More Jazz Festival

Kathleen and I had a great time on Friday night, July 3rd, in Montreal. We started off with a beautiful diner at a new restraunt at the Place d'Arts in Montreal. Then, on to Eliane Elias. Not a lot of people who don't follow jazz as slavishly as I do will have heard of Elias. Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Eliane Elias’ musical talents began to show at an early age. She started studying piano at age seven and at age twelve was transcribing solos from the great jazz masters. By the time she was fifteen she was teaching piano and improvisation at one of Brazil’ s most prestigious schools of music. Her performing career began in Brazil at age seventeen, working with Brazilian singer/songwriter Toquinho and the great poet Vinicius de Moraes who was also Antonio Carlos Jobim’s co-writer/lyricist. In 1981 she headed for New York and in 1982 landed a spot in the group Steps Ahead.
Her first album release was a collaboration with Randy Brecker entitled Amanda in 1984. Shortly after her solo career began, spanning over eighteen albums to date; fifteen on Blue Note Records and three on RCA Victor Group. In her work Elias has documented dozens of her own compositions, her outstanding piano playing and arranging, and beautiful vocal interpretations. In 1988 she was voted Best New Talent by the jazz critics poll of JAZZIZ magazine.
Together with Herbie Hancock in their duet, she was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Jazz Solo Performance” category for her 1995 release, “Solos and Duets” .This recording was hailed by Musician Magazine as “a landmark in piano duo history.”
In the 1997 Downbeat Readers Poll, her recording “The Three Americas” was voted Best Jazz Album. Eliane Elias was named in five other categories: Beyond Musician, Best Composer, Jazz Pianist, Female Vocalist, and Musician of the Year.
Elias just completed a new recording for Blue Note records. “Bossa Nova Stories” is a celebration to the 50th Anniversary of the Bossa Nova and features her vocals accompanied by a stellar rhythm section and strings recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London.

And we heard pretty much the whole album "Bosa Nova Stories" with a few gems like "Tangerine".

But she really remains unknown in non-jazz circles and that's too, too bad. Kathleen and I both noticed that she is a "muscular" player, that is, she really can play the piano with the best of any jazz musician. There are some, like Diana Krall, who can sing and play -- and Eliane Elias is arguably a much, much better piano player than Krall, (but Krall has a voice and presence and song selection that far outpaces anyone out there today) -- but Elias has to be counted as one of the top 10 piano players in jazz.

These are videos of the same band with Eliane Elias with three of the songs we heard. We were in the Theatre Jean Duceppe which holds perhaps 1000 people. There is not a bad seat, and we were in the fourth row.

And of course, just one more... The Girl from Ipanema" ("Garota de Ipanema") is a well-known bossa nova song, a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s that won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965 It was written in 1962, with music by Antonio Carolos Jobim.

Myth has it The Girl from Ipanema was inspired by Helô Pinheiro, then a fifteen-year-old girl living in Montenegro Street of the fashionable Ipanema district of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Daily, she would stroll past the popular "Veloso" bar-café on her way to the beach, attracting the attention of regulars like Jobim. This is Helo Pinheiro some forty years later, (and perhaps various surgeries later?) on the left. Its a great standard and has a fun story behind it, as many songs do...