1000th show in 2026?

1

At Zameen Art House last Friday, I was delighted to fill in for Tim Reinert and introduce the 500th Infidels Jazz show. It was an edition of the New Thing series, with La Syrie Libre: Emad Armoush on flutes and vocals, James Meger on upright bass, and Kenton Loewen on drums. The small place filled up for this trio, which played freeform music dotted with a couple folksong-like structures. The volume was quiet on the spectrum of Kenton Loewen gigs.

Armoush, who also played Jazz at the Bolt last month with his group Rayhan, brought three albums on CD: Fragrance and Distilled Extractions by Rayhan plus his Electritradition project with a series of duos. "La Syrie" is a track on Electritradition, featuring Armoush with cellist Marina Hasselberg. Armoush plays both ney flute and oud string instrument on record, though he had no oud on the gig:

Infidels reached 500 shows in roughly three and a half years. At the show, I enjoyed one presenter of an occasional but long-running series' remark that he hadn't yet hit 500 in over a decade. Given that the current pace is about 25 shows per month except in certain more laid-back stretches, it's quite possible that Tim presents his thousandth show before the end of 2026.

2

At the VIFF Centre on Saturday, to kick off a big birthday weekend for Cole Schmidt, I heard Kevin Romain's trio play a set and then saw the documentary Beware of Mr. Baker. The trio played the music of Going Back Home by the Ginger Baker Trio with Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden, plus a crowd-pleasing snippet of "Sunshine of Your Love". My favourite numbers were my favourite tracks from the album: "Rambler" and "When We Go" by Frisell plus "Ramblin'" by Ornette Coleman. I found a live set of the Baker trio on YouTube:

Cole played with a rounder guitar tone than Frisell's but launched into just as much distortion when needed. The VIFF Centre sounds great at any volume I've heard in there so far, deadened like a studio. Cole and Kevin played with Olive Shakur on bass, whom I'd never heard before but enjoyed in the Haden role.

If you don't know much about Baker the terrible human, haven't seen the documentary, and are curious, start with the Rolling Stone story by the film's director.

3

At The Hargrove on Sunday, the fun continued with Cole and Kevin's Lost Dog Sundays series, featuring the Bruno Hubert Trio. The turnout was strong and lively, especially because the cover charge was nonexistent and the birthday snacks and drinks were aplenty. The set break must have been an hour.

The trio played their latest album Fire Waltz, like I wrote to you at jazzfest time last year. Bruno tuned the piano extensively before the gig, coming into the non-insulated Hargrove room twice to give it some love. Hearing Meger play swinging straight-ahead time with Joe Poole less than 48 hours after Friday's show was quite something. The man has range.

Bruno brings the trio back to Frankie's this coming Wednesday.

4

At Brentwood Presbyterian Church's Jazz Evensong on Wednesday, vocalist-trumpeter Bonnie Northgraves led a quintet through her Alice in Wonderland suite of seven or eight pieces, many of them songs. The quintet consisted of Brent Mah on tenor saxophone, Dean Thiessen on piano, Wynston Minckler on bass, and Seth Kitamura on drums.

I'd already heard this music once, but with only the consummate pros Dean and Wynston accompanying Bonnie. I heard it during the 2022 jazzfest at the 2nd Floor Gastown. Bonnie was at the time the booker and music host, and she had enlisted me to cover that hosting role for her while she performed many jazzfest shows, but she did come back to the venue to play this new suite.

Brent on tenor is fun and has some Ben Webster vibes; I'm used to hearing him on alto. Seth was a solid and responsive drummer, immediately matching the rhythms thrown at him.

Bonnie comes from the Fraser Valley trad-jazz scene and is an expert entertainer, bringing well-thought-out phrases on the trumpet, powerful vocals, and across the suite itself a wide range of grooves and satisfying arrangements. She talked between each tune about the Alice references, with Jazz Evensong dropping its spoken intermission to accommodate the long musical runtime. The originals she writes are as logical and pleasing as standards.

Bonnie plays a few more times this weekend, including New Westminster's Uptown Swing Collective monthly series on Saturday and the White Rock Traditional Jazz Society on Sunday.

5

I read a long report about our national live music industry called Hear and Now, published by the Canadian Live Music Association and developed by the consulting firm Nordicity. The fine folks at ShowHub brought it to my attention. You're welcome to check out either the short or long version:

I feel prevented from taking it seriously, though, because of this incredible sentence (the bold text is theirs):

"Hear and Now survey results show that Canadian concert bookers and promoters booked an estimated 18,945 live music shows in Canada in 2023 – that figure conservatively translates to 50 shows per day across the country."

So sclerotic and reductive, "conservatively" doesn't come close to excusing it. I know, not even bet, there's that many shows per day in southwestern BC alone. I wonder what the real number is: could easily be 500, making them off by an order of magnitude. Heck, maybe 5,000, two orders. They must not care about anything below a certain size, and thus the report is irrelevant to so much of our world. After all, they write this in the long report:

"As an artist grows over time, they ideally move up the rungs of the venue-ladder, starting out in small bars or cafés, to theatres, to one day amphitheaters and stadiums."

The bureaucratic conception of the music industry only cares about the artists who map onto that absurdly narrow track. News at six, I guess. Hilarious to share that in the same column as Infidels' road to 1000 shows.

6

Dacey, the band of vocalist Dacey Andrada, put out a three-track... thing (EP? Single?) called "Nobody Else" last week. It's not jazz whatsoever, rather turned-up pop/rock. There are now two kinds of indie personae: those who use no caps in their titles and those who use ALL CAPS. You'll see which one we have here.

Humour me as I tell you of three connections that make Dacey relevant to my world:

• The band's drummer is my friend and collaborator Miles Wong, who is very much a jazz musician
• They somewhat recently appeared on another local podcast I produce, Pacific Sound Radio
• In the cover art, Dacey holds a yellow Nintendo 64 controller. Two weeks ago, I saw that exact controller – being used for some sort of Disney Tetris matches – at her rehearsal space, which played host to a semi-private mini show and video session for one of my friends' rock bands. Beyond just having fun, I actually learned a lot from attending that show: lessons that deserve to be obvious and are nevertheless easy to forget. 15 people in a tiny room, free of charge, can easily be more valuable than 40 people in a 100-seat venue who bought tickets. You can play only one set if you have a screen to do YouTube karaoke as set two, as long as you have the right 15 people in the room. People are more likely to remember and buy your eventual project if they come to something like this, than any amount of advertising you spend toward them.

7

On Tuesday, Renee Rosnes happened to appear on both the University of Manitoba-based Canadiana Suite radio program and The Late Set with Nate Chinen and Josh Jackson.

Rosnes' latest albums are Crossing Paths, released on Smoke Sessions Records at the end of 2024; and Arboresque as part of the band Artemis, out a few weeks ago on Blue Note.

I enjoyed hearing Rosnes shout-out Bob Rebagliati directly in the intro of Canadiana Suite and alluding to the strong presence of Canadian women across the international jazz scene in The Late Set. I feel that both the stiff pre-planned and the disarming cognoscenti styles, respectively, can work well and did work equally well for Rosnes as a guest.

"Vancouver during the early 80s was a very healthy environment in terms of all the jazz musicians that lived there, such as Fraser MacPherson and Tom Keenlyside," Rosnes said on Canadiana Suite. "There were just so many great local players, and there were a lot of clubs at the time, more than two, that were bringing in American acts." (For the record, which were they, folks?) Here's wishing that we're raising the next Renee Rosnes right now.

8

Artemis and the Ostara Project might seem comparable at surface level. Jodi Proznick herself said on the podcast, referencing Artemis by name:

"We were thinking about it around the same time, just as we saw that start and launch. We were like, oh great, Renee and Ingrid [Jensen] are doing the same thing! It kind of gave us a bit of, oh, we can do it too. It's a thing. We wanted to put together a band of just really unarguably great musicians and bandleaders, in particular writers and bandleaders." (1:05:58)

That said, they're completely different musical concepts, and they always have been. Artemis is an instrumental mainstream jazz quintet whereas Ostara has already had many vocalists and songs, and an all-instrumental Ostara show would be a departure. (Not that it could never happen.) Artemis is at its essence a New York club band, Ostara more of an arts centre act. The bands use different storytelling styles. Certainly comparable, however, are the 'most experienced member' roles that both Rosnes and Jodi carry.

9

I bandied this idea with Sapalo Shafooli and maybe some other friends a while back: would you enjoy if I did an 80s and early-90s Renee Rosnes listening deep dive piece? I haven't heard most of that stuff!

10

Jazzfest watch: North Shore Jazz announced. We have Mary Ancheta's Betty Davis project at the BlueShore, a return to the festival in back-to-back years for Taras Luka, and a handful of crossover shows: blues, Arabic, soul, and singer-songwriter.

Coastal Jazz also strongly suggested in their ongoing social posts that one or more artists from the 2011 festival would "come back around this year". Speculators, assemble!

I doubt they'd hype that up for, you know, a local artist, so our speculation is probably safe to stay on the 2011 ticketed lineup above. Who do we think: Trombone Shorty, Robert Glasper, Colin Stetson? Satoko Fujii, who already is coming here next month? You know if it were me, it'd just be Lucinda again.