Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday June 5th, 2013 with Bernard Stepien
Ottawa International Jazz Festival picks

This is the start of a series of shows on the Ottawa International Jazz Festival’s Improv Invitational series that is particularly beefed up this year. On this first show, I have invited two outstanding Jazz aficionados, Alayne McGregor and Brett Delmage that have two characteristics: first, they are not musicians and thus will give us an insight on what a non-musician listener appreciates in such a programming and second, they are over-actively promoting Jazz through their OttawaJazzScene.ca web site, giving extensive details on a sometimes encyclopaedic scale on locally performing musicians. Two more upcoming shows will handle the highly technical musician’s point of views. Producing a Jazz Festival these days is quite a different story than 20 or 30 years ago. Back then, festival organizers could count on a pool of Jazz giants. This was how the Jazz music business was organized back then. Now that most of them have disappeared, they are replaced by a multitude of highly music educated musicians that I would call academic Jazz musicians. They play exactly like the giants that they have thoroughly studied and come up with new ideas of their own.