Long post for Saturday Sunday and Monday

This is a long post and will cover Saturday, Sunday and tonight Monday.

Saturday

Michael Kaeshammer was excellent. I'm not that big on "boogie-woogie piano but Kaeshammer does a lot more than that and he has become a great showman. I most enjoyed his set and could have happily sat through another.

Holly Cole not so good. She seemed vague, scattered and kind of sloppy. I kept waiting for her to settle down and do the show but it never happened. I left before the encore got started and headed home. My companion had bailed earlier and had headed back to catch the second set of Tierney Sutton at Performance Works, a much better plan.

Sunday

Gordon Grdina's Box Cutter Nice set but I don't like Gastown as a setting, too much stuff going on, to many panhandlers, to many talkers and walkers no where to comfortably sit, still a nice set and Houle seemed very on.

Christine Jensen excellent set. Very meditative but not soporific. Very nice opening act for:

Olver Jones Again a nice set the man can play but not really my cup of tea.

Dhafer Youssef Went across to Granville Island and Performance works and caught the las 45 min of his set. Amazing Oud and cello and violins and tabla and his haunting voice. Acoustic with electronica underlays and powerful expansive strings. With a weird non-English heckler that were much upset him and confused most of the audience (or at least me and my best companion) to round out the night. This was the one that we talked about on the walk home.

Monday

SEKOYA Some interesting textures and rhythms, but not quite there yet. The sound was muddy and the vocals disappeared (which may have been intentional).

Bebel Gilberto

Entertainment Weekly opines that “her voice is the embodiment of breathy Brazilian cool,” while Billboard declares that she sounds “simply gorgeous.”

The above says it all breathy, cool, gorgeous. Not much in the way of music though. Kind of a "jazz/disco lite". Left after two songs and a lot of posturing. She was pretty (I think), being up in the balcony makes it hard to see sometimes.

Jackie Greene Looks about 14 and plays like the real thing. I only cought the last to songs of his set but best thing that I heard all night.

James Hunter Maybe just tired but white guy r&b just never quite made it for me, other than the Righeous Brothers. Didn't stay long enough to give him a fair chance but that's the chance you take when you let the bar make everybody cool their heels for 35 or 40 minutes, to sell more drinks. It makes us surly, sleepy and sober and you don't want to see us sober.

More tomorrow.

later

jack

The Tierney Sutton Band

Yahoo!!

Get out and see Tierney Sutton and her band tonight.

I ended up out at Performance Works on Granville Island last night as much by accident as by design and that worked out well. Tierney Sutton and her band put on a great show (a long show too, started at about 9:15 pm and we hit the streets just before midnight with a 20 minute break to sign CDs).

Sutton is a powerful and varied singer moving from Frank Sinatra standards to "Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead" with amazing facility. And for me the standards worked better with most bands, I think it had something to do with Tierney's assertion that it was a band dictum that no standard should remain recognizable, which I thought they did an admirable job on.

The best part for me was the fact that they (Tierney Sutton vocalist, Christian Jacob piano, Kevin Axt bass, Ray Brinker drums) played together. No noodling solos on every song, just brief solos at the end of each set. The artists and the instruments worked to integrate their individual sounds together in a whole that was much greater than the parts. They also appeared to not be too cool to have fun, with each other, the audience, and the music. Yahoo!!

Great show and if I didn't have a hard ticket for Holly Cole I'd be tempted to go back to PW and Tierney Sutton tonight.