The Festival Django Reinhardt, held every summer at the Château de Fontainebleau near Paris, is named after the most famous jazz musician Europe has ever produced. By combining the continent’s gypsy or Roma music with American jazz, the late guitarist created a music so vibrant that interest in it has never flagged.
I took a 25-day road trip this summer to see family, friends, museums, national parks, state parks and more, but I organized it to maximize my live-music opportunities. There were challenges, yes, but they were worth it. Our first stop was Syracuse, New York, where my son lives. The second night there, Thursday, June 27, he and I attended the Syracuse Jazz Festival, a free event in a concrete downtown plaza.
Even better was the preceding set from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Dylan is a great singer despite his limited voice, but Plant and Krauss are great singers with strong, supple voices—and that makes a difference. The singers’ different backgrounds were reflected in the band: two rock ‘n’ rollers with three bluegrassers . The 15-song setlist betrayed a similar diversity; three Led Zeppelin numbers, three Everly Brothers tunes and two Allen Toussaint compositions. It all worked wonderfully.
The most exciting set of the festival was Moran’s solo show, a tribute to Duke Ellington at Gesu earlier on Monday. The pianist—wearing a white T-shirt, black slacks and a salt-and-pepper goatee—explained that he didn’t do this show often because it was like climbing a mountain each time. But climb it he did, hammering anchors into the cliff with his dense left-hand chords, and reaching for new handholds with his right-hand melodies.
By Wednesday, July 3, we were in Toronto, and I celebrated the Fourth of July in Canada by going to see the Elvis Costello/Daryl Hall Tour as it stopped at the Budweiser Stage on a peninsula jutting out into Lake Ontario. The hipster-intellectual Costello and the mass-marketing genius Hall might seem an odd couple, but they share an abiding faith in pop craftsmanship, a quality exemplified in different ways during their two sets. Costello went on first.
It was a great evening, but as too often happens at large, outdoor concerts, selfish jerks did their best to spoil it. Most annoying was a woman who stood up to dance, blocking the view of a dozen people behind her. The young usher pleaded with her to sit down, but she insisted her freedom to move was more important than everyone else’s freedom to see. Only when an older usher came down and whispered a threat did she finally sit down.
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