Festival City comes alive as Jazz Festival kicks off

Article content

WHO: Ms. Lisa Fischer

WHERE: TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, Confederation Park

Festival City is alive with the sound of music.

Ottawa's famed festival season swung into action and set the city alight Friday night with a quartet of fine festival offerings, culminating in the kickoff to TD Ottawa Jazz Festival's 35th season.

Surefooted festivalgoers could work their way from Italian Week's grand finale festivities to Centretown's celebrated Glow Fair -- and walking may have been the preferred mode of transit Friday afternoon, with traffic tied up in the resulting road closures along Preston St. and Bank St. -- then stumble upon downtown's Ottawa Explosion before winding up at Confederation Park's high-flying Jazzfest.

With his fifth edition as festival programming director, Petr Cancura has carefully curated a masterpiece of a festival.

And if the tour-de-force opening night performance from Ms. Lisa Fischer was any indication of the shape of things to come, then Jazzfest fans are in for something special.

In the days leading up to the festival launch, Cancura described Lisa Fischer as "swimming along that line between r&b, soul, jazz, blues... she's everything the festival is about, really."

She's that and much more.

Ask anyone who has seen her in the awe-inspiring film 20 Feet From Stardom -- and if you haven't, go see it now... -- or caught her belting out Gimme Shelter or Monkey Man with Mick Jagger, a role she's reprised on every Rolling Stones tour since 1989. (It was revealed in her introduction that Fischer would be boarding a post-show flight to join the Stones in time for Saturday's tour stop in Pittsburgh.)

And while she traversed all sorts of diverse musical territory through an hour-long headlining set, it was her affinity for the Jagger-Richards songbook -- and her unique spin on old Stones classics like Jumpin' Jack Flash and Miss You -- that really drove the performance home.

She first welcomed the crowd with a soft-spoke "Hello" before unleashing a swirling wordless siren song, aided along by her ace band Grand Baton, with guitarist and musical director Jean-Christophe Maillard, drummer Thierry Arpino and bassist Aidan Carroll.

The eerie introduction melted into the hymnal Breath of Heaven (Mary's Song), captivating the crowd that trickled into Confederation Park at sundown.

But it was her hip-shaking swing on Fever, the Peggy Lee signature song, that got people moving, and kept them under her spell through a soul-drenched Freedom.

Her voice was soaring on her own breakthrough single How Can I Ease the Pain, but the band was at their best -- as evidenced by the crowd response -- on her adventurous reworkings of the more familiar songs in her repertoire, with a groovy take on Led Zeppelin's Rock n' Roll, an extended improv on Jumpin' Jack Flash and a funky rendition of Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love the highlights.

Side stage offerings on opening night seemed to encapsulate the vision Cancura laid out for the festival.

With Friday's idyllic weather and the picture-perfect setting with the Rideau Canal as the backdrop, Montreal's Jacques Kuba Seguin and his Odd Lot band opened the main stage with an eclectic mix of brooding jazz with a distinct Eastern European influence -- "Spotlight on Europe" is one of the key themes running throughout this edition of the festival, a production Cancura said has been "literally years in the making."

With the Main Stage reserved for heavyweights -- The Roots, Huey Lewis, Tower of Power, Steve Miller, Joel Plaskett and Beirut will all grace the stage by festival's end -- the Laurier Ave. stage served up it's first of a quirky blend, with Brooklyn's Lucky Chops charming fans with their New Orleans-style swing renditions of I've Been Working on The Railroad and My Girl.

aedan.helmer@sunmedia.ca

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Festival City comes alive as Jazz Festival kicks off Back to video