Bonnie Northgraves' Big Loud en route to a live recording
The show to be recorded happens tomorrow; here’s what they played & how it felt at the Fox
Trumpeter and vocalist Bonnie Northgraves celebrated her birthday and led her Big Loud quintet with Jens Christiansen on saxophone, Dean Thiessen on piano keyboard, Joseph Lubinsky-Mast on bass, and Seth Kitamura on drums at the Fox Cabaret on Wednesday, March 20, 2024. The Vancouver Independent Music Centre Society, or VIM House for short, presented the show.
Bonnie's Big Loud is a trad-jazz ensemble, like many of her projects. Her podcast episode was still just six months ago, and she talked about assembling this band toward the end of our conversation.
The Fox, known as the place to be for Millennial pop/rock fans in East Vancouver, has finally become an important venue in our community since this article I wrote two years ago about another VIM-presented concert:
Will Chernoff
Here's the thing about Bonnie: she is one of those performers whom you can count on to put on a show and entertain an audience in any environment. You can even send your friends to her shows and tell them you know it'll be a good time, regardless of where or when...
This quality was important on Wednesday night. Unlike the Stranger Friends Orchestra show, the draw wasn't there: when I showed up, only about 15 minutes before the start time, fewer than ten people were in the room. (On top of that, I was given a complimentary ticket.)
Do we chalk that up to Infidels Jazz vs. VIM as presenters? I doubt it. Too many variables – Friday night versus weeknight, length of pre-sales, number of musicians in the band, on and on.
The only point I'm willing to linger on, before I wave my hands over this issue of turnout, is that with the birthday gig Bonnie pre-empted two more Big Loud shows this weekend. I've been worried myself about overplaying recently. Both of those other shows are in the weekend gigs section below, and the first is a live recording.
All that said, the cavalry did come: swing dancers eventually filled the front area and lent their exuberant energy to the event, inspiring the band in the second half to greater heights. Perhaps 50-60 people ended up in the house.
Bonnie enjoys mixing pop songs into the hot jazz arrangement style; the concoction is like a Red Bull of accessible, fun numbers to sing. She did it on her 2021 release Welcome to Trashland with songs like Lorde's "Royals" and Macy Gray's "I Try", both of which we heard on Wednesday – along with an unexpected "Stuck In The Middle With You".
I believe she performed only one original: "I Lied" from her 2019 album Between Then and Now. It's about denying the extent of a lover's love, "an original song about not telling the truth", she said to introduce it in perfect timing after reciprocating an audience member's joke about how this birthday must be her twenty-first.
Then we had much of the trad fare that Bonnie has performed with poise, and full-bore trumpet soloing, for over a decade: "Bourbon Street Parade", "Royal Garden Blues", "St. James Infirmary", "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It", and more.
I enjoyed the band's "Summertime" where Bonnie deployed a conservative arrangement in G minor, letting Dean Thiessen set her up with the keys playing that he's delivered in her bands for years, only to soar high with her vocals at the ending. But my favourite number was "That's a Plenty", their most uptempo song, where the swing dancers lifted the Fox's mood.
