I go to the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal most years, and the honest reason isn’t the lineup. Some years it’s the only trip I take. A few days to unplug, sit in a foreign city, and listen to jazz. That’s the whole plan, and it has never once failed me. The festival is enormous — the 46th edition ran June 25 to July 4, hundreds of acts across indoor halls and free outdoor stages in the Quartier des Spectacles — but it doesn’t feel enormous when you’re in it. You drift between stages. Pub Molson had jazz instrumentalists every night. The blues acts held their corner down. We were there Saturday through Wednesday, and a few things happened that I’ll be telling people about for years.
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Tony Bennett were all born in 1926, so the program was full of centennial tributes. The one I caught was Nicholas Payton’s “A Supreme Blue,” his Coltrane project, on the Scène Rogers — Payton and his band reworking Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme together. There’s music you accept you’ll only ever own as recordings, and for me those records were always on that list. This was probably the only time in my life I’ll hear those tunes played live, in a crowd that knew exactly what it was hearing, and I knew it while it was happening.
Alfa Mist, the UK pianist, played the TD Stage with his band. The set moved between hard-driving stretches, pushed by his trumpet player, and long melodic passages that hung in the air over the plaza. I went in curious. He’s in the rotation now.
The set I keep thinking about is Angine Poutrine. Last year they played a late slot on the Rio Tinto stage — one of the most exciting sets of that whole festival, and the crowd was thin. Their math rock is all tension and release, which I take to be the joke in the name: angine is French for angina. The music grabs your chest and lets go. This year they played Saturday night on the TD Stage, and the crowd ran thousands deep — enough that the doors to the hotel on the Complexe Desjardins side were closed. Twelve months between those two sets. I don’t know how big a math rock band from Quebec can get, but I’m glad I was there for the before and the after.
And then the singer-songwriters, which is the part of the festival I actually plan around. Olivia Jones, Elysia Biro, Aron! — all serious writers. Biro’s set stayed with me the longest: mellow, unhurried, with stories between songs that landed as well as the songs did, including one about her pet frogs that had the whole crowd with her. I met her mother after the show and spoke with Elysia briefly, and she signed a sticker with her frog on it and handed it to me. She’s on the playlist now.
That’s why I keep going back, I think. The tributes were the reason to buy the ticket. The frog sticker is the thing I brought home.
See you next June, Montreal.