Review: Kenny Werner and Grégoire Maret at the 2023 Ottawa Jazz Festival

Kenny Werner and player Grégoire Maret
June 24, 9 p.m. in the NAC Fourth Stage
Ottawa Jazz Festival

On Saturday, Quebecers celebrated Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. But across the Ottawa River, inside the National Arts Centre’s Fourth Stage, a packed house of jazz fans and two stellar musicians fêted a different Jean-Baptiste, one who was much better known simply as “Toots.”

Of course, we’re talking about the late harmonica master Toots Thielemans, a virtuoso who emoted like no other through his chromatic instrument. Born Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor Thielemans in 1922, the late Belgian jazz star, who died in 2018 at the age of 94, inspired pianist Kenny Werner and harmonica player Grégoire Maret to play their hearts out even as they took well-worn songs on trips into the great musical unknown.

Werner, 71, was paying tribute to a close friend and collaborator. He and Thielemans played intimate duets in the 2000s, and at the 2007 Ottawa Jazz Festival they gave a concert for the ages. The pianist told the Ottawa crowd Saturday that Thielemans would designate Maret, a Swiss-born 48-year-old, as his substitute when he could not make a gig.

The pair played a highly spontaneous and conversational set, which included:

The Days of Wine and Roses (Mancini)
The Dolphin (Eça)
No More Blues (Jobim)
Smile (Chaplin)
Wave (Jobim)
Ne me quitte pas (Brel)
Footprints (Shorter)
Nardis (Davis)
Bluesette (Thielemans)
What A Wonderful World (Thiele, Weiss)

Many songs were vehicles for intense musical exploration. Werner in every setting is a musician who delights in finding ear-catching ways to push the envelope, and he was absolutely irrepressible on Saturday, frequently charting delightful new harmonic routes and propelling the music with subtle rhythmic displacements. With Maret tracking and interacting with Werner’s curveballs, songs such as the Days of Wine and Roses and Wave, Footprints and Nardis in particular were epic journeys.

The ballads Smile and Ne me quite pas were more constrained set pieces that put Maret’s ability to wring every drop of emotion from his instrument in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Werner evoked lush synthesized strings with the keyboard on top of the piano, upping the cinematic sweep of the unabashedly sentimental music.

“We don’t exactly plan the set,” Werner said at one point, explaining that he and Maret were just going to choose each tune in the moment rather than work from an ordered list. Still, the set ended with a jaunty version of Bluesette, during which Werner and Maret alternated solo choruses, and then the encore of What A Wonderful World, because, as Werner said, Thielemans always ended his concerts with these pieces.

Thielemans, Werner said, made music that sat in the sweet spot “between a smile and tear.” The pianist and Maret did their inspiration proud as they aimed for a similar special mark, but in their own sweet way, with profound leaps of imagination as well as remarkable big-heartedness.

phum@postmedia.com

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