From the very beginning, there was such quick intimacy with the place and the people of Toronto. Flying in, I was sandwiched between one of my least favorite co-workers and a Torontoian who was a very interesting preview into the next few days. Within half an hour of conversation with this man (whose name I never got), I had learned that he was a retired Muey Thai (spelling?) fighter and professional hockey player, did construction contracting for a living, and traveled all over the world with his sports and on business. He told me of dining on a mountaintop in France with his wife at a restaurant run by a couple that cooked five courses for the handful of people that made the trek out there every night. No menus, just divine food. He told me of Israel and Egypt and Russia and Italy and, most importantly, about Toronto. A relatively crime-free, international, and welcoming city. All of which proved to be true and perhaps understated.
A random note at the airport: When we were waiting for our luggage (me in a great state of anxiety hoping my tradition of losing luggage might not continue), I caught site of a sax player that Tom and I had seen at the Green Mill in Chicago. Contrary to my usual shyness, I decided to approach him to tell him how his music had impressed the both of us and would he be playing during the conference. Frank Catelano (his name) was quirky as I had gathered him to be from stage, but incredibly approachable and friendly. He seemed to be excited that Tom and I had enjoyed ourselves, even though I learned through the course of the next few days that he is actually a world-renowned player and composer. He ended up giving me a free CD and I walked back to the guys all aglow and starstruck.
Another random note: There were many workers at the airport apparently Middle Eastern in ethnicity, a fact that did not register with me until I saw the guys with me clustering and whispering and pointing. Fragments that I caught from their failed attempts at furtiveness had to do with killing these guys now before they got a chance to do something. Even my chief (whom I consider to be a fair-minded, educated sort of guy) showed extreme discomfort and joined in the whisperings of "security threat" and so on. And we wonder why we have such a problem on our hands...
On the bus from the airport, a woman approached the seat next to me and began speaking in rapid French, effortlessly switching to English as she saw the confusion on my face. Oh, you looked so French to me, she said. She refused to believe me when I said I was from Texas, swearing that she had heard an accent (even though I can't remember saying a thing to her before this...oh well). She too told me a good deal of her life story ranging from the mining company she helped run with her siblings to the girls' orphanage in Rwanda she was on her way to work at for a couple months. Our conversation was fluid and uninterrupted until we reached her hotel and she said with a grin that I should get off at her stop so we could keep talking.
At this point, I had a hypothesis developing as to the distinct adventurousness of the natives in this place. The people I had met so far did not seem incredibly well-off, but they used their resources to take such risks that seemed unimaginable to the American traditions of saving for retirements and vacations that are always next year. The stress I almost always carry on at least a latent level seemed to slide off with every moment of contact with such generosity of conversation and the freedom that they grasped so ardently. Maybe I was simply lucky with the people I met, but somehow the luck just kept going...and at some point you have to concede that maybe these things just are.
The first night I allowed myself to be dragged to Hooter's with the guys, even though I had sworn not to eat anything American while I was there...especially this particular vein of American. But having the argument about me wandering around by myself at night in a strange city was one I was more willing to wage when I got a few bearings with the place. Of course, Hooter's was as uninspiring as can be imagined, and expensive and tasteless to boot. Afterwards, we managed to find a jam session at one of the local clubs and we all got our first tastes of what it is to be a real musician playing real music in a real place...and how far we are from such delicacies. Our world is one of sufficiency and efficiency rather than art and expression. After all, how many officers or soldiers on a parade field can you imagine have any interest in the intricacies of progressive jazz or improvisation. A beat you can march to, that is why we exist. We lapped up the music of that first night like desert wanderers at an oasis. We are still musicians no matter what the army might tell us about ourselves, and the musicians jumping on to stage on after another for their moment of expression were beautiful to us.
The first full day was my only day to really explore, so I woke early to make as much use of it as I could. I had to take care of the mundanities of registering for the conference, but there was nothing of note happening that first day to distract me from the city waiting for me. I didn't know that the conference center was about a mile away and I only knew the general direction, but some arm of fate guided me straight there...well almost. So I turned around a couple of times. But it seemed miraculous nonetheless that I managed to find the place at all. Then I headed back to the hotel to make my battle plan for the day.
After looking through the phone book for a while, I decided to try to find a European style market I had seen in the yellow pages that looked not too far away. The woman at the desk told me I could get most of the way there underground, and so I was introduced to PATH. This is an underground tunnel network that connects virtually all of downtown in a total of 25 kilometers of linked paths lined with shopping areas. It did not happen to be cold on this day, but I figured this luxury would come quite in handy the next couple days (and I certainly was not wrong). In fact, it was not uncommon to see business people walking topside without jackets since they would only have to brave the elements for a few moments between emerging from the tunnel system to their place of business, usually less than a football field away from any entrance to the underground network. The market I centered the adventure on was in the middle of a neighborhood I learned was "Old Toronto", complete with aged looking shops selling "Gelato" and "Travel Books". The brick buildings seemed to be memories I could nearly access by looking at them and all the shops seemed to carry themselves reverentially in the mix of old and new. There were old pubs and coffee shops...and finally the market. Oh, how it made me crave to live there and cook there. Hundreds of cheeses and fresh meets and every kind of vegetable and spice you could imagine. All in their own specialized area of the market. You could smell your long away to the coffee section and the restaurants that combined the fresh wares into delectable homemade concoctions. I could barely bring myself to buy anything because I simply wanted it all. Eventually I settled on some dried fruits and fresh bagels to get me through the coming hecticness of the conference that would leave little room for refreshment.
That night, I had my eyes and mouth set for an Indian restaurant down the street from the hotel that I had heard good things about. I insisted on dragging along a couple of the guys, even though they did not quite share the same excitement that I did. It didn't help things for them that we had to wait for ten minutes out in the colding night, and I thought they might all just leave me alone once we sat at our table and were served crispy wafers with pickled carrots. Of course, it also didn't help things that one of the guys didn't even like curry, but I figured I would let the food tell him that he had made the wrong decision in cuisine. It was all too delicious for me to concern myself with such a minor thing. The wafer practically melted with the initial bite and then the burn of the peppered carrots. All couched in a subtle sweetness that made the burning okay. Again, I wanted practically everything from the menu but finally decided on a lamb vindaloo and curried potato pita bread. It was too much food (and so delicious I almost embarrassed myself salivating), helped along with the curries handed to me by the unwitting Sturhahn. I wanted two stomachs so I could eat all of mine and his too, but I only got about halfway through mine and a couple bites of his before I had to mournfully put down my fork. And no refrigerators in the hotel to save for another day. Such sadness.
The next day was largely a disappointment as far as clinics went, but the night made up for all of it. I ran into one of my good friends, Forthman, and we decided to take a cab up to a place we had heard about the night before with another of our friends. Once there, we found out that it would be an expensive night, but we were already there so why not. And I am so glad we decided to stick it out. The music began with a quartet led by Francois Bourrassa. I finally realized that I had seem him the year previously in New York, but had no idea that this is who we were going to see. He was inspiring not just as a composer but as a technical genius at the piano. I would have to insert clips from the CD to come even close to explaining the grandness of each piece that they performed. The perfect swell and freedom to incorporate whatever musical dialect was necessary to communicate the intent of each moment. I mean, at one point they went from extreme progressive free jazz straight into a grungy Georgia blues feel that just about ripped me apart it was so perfect. Following them was a quintet led by another person I had seen the year before in the Sisters of Jazz named Ingrid Jensen. The quintet was led by her on trumpet and her sister on sax and clarinet (Christine Jensen). I thought that nothing could top what we had just experience with Bourrassa, but I left that night aimed at following the Jensens wherever else they might appear that week. This was probably the most fortunate happening of the week as it led me to the ultimate highlight of the trip the next night...but more of that later. They had a drummer (Greg Richie) sitting in for their regular drummer who had apparently never played with them before, but managed to recreate their pieces so perfectly on the spot that the rest of the band was looking at him in awe a couple songs into the set. It would be like one person would be in the middle of a solo, and suddenly Greg would pitch the whole song into a groove that I'm sure was not previously discussed but the light in everyone's eyes said, "Yes, that is exactly where I wanted to go with this." It was beyond inspirational to see such deities of jazz finding new inspiration themselves and sharing it with ecstatic abandon. The club was small and we were nearly sitting on stage ourselves, so the whole experience had the illusion of containing us as fellow performers. Everything was one motive and one expression in the magic of those moments.
