Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Ottawa Jazz Happenings

It is no surprise that jazz is slightly harder to come across in Ottawa than in Toronto. In T.O., you just walk into The Rex any night of the week, and you're guaranteed some mind-blowing music.
Up till now, I've only been frequenting Cafe Nostalgica on Wednesday nights where my friend and teacher Yves Laroche usually plays with his trio.
But it turns out there's much more jazz in town, as I've found out when I subscribed to Gavin McClintock's newsletter, Ottawa Jazz Happenings. Turns out there's something going on pretty well every night! The only problem with that newsletter is, for an organizationally challenged person such as myself it can be pretty hard to act on this information. That's why I've punched in the events from that newsletter into a public calendar. I'll try to keep it updated.


Oh and I also came upon the Ottawa Citizen Jazz Blog today which I had no idea about. Great!

Finally, I've received some sheet music from sheetmusicplus.com today. I'm very happy with their prices, they're typically around 50% of those of the local stores', and their catalog is much larger than that of Amazon. The only drawback with them is shipping: their cheapest option to ship to Canada is about as expensive as Amazon.com's, but while it typically takes under a week for me to get books from Amazon.com, here it took me almost a month.