The Montréal Jazz Festival Endures in 2023

The Montréal Jazz Festival, now in its 43rd year, has been named the biggest and the best in the world innumerable times at this point. 

But in so many ways, “biggest” and “best” are simply beside the point. It is also unlike any other, because of its location, its ambition and because for all the dazzling music presented, the event is just more festive than any other I’ve witnessed: the splash pad fountains children walk through stretching for a long city block, the keyboard to walk on, the ping pong tables at one of the nicer outdoor venues, the circus performers who pop up and perform here and there, the dance tutorials painted on the street near Place Des Arts, the world class lighting and sound even the least well known acts enjoy…

It all adds up to a sense of fun that brings visitors to this festival from throughout the world year after year. 

In 1976, this Vermonter drove to Montréal, parked on the street and walked up the steps of a club called The Rising Sun. The occasion was an appearance by the legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon, later an important character in Bertrand Tavernier’s film Round Midnight. Gordon had just returned from a self-imposed exile in Europe. After a couple of uptempo numbers, after the applause subsided, Gordon leaned into the microphone and spoke in a whispered baritone a fragment of the lyric of an old song: “Polkadots and moonbeams, wrapped around a pug-nosed dream”. Then, having set a mood, the ensemble proceeded to play the song. It was breathtaking. 

The Rising Sun is no longer there. But the building stands. Except that now the neighborhood the old club occupied – once part of Montréal’s red-light district – is now known as Le Quartier Des Spectacles. …or Festival District for us Anglophones. “Le Quartier” is now 20 years old. And the same Jazz lover, (yours truly), 47 years later, enjoyed the terrific Le Tonique Big Band playing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” for free on the street mere footsteps from the building which once housed The Rising Sun. 

This neighborhood – Le Quartier des Spectacles – has more seats in its 30 indoor performing arts venues than any city in the world, save for NYC with its Broadway theaters. The area is home to one dazzling festival after another in the Summer, (some 40 in a given year) and surprisingly the Montréal Jazz Festival (which these days offers some 350 performances over 10 days,) doesn’t even use them all. 

But people visit this festival for the Jazz, not just the ambience, the extraordinary food and the festive Joie De Vivre. Thanks to the thoughtful and vibrant curation by Maurin Auxéméry and his team, which in recent years has picked up the mantle from André Ménard and Laurent Saulnier, they get jazz and adjacent music in spades. And this bouquet of musical choices comes both as free concerts and ticketed concerts. 

One venue is in the building which serves as the headquarters of the Jazz Festival. Formerly called L’Astral, now known as Studio TD, this intimate club hosts performances by top shelf Jazz artists twice a day every day for the entire ten days of the festival. On July 3, the pianist Emmet Cohen led a trio which delivered an astonishing performance. Cohen became a star in the jazz world partly on the strength of the livestreams he’s hosted from his Harlem apartment starting when the pandemic made touring impossible.

Videos of these shows have been streamed some 26 million times. Yet here he was in a tiny club playing for anyone who’d been willing to stand in line for an hour or so. Having seen this very trio (drummer Kyle Poole and bassist Phillip Norris) I knew we were in for a foot tapping good time and some sore grin muscles. But on this occasion, the audience acted like they were witnessing The Beatles at Shea Stadium, and the musicians played as if their lives depended on it. I’ve never seen a piano trio erupt quite like this before and bring a crowd to this sort of a frenzy and I’ll never forget it. I can’t say how most of the other concerts in this series were, exactly. But hosting this series in this club, free of charge says a lot about this festival’s commitment to straight-ahead jazz, offered gratis. That performance was but one of 24 that day, and fully half of those performances were free. Bravo!

A day earlier I’d gone to see something unusual and the sort of thing which not many Jazz Festivals would present: Tim Brady’s Instruments of Happiness. Brady is a guitarist, born in Montréal, who periodically performs with ensembles of 100 electric guitars or more. YouTube, the composer and guitarist told me, has a video of one of these performances at St Joseph’s Oratory in Montréal.

On this occasion, the setting was the atrium of the Garden Complex, a mall in the center of the Festival District which also serves as an important nexus for Montreal’s underground city. Home to some 1600 shops and services, Montreal’s underground is the largest in the world, and the thought of 100 electric guitars performing there piqued my curiosity. 

Arranged in four groups, each with a conductor and cellphones set to a synchronizing program, the ensembles played mostly together but also in sequence, seemingly passing the music around the room in the manner of antiphonal choral music or birds in murmuration across the sky. By turns ambient, minimalist and gestural, the music twittered, hummed and filled the space like water in an aquarium on a storm-tossed sea. It was thrilling and remarkable. I felt very fortunate to be there to witness it with perhaps a thousand others. 

Two theaters in Place Des Arts, in the heart of the Festival District, offered performances by such luminaries as Herbie Hancock, George Benson, Diana Krall, Hiromi, Thundercat and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss. 

While I wasn’t able to see Hancock’s show, I’m told he delivered a wide-ranging set full of well-known music from the several careers he seems to have had – featuring composer and trumpet ace Terence Blanchard, guitarist Lionel Loueke and a very young drummer I’ll be watching for named Jaylen Petinaud. 

I did almost walk into Mr. Hancock in the sidewalk, and as always, was struck by how great he looks, particularly for 83. He seems to be younger each time I see him. 

I heard similar very happy reports about the concert by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, which included their collaborations as well as a choice few Led Zeppelin songs. This was a sellout show in a nearly 3000 seat room, and by all accounts the ensemble they brought was extraordinarily good. There seems to be an audience for almost every kind of good music in this city, and the Montréal Jazz Festival excels at shining the best possible light on whatever it chooses to present. 

Highlights from this year’s Montréal Jazz Festival will be easy to remember: 

For example, legend John Scofield’s appearance in Monument National, the most storied historic venue in use at the festival. Interrupted by a false fire alarm which caused the audience to walk to the park across the street for 35 minutes, the trio (Bill Stewart on drums, Vicente Archer on double bass) dug in and played a delightful and well programmed set. 

Anouar Brahem, the great Tunisian oud player who records for the prestigious ECM records, led the ensemble which appeared on his glorious 2009 The Astounding Eyes of Rita, creating for the audience a rare and beautiful atmosphere of calm for the length of the concert, punctuated only by periodic standing ovations. 

The great Brazilian composer, singer and instrumentalist Marisa Monte performed two sold out shows in Theatre Maisonneuve featuring costume changes, film vignettes projected behind her and some of the most beautiful lighting effects imaginable. Not only was her music gorgeous (prompting many in the audience to sing along at times) but she made a convincing case for the power of appearing on stage with a jeweled tiara and a black telecaster. Magical. 

Keyboard wiz James Francies led his trio at one of the more relaxing outdoor venues, in a set of powerfully expansive music which seemed to move in all directions at once. 

Japanese piano star Hiromi appeared with NYC based string quartet Publiquartet, demonstrating her range and taste. 

Saxophonist, singer and percussionist Isaiah Collier from Chicago led his Chosen Few through two captivating sets of their new music. 

Versatile Montréal pianist David Ryshpan led his Trio Bruxo, outdoors for free and also helped Quebec based Brazilian singer Rommel open for Marisa Monte. Ryshpan is a crucial part of several of Montréal’s musical communities and a great example of the quality of local players. 

The festival and the city both seem the be at the start of a new era with live music at the forefront. 

I can hardly wait to see what next year’s Montréal Jazz Festival offers. 

VIDEO: Discover Canada’s stroll through the Montréal Jazz Festival 2023

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David Beckett

A Realtor in Burlington, Vermont, David Beckett has been a friend to Jazz since 1983.

David airs a long running Jazz radio show at WWPV FM and serves as a Jazz Director and music librarian at the station.

Follow David on Twitter @DavidBeckettVT

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