Ottawa's Souljazz Orchestra is an electric live act that you can't help but move your body to. On their new album, Solidarity, the multicultural band takes soul, funk, jazz, Afro, Latin and Caribbean sounds to create exciting and energetic music that will keep you dancing on cold Canadian nights.
They have just returned from a tour of Europe, where they had some misfortune, some odd incidents, some great food and some truly exceptional concert experiences. Vocalist and keyboard player Pierre Chrétien recalls the Souljazz Orchestra's crazy European adventure.
What’s the oddest thing you’ve seen in the crowd on this tour?
Oh, we’ve seen some really crazy stuff. One thing that comes to mind is when we played in Montpellier, France. Some raver guy showed up dressed like some multicoloured neon superhero, with a baby pacifier around his neck, and with a gigantic six-foot teddy bear in his arms. He danced sensually with his bear all night, and eventually ended up climbing onstage. He pretended his bear was having a heart attack from funk overdose, and then proceeded to attempt to resuscitate the bear using CPR. He spent several songs desperately trying to revive his friend, and the bear finally made it out OK in the end! Wow, that was something.
Tell us the story about your saxophone incident.
Which one?! British Airways lost our baritone saxophone on the flight over from Montreal. We spent hours trying to track it down. When they finally delivered it to our hotel, they almost gave us the wrong one. Thankfully the hotel clerk knew what our sax looked like and pointed it out.
Then, on an Air Berlin flight from Düsseldorf to Vienna, they lost the baritone sax again. This time, it took days to track it down. Ray [Murray] ended up playing the show in Vienna on a student model sax donated by a local music store. It was funny, because other than that, the drums were missing cymbals and Phil [Lafrenière] was swingin’ his sticks into dead air, they forgot a piano bench so I had to sit on two stacked beer crates, and a lot of us didn’t have vocal mics so we just had to yell out into the air!
The next day, we went on to Bratislava in Slovakia, and Ray stayed behind to deal with the saxophone situation. He finally did get it, but with all this banging around, the sax was in rough shape. By the end of the tour, it was holding together with rubber bands and duct tape, real classy! Ray’s a soldier though, he took it all in a stride.
Can you tell me about the power outage you experienced?
We were in Chalon-sur-Saône, a small town north of Lyon, in France. The people there were really welcoming, really nice, and they really seemed excited to have us play their little town. We were playing a cool club that happened to be a converted old abattoir, an old slaughterhouse. Now, who knows what sort of electrical wiring they had in there.
We got through half of our set, then the power went out in the whole building again. We got offstage, the technicians got the power back on within 15 minutes, then we went back up. We played a few notes, the power went out again, we got offstage again, waited while the technicians kicked on the power. We did this about five times, and we were really starting to feel ridiculous. We eventually finished a song just acoustically, playing in the dark, and then we had to call the show, it made no sense to keep going. People really weren’t happy, we went out to talk to them to apologize. Hopefully we’ll get to come back soon to make it up to them.
How do you recover from things that go wrong during a live show?
Well, things always happen, so we’ve learned to just keep rolling with the punches, keep smiling, and go on with the show if it’s at all possible. In Lyon, we were playing in a club on a boat called “La Marquise,” on the Rhône river, during the worst storm they had all year. The boat was rocking and bouncing around like crazy, part of the roof was ripped off by the wind, the power went out once again during the night, folks were getting sea sick and puking, and somehow we managed to play a wicked show, with three encores, to a really hype sold-out crowd!
Sometimes, though, we have no choice but to take five and figure things out. In Athens for example, the clavinet just died halfway through the show, and we just didn’t have time to fix it. The club owner is a bit of an eccentric guy, with all sorts of connections all over Athens; within 15 minutes, some stranger showed up on a motorcycle with a clavinet on his back. We jumped back onstage with the new clavinet, and ended up playing one of the best shows of the tour.
What’s the most perplexing thing about performing for European crowds?
Well, as Canadians, I guess what’s most perplexing is when we show up in these far-off places, and find out that people there actually know our music, can sing along to our songs and seem to be really excited to see us.
We played in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece. We didn’t know much about the place before the show, they just told us we were playing in “Warehouse C,” a converted old storage warehouse on the pier of the Thessaloniki port. “Oh great,” we thought. They took us out before to a nice simple Balkan restaurant, we had some schnitzel, listened to Bulgarian and Romanian folk music, I figured it would be a chill evening. We went back to the club to find out 3,500 people were there to see us!
It ended up being one of the best, hypest shows on the tour, the Greeks really know how to get it on. Zak even crowd surfed, it was a crazy night. Of course this doesn’t happen every single show, but we’ve been really blessed on this last tour.
What else has stood out as a new experience on this tour?
Well, we got to play Italy for the very first time, something we’ve been dying to do for ages. Milan was everything we had hoped for … the food was amazing. They first brought out this amazing spread of all sorts of insanely delicious Italian stuzzichini, pre-meal appetizers. We thought this was the actual supper, but they told us “No, no, this is just to say hello!” Then they brought us the best margherita pizza we’ve ever had in our lives. We thought this must now be the supper. They told us, “No, no, this is just to say hello again!” Next came the primo piatto, the secondo piatto, the contorno, the dessert and finally the espresso and grappa. By the end, we were just in heaven, it was amazing. Trust me, this doesn’t happen every night, we often play shows with just train station sandwiches in our bellies!
We ended up having a great time that night, Italians know how to party, we almost didn’t care that we had to get up at four in the morning to catch the next flight to Bordeaux. All in all, it was a tough tour physically, but we had a great time, and I think it was actually our best European tour ever. Now onto Canada and the States, can’t wait to play Toronto!
The Souljazz Orchestra will be playing Toronto, Kingston, Quebec, Montreal and Gatineau this November.
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