Cully Day 2 - Festival Opens

I learned how to pronounce Cully today.  I thought it rhymed with sully, but no, it rhymes with newly.  Yeah, that's a word, like cleanliness is next to newliness. Maybe that's not a good example.  How about Jeff Brennan and the newly formed fantasy jazz quartet?

Cully is a beautiful little town on Lake Geneva.  Think of Bumbershoot, but smaller and on the edge of Lake Union.  Some of the venues are a stones throw from the lake.  And there is a pebble path along the water where I saw two little kids amusing themselves throwing handfuls of pebbles into the lake. 

Like other festivals I have been to, the concerts are divided into two categories here.  Festival In (what we'd call mainstage) and Festival Off (jazz in the clubs).  I don't understand this In vs Off.  Maybe it makes sense in French.  There are 3 mainstage venues and 15 club venues.  I started at mainstage #2 to hear French vocalist, Joe BeL, and her band Découverte (Discovery).

I dug it.  Though I wouldn't call it jazz.  Seems solidly in the rock category to me.  Great grooves, all original songs, sung in English (with a French accent). Odd that she talked to the audience in French and sang in English.  Well, not odd that she spoke French, that's clearly the default language here. Though children learn both German and French in school.  And English seems fairly well know also. I'd say maybe one out of three people I've met so far speaks English.

Then off to mainstage #1.  Or should I say in to mainstage #1. It's a triple bill on mainstage #1 tonight and they are still on one of the warm up bands, Swiss drummer Julian Sartorius.  I've never heard a solo drum concert before.  It was too avant-garde for me. Wow, I can speak French without even trying. Avant-garde is French for advance guard. Julian was trying to get new sounds from the drum kit by playing it in new ways.  A noble pursuit, I'm sure, but it was like eating a ball of spice.  Where's the meat?  Where's the vegetable?  I've just got a mouthful of curry.  Good curry, but it doesn't stand on it's own. I've heard great solo piano (Fred Hirsch, Jeff Keezer) and solo guitar (Joe Pass, Martin Taylor) and solo bass (Nate Parker comes to mind - he'd be in my fantasy jazz quartet).  I've even heard Sarah Vaughn sing "Misty" in Carnegie Hall solo. Awesome!  Hmmm, I can't make awesome more awesome by changing "some" to "full", because then it means the opposite.  Can I say awelittle to mean super awesome?

Then I remembered mainstage #3 had a solo show, American vocalist Vinx. This venue is an old church with good acoustics.  Vinx sang a mix of jazz standards and pop songs, but all in a jazz style.  And all acapella.  It filled me with some awe.

Now I'm off to the Off Festival.  Hey, there's a jazz trio playing right across the street from the church.

Is that Dumbledore on the drums?  I took this picture from the street. The club was packed and I couldn't get in.  The clubs reminded me of the Tokyo subway because the people were packed in so tightly.  Some of the clubs had no chairs--just people standing shoulder to shoulder.  Though there were no men in white gloves to pack more people in.  One club looked like it might have room down front, but there were so many people sitting on the stairs that no one could get in or out.  I guess they don't have fire codes here.  But they close off the streets, so you can stand in the street and listen and even see in a little bit.

One of the venues was a ship anchored in the lake.  It was as packed as everywhere else.  Walking back from the ship I heard music coming from mainstage #1.  Indeed, Israeli bassist, Avishai Cohen was still playing!  Wow, a swinging jazz trio. Just what I wanted to hear!  Definitely modern.  They pushed the envelope.  Avishai played a few bars of his solo plucking the strings on his bass below the bridge. It was great. It added the perfect spice to his solo.  But if he'd done that for the whole song I would have been silently slipping to the sortie. I mean that in the French sense of "exit" not the English sense of "aerial bombing mission".  I left after the 3rd encore number. But the crowd hadn't had enough. I heard the 4th encore starting after I left the building.

The schedule said the Off Festival didn't get off until 3am, but by 1am everything seemed to be done. Ordinarily I'd be tired at 1am, but my jet lagged body doesn't know enough to be tired.  Alas, it is time to say goodnight to my newly adored Cully horde.