Dr Draw
Dr Draw performed at Taste of the Danforth. He has a completely different band this year. Last year he was based in Montreal and his bandmates were all Montrealers. This year he moved to Toronto and put together a new band.
As a live band, you won’t find much better. Well, his music may not be to everyone’s taste, but he certainly gets the crowd going. At the Beach Jazz Festival he pulls in perhaps the biggest crowd of the night. I enjoy his live sets, with Ave Maria my favourite.
When I first saw the new band, I wasn’t v happy. But they play a tight set and they all seem comfortable on stage now. I’ve come around. Sally J, the bass player, has become somewhat more comfortable on stage. At their first gig this summer, she spent most of the time with her back to the audience. At the Beach Jazz Festival, she was as much a rock star as anyone else in the band. (Tim and Eugene are particularly confident.) Yesterday Sally J seemed to withdraw again.
I again had to use a digicam, this time an old Olympus that has sat in my closet for the last several years. It’s excellent at ISO 50 and drops quickly in quality after that. ISO 400 is brutal in colour - sort of like ISO 3200 on an dSLR. The Olympus is slow, but it has an EVF, which I much prefer to holding the camera out and trying to shoot via the LCD. Fine for things that don’t move, but frustrating when they do. The trick with digicams is to prefocus and anticipate what the subject will do next. Waiting until Eugene jumped in the air would have meant missing the shot. And of course there’s little to no DoF.
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