Jazz festival woes
Cedar Walton was supposed to play in Calgary tonight. Chick Corea was supposed to play on Friday night, followed by Ben E. King on Saturday night. But none of that will happen now because C-Jazz, the local organizers of the Calgary Jazz Festival, have abruptly pulled the plug on the annual event. Is it possible the shows will still go on? Likely not. The last time a Calgary jazz festival was forced to fold-in 2006-an angel was waiting in the wings. The angel was the now troubled C-Jazz, which had been formed six years earlier when Jazz Festival Calgary became too big for its boots. Jazz Festival Calgary had been launched in 1980 with some 75th anniversary grant money from the provincial government. As Jazz Festival Calgary expanded, with more and more focus on international acts, C-Jazz emerged as a local organization dedicated to promoting Calgary jazz artists. With a grassroots rallying of citizens and performers, C-Jazz was able to save the 2006 jazz festival and keep it going until now. Much the same thing happened in Edmonton. When that city’s famous Jazz City crashed in 2005, after running successfully for twenty-five years, jazz fans across the country were shocked. Jazz City was one of the longest-running international jazz festivals in Canada. If it could fail, who would be next? The answer, of course, was Calgary. The Edmonton Jazz Society was the saviour that resurrected Edmonton’s jazz festival. It had been running the Yardbird Suite jazz club for several years, and it was ready and waiting to launch the new Edmonton International Jazz Festival when Jazz City went down. The new festival started modestly-with a focus on Edmonton and other Canadian talent-and built slowly with the help of Jazz Festivals Canada. Its headliners this year include Chick Corea — who will thus be able to salvage something from his now-shortened Canadian tour — Nikki Yanofsky and John Pizzarelli. Jazz City and Jazz Festival Calgary both died because of money woes. The C-Jazz folks now find themselves in the same boat. They don’t have the cash flow to cover the day-to-day expenses of the festival, and there’s no angel in the wings ready to bail them out. Has their festival, like its predecessor, gotten into trouble because it became too big for its boots? Perhaps. It has come a long way from its Calgary-oriented roots over the past four years, regularly featuring such big names as Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis and Allen Toussaint. Great for Calgary jazz fans, but not so great for C-Jazz’s bottom line. Last year’s festival left C-Jazz with what the Calgary Herald today describes as a “significant deficit.” A scaled-down version of the festival for this year would seem to have been the right way to go. But when the board members looked at the books this past weekend, even that option became impossible. Too...
Read MoreRemembering Charly’s
My favourite neighbourhood Chinese eatery will be operating under new ownership as of July 1, 2010. The current owners have retired. I don’t know if the new owners will keep the name, Charly Chan’s Rice House. I don’t even know if they will continue to run it as a Szechuan restaurant. They should. It has been part of the neighbourhood for so long-twenty-seven years-that Charly’s has become an institution. When Charly’s first opened, in 1983, Kensington was just starting to reinvent itself as a trendy neighbourhood synonymous with modern, middle-class style and comfort. The old Kensington, otherwise known as Hillhurst, had been a pastiche of wartime bungalows, vanilla-flavoured walk-up apartments, corner groceries, coin laundries, and appliance stores. Black and Decker City. The new Kensington was dotted with architect-designed homes that looked like miniature grain elevators. Instead of appliance stores, it offered the shopper everything from custom tanning to mountain bikes. Silk lingerie, beauty salons, and linguine with clam sauce. Patio tables with Cinzano umbrellas, interlocking red-brick sidewalks, and the Plaza Theatre art cinema. Post-modern commercial architecture in the sun-baked California style. The new stores and restaurants, many of them now long gone, proclaimed to the world that Kensington was no longer a sleepy, working-class inner-city neighbourhood populated by students and hippies. It was now a place where you could shop for Stilton cheese, gnocchi, pesto and French bread, buy the New York Times, and listen to Bob Erlendson’s jazz piano during Sunday brunch. It was a place where you could take in a foreign film, drink expresso, buy a novel, and savour the salty taste of the patented deli-fries at the Kensington Delicafe. If I had written this piece back then, the Deli owner would have given me a couple of dining coupons as “payola.” Charly Chan’s offered such Szechuan favourites as fried shredded beef, salt-and-pepper seafood, and Mongolian chicken. Its only competition in the neighbourhood, the venerable Lido Café, offered a more traditional selection of “Chinese and western cuisine,” including chow mein, chop suey, and fried-egg sandwiches. The Lido opened at 8:00 AM every day except on Sunday, when it opened at 1:00 PM “People are supposed to go to church,” explained the waitress. She put an “out of order” sign on the counter jukebox to stop customers from complaining they received only one play instead of two for fifty cents. Long before Starbucks and Second Cup moved into the neighbourhood, the owner of The Roasterie was serving café au lait to his customers in cereal bowls. He had researched the market and discovered that Canadians love their coffee. “We’re number twelve in the world after the Europeans,” he said. A sign on his wall said, “Even when it’s hot, you can have a coffee and still be cool.” Canadians, it seems, also loved to collect things. At Toys from the Attic Collectables, you could find a treasure trove of vintage Coca Cola memorabilia, Victorian vanity cases with sterling silver accoutrements, and classic Elvis albums in the original shrink-plastic wrappers. A collectable, explained owner Brian Lehman, was defined as anything worth keeping and up to forty-nine years old. Older items, aged fifty to ninety-nine years, were classified as heirlooms. Items more than one hundred years old were classified as antiques. Who knew? At Blue Vinny Foods, the weekend chef could never resist a joke. “I’ll let you have it for free if you eat it with your hands,” he told a ten-year-old girl who ordered Eggs Benedict for breakfast. She giggled and declined the offer. Walt Healy sold motorcycles and snowmobiles at his Kensington store until he was...
Read MoreWhere are the iBooks?
We’ve had the iPad in Canada for more than two weeks. The main selling feature, the one that tempted me to buy early, was the promise of a digital bookstore that would give Amazon’s Kindle a run for its money. Yet, I see nothing in the iBookstore but public-domain publications similar to those already available from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, in fact, has a considerably larger selection of volumes than iBooks Canada, which currently has little more than a handful of classics of world literature. The only contemporary title in iBooks Canada, as you might expect, is the iPad User Guide. I presume the problem here is that Apple released the iPad in Canada before striking a deal with Canadian publishers to make digital copies of their books available to Canadian readers. Let’s hope today’s appointment of Chris Jackson as manager of iBookstore Canada serves to quickly change this situation. As things stand, the iPad gives me nothing more than what I already have on my MacBook Air-the many thousands of apps notwithstanding-aside from a slightly longer battery...
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