On Saturday, I went to the Toronto Beaches Interntional Jazz Festival Streetfest. The jazzfest had stuff happening all day, but I thought the streetfest would be the most fun as there would be musicians playing in random locations along a stretch of Queen St East. Victor, Ben, Peter and I had an early dinner and headed down around 7.
The streetfest lasted until 11PM, when everyone had to shut down due to noise laws. I was afraid that four hours would be a long time, because I’m not a big fan of jazz in general; but it passed by pretty quick. Plus it wasn’t really jazz fest as much as live-music-that’s-not-popular-music fest. There were jazz acts, but also blues, latin, those South American wind pipe guys that are always hocking CDs in malls, country-ish music, tribute bands, etc. The best act we saw was probably a group of whitehaired and old musicians playing swing. They seemed to be very good at playing the clarinet, trumpet, and trombone and were just having a good time playing in public. There was also this even older senior playing bass, except he looked like he was staring off into nowhere (as old people do), but his fingers were moving automatically!
There were a couple of other groups that were pretty interesting. We stayed awhile to listen to Shakura S’Aida, who had an aura of an entertainer, as she was able to get the crowd into it. These guys had an amazing, catchy instrumental as their first song, but after that I lost interest in their songs. We listened to the Mississauga Big Band‘s performance, but I don’t recall any highlights. We didn’t stop , but as I was walking past I heard her play the theme from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. In retrospect I should have stopped, she’s a real celebrity! She was part of Sugar Jones! In the end, we only made it through 3/4 of the acts that were playing, and that’s after skipping a lot of performers!
The jazzfest was fun, and it’s now probably my preferred street festival in Toronto. Aside from the free live music, it wasn’t as crowded as the Taste of the Danforth (probably because the stretch of Queen St was so much longer than the stretch on Danforth), and had the food you would’ve bought at Taste of the Danforth anyways.
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