similar experience with Jen's bunch. When you have long working associations with certain players, as I do in Vancouver, it's very tempting to stay within the comfort zone of people you've worked with a lot. But it can also be great fun (and pay tremenduos musical dividends) to take a shot and work with some of the many terrific young musicians this city continues to produce in such abundance.

Saddle Up (Again).

Seems like we just got back from Tulsa but it's already time to hit the road again. I'll be in Vancouver, Canada for two gigs at their jazzfest; June 27th with my good friend vocalist Colleen Savage at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, and July 1st fronting a new (for me) local rhythm section of Cat Toren (piano) Jen Hodge (bass) and Mike Ardagh (drums) at the Railspur Alley Stage on Granville Island. I'll also be out at the South Delta Jazz Festival in Whiterock July 9th for a concert (with Jarrod burough's on guitar, my old Vancouver runnin podnuh Stan Taylor on drums, and my New Orleans crony Rob Kohler on bass) and clinic/lecture. http://www.southdeltajazzfestival.com/faculty09.html Man it is so hot and humid here right now. I've been riding my bike back and forth to my office at Tulane, and it was so bad yesterday that the condensation on the inside of my watch crystal caused the watch to stop. I think it's rusted shut in there. All in all, a good time to get out of town for a while. I'll try and do a little blogging from the Vancouver fest, always one of my favorite playing opportunities. If you're in town and make either of those gigs, hollah at me.

Meyer the Hatter.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that, in a place like New Orleans, the sun is not your friend. After years of living in Vancouver, Canada, where a warm sunny day is such a rarity that a kind of mass hysteria grips the city when one occurs, compelling tens of thousands of Vancouverites to skip work in a mass stampede to the beach, to the bike path, to rollerblade, here I deal with an embarrassment of riches. The sun, much of the year, is so brutal that locals use umbrellas as much for protection against sunlight as against rain, and only non-natives (like most of my students at Tulane) are crazy enough to actually lay out in it. And if you're walking any distance out in the open, you're nuts not to wear a hat. I own quite a few of them already (when I was a kid I loved hats of all kinds, and had a whole box of them); my current stash includes two felt fedoras ( Biltmores, in brown and grey), a pricey straw panama with a black band (the kind favored by the recently deceased pianist and raconteur Jack Velker), a cheap straw fedora with a band that says "Vancouver Sun Golf Tournament" that I bought for two bucks at a thrift shop in Vancouver, a "one size fits all" vent-air fedora (another thrift shop purchase, this time in Vicksburg, Mississippi), and a stingy-brim job I got for $4.98 at Walgreens drugstore on Tchoupitoulas last year that's actually made of paper, even though it looks like straw, and that never fails to get me complements from middle-aged African-American sports at second lines. I also recently aquired a straw version of the British "flat cap," which Mr. Arthur, our local truck-vendor fruit and vegetable man, refers to as my "Dago" hat. But since I'm going on the road for a few weeks worth of gigs this summer, and none of these hats are what you'd call "suitcase ready" (and hat boxes on the plane are a real pain in the ass) I decided today that I needed to pay a visit to Meyer the Hatter for something more portable. Meyer the Hatter is a long, narrow store on St. Charles Avenue, just off Canal and right across from the streetcar stop in front of the Pearl Oyster Bar, that sells nothing but hats. It's sign advertises "quality headgear since 1894." When I was in there last winter the place was full of derbies (some of them green, for St. Patrick's Day) felt fedoras, porkpies, and dark colored Kangols, as well as the odd stovepipe and topper. Today it's filled with straw boaters, panamas, fedoras , various and sundry Palm-beachers and summer hats and of course the white, eight-point black visored caps that bandsmen wear in brass-band jazz ensembles. But I don't see what I'm looking for, a lightweight cotton version of the British flat cap, known in New Orleans as a "bebop cap." A chubby little guy with a goatee, wearing, incredibly, a peaked-brim cap with earflaps, ala Ignatious Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," skates up to me and says, "How ya dooin cap. Ma heptcha?" A major y'at for sure. God I love this place. (For the uninitiated, a "y'at" is a working class, white New Orleanian. Their manner of speech is surprisingly un-southern, containing a lot of dese-dem-and-dose-isms. Think Archie Bunker with southern diction. The term "y'at" comes from the once-ubiquitous greeting "where y'at?" and he was asking me "how are you? May I help you?" The expression "cap" (short for "captain") is roughly equivalent to "buddy" or "pal," and is another form of address that one doesn't hear as often as even just a few years ago. Sadly, the homogenizing effects of mass American culture are spreading even here). But I digress. Clerk: "Ma heptcha?" Me:"Y'all got any a those bebop caps in the store, in maybe a white or a powder blue?" Clerk:"Ohyesindeedy bruh, y'all follow me through heah, watch yah step" (he proceeds to lead me through a narrow opening between mountainous hat trees to a tiny, secluded oasis of hat drawers) "it's a little tight up in dis piece an dat's fuh sho." And after 15 or so minutes of this kind of back and forth, in which we discuss jazzfest ("too expensive for me bruh. I pay $50 to hear music, I want a chair, know what I'm sayin?") the absolute joy and perfection of life in New Orleans ("although I could use a bit less a da flyin bullets, an dats fuh sho") and his total commitment to my continued sartorial well being ("I gotcha covered like dew on da ground, baby"), I walk out of there in a spiffy new white Kangol be-bop cap. And by god looky here, right under the brim. Meyer's has a website: http://www.meyerthehatter.com/meyer/