THE ART OF IMPROV
Jazz festival returns
It's kind of like playing jazz.
The past couple years have packed a series of unexpected challenges and reflections for Kent Sangster, educator, musician and director of the TD Edmonton International Jazz Festival.
For example, you might wind up on the other side of the planet to find yourself sourcing great artists who live closer to your own backyard. Consider expert pianist John Beasley, the Los Angeles-based leader-composer-producer, and one of the headlining performers billed for this year's festival happening live and online.
Sangster was in Russia in 2019 when bandleader Igor Butman asked him to play an impromptu number with the Moscow Jazz Orchestra. Beasley was a featured guest in the show.
“There was no rehearsal, so I wasn't expecting to play,” Sangster recalls. “On the break, I was told, `Igor wants you now, no rehearsal needed,' and John Beasley walks out of the dressing room to meet me. So I ended up playing a funk tune in A flat with him. Embarrassingly so, I didn't know much about him, and then he won a Grammy this year. He's a fantastic musician that Edmonton audiences should know about and his band is a killer.”
Louisiana-born Beasley (nominated for eight Grammy Awards) is one of six musicians to headline virtual shows for this year's Edmonton International Jazz Festival, along with other artists from New York, the U.K., Iceland and across Canada.
Acclaimed reedman David Liebman, joining the festival in conversation and concert, heads up the New York contingent, along with bands led by pianist Dan Tepfer and trumpeter Jaimie Branch. London saxophonist Nubya Garcia and Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs fill out the list of rising stars with virtual dates.
Another six Alberta acts will headline a series of live club and outdoor dates the festival dubs Jazz Around Town. Previous venues like The Common, Blue Chair Cafe and La Cite Francophone will host shows, along with new outdoor sites Route 107, The Backyard and Snow Valley Ski Hill Outdoor Venue.
These fresh-air performance spaces are a new experiment by the festival. They'll be filled with bands from around Edmonton and the province, led by Charlie Austin, Louise Dawson, Rubim Detoledo, Ellen Doty, Andrew Glover, Brett Hansen, Jeff Hendrick, Brett Miles, Audrey Ochoa, Olga Osipova along with Melafrique, Good Information and Bones From Underground.
All shows online, or in-person outside are free of charge, while indoor venues have ticketed seats.
Sangster says the free shows are the festival's way of encouraging crowds to come out for jazz again and to help promote local venues that have faced hard times from the pandemic.
“The festival wasn't hurt that much, we still have our funding, but it felt like the music industry was the one industry hit the hardest,” he says.
Like Edmonton, other jazz fests across Canada have also pushed dates this year to late summer. One reason the festival was moved from its regular June spot to August is to enable social comfort.
“Intertwined with all this is the fact that we don't know what people's acceptance of all this will be and how they will feel about coming out,” Sangster says. “Some people might feel, `I'm not ready for that yet,' but if they can come outside and maintain a safe distance, that's another thing.”
In getting here, the pandemic period has been an exercise in real-life improvisation beyond anything the jazz festival director was called on to play through his saxophone.
“It has been frustrating,” Sangster says. “It's been plan, wait and see, and stop, and then plan, wait and see, stop a little bit. We knew all along that most of the festival itself would be online in working through the restrictions and forecasts, and it was a futile process to try and make money off it this year. We still had to pull the plug on some stuff.”
At times, Sangster says government regulations seemed contradictory.
“As we got further locked down, there was what I think was a double standard that doesn't sit well with a lot of people in the music industry. You could go into a place of worship and play music if you wanted to, but you couldn't go into a music venue and record three or four local musicians at a safe distance because of restrictions. I'm not talking about a live gig, just supporting local artists online.”
From another angle, Sangster says the pandemic inspired a re-evaluation of what the festival does.
“It has been a good time to reflect. It's possible that we may stay with a five-day festival next year because it's a little more manageable,” he says, referring to this year's Aug. 16-20 run. “But at the end of the day, we're in a position to look at other community initiatives — how to help musicians more, how to help people who may be interested in jazz to access more information, to make sure our programming and development of musicians is accessible as possible. We might pick one or two events a month that we either sponsor or present.”
Speaking of community, Sangster's Russian appearance had an ideal, if not unexpected bonding element to put it over the top.
“Igor insisted on changing before the set to wear an Edmonton Oilers jersey that I had given him, and insisted that I wear a Russian jersey signed by all these Russian hockey players,” he says. “By the end I was on Cloud 9.”
For full details on this year's jazz fest, go to edmontonjazz.com or @edmontonjazz on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.