a delicious night

A delicious night ensued on Canada Day a few weeks ago.  My friends Hilary and Julie (H., not my Colorado Julie) and I feasted on some brown-sugar-soy-sauce-fresh-pineapple-glazed salmon and walked downtown to the Jazz Fest.  The Montreal International Jazz Festival is a twelve-day festival every July with hundreds of performances, dozens of stages, and every possible take on jazz you could imagine.  With my over-polite but also over-impatient lead, we ended up listening to a band made of one percussionist and six or seven horns.  They played some crowd-rousing songs and were highly entertaining to watch as they swayed and danced as they performed.  Then we saw the real crowd gathering at the main stage for Bran Van 3000’s nine-o-clock performance, and I grew crowd-shy.  So Hilary and Julie led.  We were corralled around scaffoldings and through buildings in order to get to a side stage, where the eight-o-clock show was a bluesy-folk artist.  He was hilarious and bilingual and we had a good view.  After his last song, we felt the crowd becoming more and more dense, and knew we needed to get out before we were stuck.  Julie, a brave soul, led us à la opening of Star Wars, upstream through the crowd which was going toward the stage, as we rushed away from it.  We dodged, we turned, and we walked and squeezed around and ducked and took every dang opportunity we could to move.  We must have passed about 600 people.  At one point I though we had gotten through, but we were only about halfway.  We FINALLY surfaced on a side-street and took a minute to recoup and recover normal breathing patterns.  I’m an extrovert, but that kind of crowd could make anyone introverted and claustrophobic.

 

With all that hard work, we got hungry.  So we sought out ice cream and found it at La Cremière, which is a chain ice cream establishment here in Quebec, but it’s soooo good.  I had their swirl soft-serve (which was rich and creamy), with a chocolate enrobage (I love that, instead of ‘dipped’ it was ‘enrobed’ in chocolate).  The enrobage never got super-crispy like Dairy Queen’s.  It also wasn’t waxy.  It dried in a delicately thin shell that was wonderful dark chocolate.  I’m spoiled for anything less now.

 

We took our cones to an instructional tent set up and connected with the Jazz Fest.  It was a “Learn Harmonica in an hour” tutorial led en français by some hilarious guys.  They handed out harmonicas to the participants who were there early enough and went through the steps of how to hold and play the harmonica, and even taught them bluesy rifts.  We unfortunately did not get harmonicas, but we would have promptly ruined their reeds with our sticky and chocolatey mouths. 

 

The instructors finished with a sound I can’t quite put words to—they brought out different keys of harmonicas (including a bass harmonica, which was a foot long and three inches thick), and played them for us.  A particularly creative guy had taken what looked like a drum the size of a folger’s can, and created an electric harmonica with reeds and wires within the structure of the drum.  He could tap on it and play into it with what seemed like endless notes.  These four unassuming music geeks ended up playing the most beautiful, intricately-layered songs with alternating melodies.  They played blues, they played a Celtic song, they played Persian-sounding songs, they played an Electronica-style song, and ended with more Persian music.  It was incredible.  We sat down in the tent with our ice cream and had no expectations for the tutorial.  I just thought “oh, that’s cute, they’re teaching people harmonica (insert judgement about it being a quaint, simple instrument here).” We were all blown away by the complexity of the sound and the innovative universal approach the performers had.  It was truly the best ‘show’ I’ve seen yet at the Jazz Fest, and it wasn’t even publicized as such.  Even the sounds were thick and delicious that night.