During my time programming with the Toronto Downtown Jazz Festival two sets of events stand out amongst the rest for very opposite reasons.

The first set of events were actually a special pre-festival showcase that combined music with a wonderful visual art exhibition in the downstairs space of the Berkeley Church. The first night of two featured the incredibly talented Toronto group The New Deal, who I admired and worked with before.  

The night went off so well  with more than 900 people attending. The New Deal had the place jumping so much I could see and feel the floor moving and the speaker stacks swaying a bit from all the dancing and jumping. 

In between their sets I had arranged for the fab scratch DJ Dopey to do a set and while he had the audience’s attention on one side of the venue, we snuck in a 20 plus piece Brazilian drumming group Escola de Samba behind them. 

When the group was ready DJ Dopey started scratching a beat that the Escola did a call and response with and eventually they started playing full force right in the middle of the crowd and everyone went wild as it was so unexpected. I was and am still very pleased with myself that I thought of that and it worked!

The second night had iconic Jazz bassist Christian McBride as the headliner and he was outstanding. Starting the night was the Trifecta group with one of my favourite vocalists Divine Earth Essence (now Divine Brown) and stellar spoken word from Dwayne Morgan.

All in all, both nights were/are so memorable and meaningful to me.  

So that was the night I caught, the night that got away from me was during the Jazz Festival with an incredible live electronic artist Llorca from France.

The event was sold out and more than 500 people showed up but during the soundcheck I got called to come in and their tour manager was yelling at me that the sound configuration wasn’t what they needed or required and they weren’t going to play unless it was fixed. 

Well I was very surprised to hear this and this guy was such an asshole about it. The Jazz Festival has sound and tech support who are supposed to know what they are doing but obviously mistakes were made and we spent hours sourcing the equipment needed and brought in someone to try and get it all done in time.

Unfortunately time was not on our side and around 11 pm I had to make the call to cancel the gig, which would mean refunding everyone’s ticket and a lot of disappointment all around. 

I still remember getting up on stage in front of 500 people and telling them the concert wasn’t going to happen and apologizing for the inconvenience. The crowd took it pretty well as we had a great DJ kick in immediately with some beats and people just started dancing and made the best of it.

I think I took it the hardest as this was the first and only time of all the hundreds of events I programmed, that I had to cancel an event so dramatically and so unexpectedly. It happens and it happened to me. Sigh and move on.