Montreal Jazz Festival - part two

In this post I wanted to include a link to still more reviews from the Montreal Gazette of concerts I was unable to attend:

http://communities.canada.com/MONTREALGAZETTE/blogs/wordsandmusic/default.aspx

Also there are 2 local noteworthy bands that we saw:Gadji-Gadjo who play East European tunes. I endured the first blazing sun of the festival to watch them and they played a long set of stirring music to celebrate the sun.

Next was the Small World Project, run by Sebastian Dufur, also the leader of the Montreal Guitaire Trio, whose premise is to play with smallest instruments possible such as Charanga, ukelele, and another even smaller narrow stringed instrument that I do not know the name of. They finished up by singing It’s a Small Small world.

Finally another interesting premise for live music was the as accompaniment of old movies. We saw L’Homme a la Camera and Le Jeune Fille Au Carton a chapeau, early silent Russian movies, the latter being a slapstick comedy with Russian humor. The former was experimental multiple exposures showing an outsized man with the camera over various scenes of crowds in Odessa.

Finally, more about Montreal. We visited the eastern side of the Old Town and saw some stimulating art galleries. One featured reconstructions of wooden sculpture and furniture where I fell in love with a beautiful wooden angel blowing a horn suspended slightly off-balance in air. Another featured fascinating photograms (phtographic paper exposed with objects above it instead of in a camera) including several made with fireflies alighting on the paper, several made with snow and water (including fish) and one 3-D piece made with folded photograms. There was a gallery with wooden and glass objects from Indonesia and Morroco. The architecture was also stunning and unique blends of new and old, brick and limestone and glass and wood.

Finally next to this vibrant neighbourhood were 2 neglected concrete parks, or shall I say neglected by people but not by nature. The parks were geometric concrete now overrun with organic vegetation resulting in something probably greater than the original to my eye. We discovered one of these parks had been the haunt of a serial killer called the Viger Vampire 5 years ago.

Back to Montreal for one last day at the festival.