23rd Annual TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival
Featuring two very different, but equally enthralling duos, Friday evening’s ticketed Roundhouse show was my personal festival highlight. Pianist Paul Plimley, Vancouver’s resident sprite and improvisational foil for all manner of foreign players, teamed up with Chicago flutist Nicole Mitchell. Equally playful and virtuosic, they matched each other’s gambits on a program of free improvised sketches referencing blues, spirituals, art songs and airs. While Plimley often raced around the keyboard with zinging right-hand runs, Mitchell offered calm singing lines (with vocal overtones) that drew him into reflective spaces. On the final piece, Mitchell opened with a beautiful melody that kept Plimley poised over the keyboard for more than a minute, as he deliberated over the right moment to join her until he offered a series of delicate ascending chords that sustained her conch-like tone. Pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and violinist Mark Feldman played the second set, and it was no less engaging. As formidable as any duo in jazz or contemporary music, the remarkable husband and wife team focused at first on several John Zorn Masada compositions, racing through his Hebraic pastiches with all the humor, pathos and antic energy that makes Zorn’s music so confoundingly engaging. Courvoisier’s original compositions proved just as rewarding, from an unsettling dreamscape to her breakneck “Two Speed,” a piece that bounced between the bass and treble so quickly it could cause whiplash.
Sunday’s program opened at the Roundhouse with the festival’s high school ensemble led by Nicole Mitchell, who has worked with the student ensemble for the past three years as the festival’s resident artist. The fact that this major player has never performed on the West Coast outside of Vancouver (for shame Seattle, San Francisco and L.A.!) made her work with the young players all the more impressive. She’s an artist who clearly knows how to get the most out of her charges, leading the group through a program ranging from Maria Schneider and Arturo Sandoval to Mingus and Ellington, with a couple of student originals as well.