There is a beautiful thing that happens with the Island entertainment scene in the wintertime.
Save for the boppin’ and bustling Music P.E.I. Week that we’re now immersed in (and the ECMAs that will be here in April), it’s pretty much a guarantee that your choices for weekend musical entertainment will be a little less numerous this time of year.
Whereas our summer listings increasingly runneth over each year, like some sort of grandiose and overloaded buffet, the winter months often seem like a less loaded food cupboard, where you’re just happy to look and find anything to indulge in and enjoy.
But with this situation also comes a fantastic simplicity: you know you’re going to be going to the right place ‘cause there’s nowhere else to go. This kind of logic kind of comforts you. And how even more awesomely sweet the feeling is for everyone involved when the show is actually a really, really great one.
Jazz at the Alibi Lounge with The Glen Strickey Quartet and Chastity was my show of choice last Saturday on a cold mid-January night that certainly could’ve used some heating-up with some fiery jazz by a few of the best players around.
To walk in from the frigid wind coming up University Avenue to the warm candlelit glow of a packed restaurant, with folks eating, drinking and being merry — their attention focused on a red-curtain-framed stage in the corner, where upbeat jazz easily flowed as it danced about the room — it was a pretty welcoming embrace, to say the least.
Grabbing a seat at the bar near the stage and ordering an eggplant tomato pasta (which was divine) from the busy and talented hands of Chris and Jennifer Coupland in the Alibi kitchen, I leaned back and savoured what was going on before us.
Glen Strickey on alto sax, with Alan Dowling on drums, Wayne Dunsford on bass and Ian Toms on electric guitar, slinking out the bossa nova groove of Black Orpheus together — and all of a sudden it felt like Charlottetown no more, but more like some hazy and humid bossa club in Rio.
(I’m going out on a limb with this one, as I’ve never been to a club in Rio, I admit. However, I’m going with the theory that there must have been at least one place in time in Rio that felt and sounded similar to the way this did, somewhere along the line . . .)
Continuing into tunes like Hallelujah (such a gorgeous free-flowing rendition the quartet does, with Strickey on soprano sax), Lucky 13 (a quick-stepping tune written by Dowling himself) and Mr. PC, the quartet just wowed us time and time again with its tightness, ingenuity and flare in improvisation. In a nutshell, they are all ninjas, and to watch them in improv action never fails to be a tremendous and dazzling display.
