The last few days have been a blur of shows. On Tuesday I headed down to the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern on Queen to catch a set of experimental & improvisational guitar with Nels Cline and Julian Lage. Both extraordinary guitarists.
Julian was playing on a beautiful guitar made by Toronto’s own master luthier Linda Manzer
After this I got a quick streetcar up to Grossmans to get a fix of the Don Valley Stompers with Miz Debbie. Blues, gospel, jazz along with New Orleans dance. There was a group of dancers in attendance paying homage to the great swing dance styles. This place was boppin on a Tuesday night!
On Wednesday, the day it poured like crazy, I made it to the Main Stage tent reasonably dry, but not after a double back onto the subway to get to the downtown underground PATH network. Ended up at a deadend and just went to street level and got a little rained on.
On the main stage this evening, from New Orleans, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and from Brooklyn, NY, Lettuce.
DDBB got the party started with some heavy ‘brass funk’ and loud colourful shirts!
Miss ‘Ippi was invited up to dance and be serenaded to
Lettuce, who I missed last time they were in Toronto, brought their skill as the masters of old school funk.
It was still raining a little bit when this show finished, and a jazz festival program made for a lousy umbrella, it quickly fell apart before I got on a streetcar back over to the ‘shoe to shoot the last set of the Joey DeFrancesco Trio. Nice crowd on hand here.
These posts do not have all of the images from these shows in them. All the images can be viewed at the following links in either a viewer, by clicking an image, or by ‘piclens’ , a nice full screen slide show with navigation.
2014 Toronto Jazz Festival
2014 Toronto Jazz Festival Gallery II
all comments welcome, thanks
![Michael \"Bass\" Ballard](http://stratophotography.com/wp-content/gallery/2013-favorites/mw-2013-06-26-38624.jpg "Michael \\"Bass\\" Ballard")
