Tauranga was clearly the place to be over the Easter holiday. New Zealand has a silly law that causes most businesses to close Easter weekend. I say it's a silly law, because most kiwis don't even go to church. Enacted 17 years ago, it's not like the Easter weekend trading law is some sort of grand old tradition. I'll go on record as calling it a lame, anachronistic "blue law" that has no place in a secular country.
Tauranga doesn't suffer from the trade act because it has a jazz festival. I think it's because we jazz types are in cahoots with Satan, and he knows which strings to pull to get an exemption. I'm not sure what it means, but in Tauranga, you could even get some "coffee up your jazz."
As we arrived downtown, it was clear this was a big festival. A number of roads were blocked off and the sound of one band bled into the next. As we walked down one street, we saw the NZ Air Force band playing an excellent rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." Hey, that's pretty funky. The female vocalist singing most definitely had pipes. They finished to boisterous applause despite playing a small side-street venue. Then they launched into another Stevie Wonder chart. They must have been doing a Stevie Wonder tribute gig. Hey, they're an Air force band, they can get away some kitsch--it is a festival after all.
But as we walked from venue to venue, I noticed that everyone we heard was playing covers. They weren't just covers, but covers of pop music done "jazzy." The jazz we heard were mostly standards. There's nothing wrong with playing some of the standards, but it felt a little tired to hear the most standard of standards against a backdrop of jazzy pop oldies.
Out of the approximately 15 songs I heard, some 12 were clearly identifiable covers or "ultra" standards. I hate to sound like a whiner, but a steady diet of (I'm not making this up) the theme from "Love boat" or a swing rendition of "All Along The Watchtower" started grating on me.
By the time we decided to head back to Auckland, I'd pretty given up on hearing jazz. It was fun; it had a nice carnival atmosphere (complete with bouncy castles, jugglers, and escape artists), but it wasn't really a jazz festival in any way that I was familiar with. It lacked authenticity. I began to realize that the festival was a ruse for bars to sell a whole lot of food and booze on Easter weekend.
Fortunately, on the way back to car we found salvation. There was a little trio setting up down one of the side streets. They had their white hippy van parked next to them, their dog lazily lying in the shade.
And I'll be damned if they weren't playing honest to goodness real jazz. They had some rough transitions in spots, but they were playing together and off of each other. And for the 40 minutes that we listened, they didn't trot out any pop covers.
Tim asked what their band was called. "Do you have any suggestions?" they laughed. This was in sharp contrast to pretentiously named groups like the Grant Winterburn Experience. Thank you, anonymous band. You saved Easter.
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As a postscript, anyone near Missoula in April should go hear the Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival at UM. Bob Mintzer is going to be there, and he's brilliant.
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