Most of this year’s big-ticket concerts took place under the tent pitched at Nathan Phillips Square, near Toronto City Hall. I caught two of these concerts, both of them rather oddly assorted double bills. D.D. Jackson was hampered by an increasingly out-of-tune piano but still delivered a solid performance with his trio, though I can only take his mix of honeyed sentimentality and pianistic flash-floods in small doses. Bud Shank’s quartet featured Bill Mays on (a freshly-tuned) piano, bassist Bob Magnusson and drummer Joe LaBarbera, as well as special guest Phil Woods. Shank’s solos were full of airborne cries and trills, reaching skyward then plummeting to earth like a wounded bird. Woods has a similarly gutsy Parker-derived style, but with more hustle: rather than dwelling on a note to give it weight, he would cut it short, or fast-forward to the next phrase. It was a pleasure to hear the saxophonists going head to head in front of this blue-chip rhythm section, and Shank in particular was in fine form on “Nature Boy” and Mays’ waltz “Gemma’s Eyes.”

The Bad Plus made an equally offbeat pairing with vibes legend Gary Burton. Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and David King blasted through a bunch of enigmatic originals as well as Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Some pieces developed into huge rock’n’roll power-anthems; others had a Frankenstein’s Monster feel: disconnected bits and pieces stitched together and shocked into life with a jolt of electricity. For all his power - you pitied the poor piano at times - Iverson also has a subversive elegance recalling Simon Nabatov, and despite its ingenuities the music came across as genuinely enigmatic rather than merely clever.

Burton has always given generous exposure to young up-and-coming players. His Generations Quintet features three young musicians plus his regular partner, pianist Makoto Ozone. Sixteen-year-old guitarist Julian Lage was strongly featured as a player and composer, sounding entirely at ease in this fast company. This was good but not great music: of what I heard, a gently swinging blues sticks out most in the memory. Ozone contributed an arrangement of Oscar Peterson’s “Wheatland” - a slight composition at best, but a nice gesture to the home crowd.

Nathan Phillips Square was also the location of a series of free daytime concerts, of which I only caught a gig by the Carlo Actis Dato Quartet. Like Han Bennink Dato is an avantgardist who’s also a crowd-pleaser (the Square was packed), and he was in his element. His music is a pancultural stew (Arabic, Mediterranean, African, European....), though its headlong momentum tends to iron out idiomatic differences. Dato’s on- and offstage skits were worthy of The Muppet Show: mischievous mamma-mia stage banter, onstage skirmishes among the bandmembers (including a ballgame using a cymbal for a bat), a dance between Dato and an obliging woman in the audience, and a manic theme-and-variations routine which saw them crosscutting from bolero to faux-hipster swing to samba to free jazz.

Festival programming this year relied more heavily than usual on the input of Toronto’s jazz clubs like the Montreal Bistro, the Rex and the Top o’ the Senator. These clubs program jazz throughout the year, so their inclusion in the festival program does not represent a net gain in the city’s jazz programming at this time of year; but they certainly kicked into overdrive, offering a diverse and frequently changing menu of performers. Chris Potter’s new band, which had a week-long residency at the Senator, is the most left-field project he’s ever helmed. The bassless lineup has a Tim Berneish flavour: Craig Taborn on the Fender Rhodes, Wayne Krantz (depping for Adam Rogers) on guitar, Nate Smith on drums. In the past I’ve felt Potter to be a little too glib and inclined to push buttons (instant accesses of scorching heat; cries like he’s sighted his quarry): but on this occasion he was superb. These were extended, exploratory performances that started from Potter originals or from material like Beck’s “Little One” but then took off for the hinterlands. Krantz was superbly laconic - he plays guitar out of the side of his mouth - while Taborn was a sly surrealist, contributing Jabberwock burbles, wriggly spaghetti runs, blackfly noteswarms, spectral lines that floated through the air like a ghost. A rubato “Lotus Blossom” was decorated with twinkling electric piano; Potter didn’t touch the song’s depths, perhaps, but still delivered a handsome, eloquent reading.

After Potter the Senator played host to singers: first Carol Sloane then Kevin Mahogany (his “Johnny Hartman Project,” though he didn’t just stick to Hartman-associated tunes). I dropped in on a couple of nights: what I heard was solid though not outstanding, a little heavy on the hokey banter (low point: Mahogany’s endless badgering: “ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME?”), but with a few nice things, like Sloane’s cover of “It’s Like Reaching for the Moon” and Mahogany’s of “Fools Rush In.”

The Montreal Bistro offered a wide variety of concerts. The leaders of the Mike Murley/David Braid Quartet are both well-regarded musicians on the mainstream Toronto jazz scene, though they are rather different players. Braid’s mix of Tyner and Hancock is fluent but rather impassive; Murley is much more passionate, both musically and visually: he plays with eyes shut, his tenor weaving back and forth like a swinging door. American drummer Ian Froman, who like Murley plays in the fusion band Metalwood, was a usefully abrasive presence: he played with the enthusiasm of a Viking cracking skulls, his mouth a perpetually gaping “O.”

Following nights offered a series of two-piano duos. Toronto’s Don Thompson is equally at home on piano, bass and vibes, but for his duo with Fred Hersch he was at the keys all the way. The two pianists were wonderfully attuned, each working his way into the other’s original compositions, playing cat-and-mouse on the set-openers, batting bebop chestnuts around the keyboard. Thompson’s gentlemanly demeanour and low-key touch at the piano betray little of his acerbic sense of humour (who else would write a tune called “A Waltz in 3/4 Time”?); his ballads shine like rime or opal, while Hersch’s are red-wine rich, full of brainstorm-fast reharmonizations and natural-seeming yet revelatory changes of mood. His eventual stripping-down of “I’ll Be Seeing You” (his solo feature on the second set) sticks in the mind: in the end all that remained was a single note, desolate as a pang in the heart.

The Joanne Brackeen/George Cables duo the following night was by contrast a stark disappointment. Hersch and Thompson had avoided chording clashes by splitting their roles: most of the time the soloist played a single line in unison in both hands; the other comped. Brackeen and Cables simply piled in on top of each other, and the results were a mess, full of rhythmic snags and mismatched chords. It was clear the pianists were ill-prepared: Brackeen hadn’t bothered to put together a two-piano arrangement of her own “Ghost Butter” (a rolling blues with a fully written-out left and right hand), so they just read it off from the sheet music in awkward unison. Who knows, maybe they worked out the glitches by the end of the evening, but after just two tunes I’d had enough, and I split.

Other than the Dato gig, nonmainstream music was mostly programmed as part of the Next Wave Series at the National Film Board. These concerts took place in a small screening room, the musicians performing in front of the projection screen and hemmed in by twin video monitors. Video artists generated flickering screenfuls of images in real-time to go with the music, which was pretty neat when it wasn’t tiresomely distracting.

Several bands associated with the Montreal label Effendi appeared at the festival this year, including a lunchtime concert at Nathan Phillips by the “Effendi Jazz Lab.” At the NFB drummer Karl Jannuska, a Montreal native now living in Paris, led his quartet through his own compositions. The results were innocuous, tidy and rather dull. Drummer Thom Gossage’s quintet Other Voices was a different matter: he’s one of the most original musicians on Canada’s jazz scene. His pieces are travelogues from a strange country, buoyant and fastmoving and downright eerie by turns. The occasional wordless vocals by bassist Miles Perkin aren’t always to my taste, but these had a smaller role than when I last saw the band, and the music’s flickering strangeness came through so strongly that it rivalled the morphing eye-candy on the video-monitor.

Dutch violist Ig Henneman’s string quartet was founded in 1993; for this tour bassist Mark Helias replaced the unavailable Wilbert de Joode. The focus was on composition, though the pieces made room for improvisation; the general mood was of furrowed-brow austerity. (This is easily the most deadly serious Dutch band I’ve ever encountered.) The sources were interesting - a traditional Sicilian lament, a composition by Monteverdi - but the pieces themselves were diffuse. After 50 cheerless minutes of this stuff I’d had enough.

Swedish vibraphonist Mattias Ståhl plays with all the mystery and urgency of early Bobby Hutcherson, and writes brisk, hairpin-turn compositions that owe much to Ornette Coleman. His widest exposure in North America so far has come as a sideman with Fredrik Nordström (see the fine 2002 disc On Purpose) but he’s also the leader of his own band, Ståhls Blå, which features saxophonist Joakim Milder, bassist Filip Augustson and drummer Thomas Strønen. This was perhaps my favourite concert of the festival, and Strønen in particular was a real discovery, a maverick creator and crossbreeder of drum patterns. His one extended solo was virtually a composition in itself, a far cry from most drum solos’ space-filling pyrotechnics.

The Toronto jazz festival (or, to give it its current corporate name, the TD Canada Trust Toronto Downtown Jazz Festival) remains a curious entity on the Canadian festival circuit. It’s assembled, rather than curated: it has none of the remarkable focus and ambition of the Vancouver and Montreal festivals. The daytime programming has become rather spotty: there’s plenty to see if you’re looking for some live music during your lunchbreak or after work, but there is no longer the concentrated daylong programming that characterized the festival up to the mid-1990s and continued in attenuated form until recently. I remember in the past spending entire days running from venue to venue, beginning at 11 a.m. and going into the wee hours; this year not much of consequence happened till 8 p.m. But there are still a lot of concerts fielded in the program, and it’s always worth picking over: the concerts listed above are only a small selection from the wider array of offerings, ranging from big draws like Wynton Marsalis, Stacey Kent, George Benson and John Scofield to smaller offerings like Tom Walsh’s Phat Hed, the Vandermark 5, and the Jay McShann/Junior Mance duo. Toronto’s summertime weather was pleasantly co-operative - mostly quite cool and dry - and, despite my quibbles about the uneven programming, there was plenty of excellent jazz if you looked around.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, August 2004