A Magpie Amongst The Beavers: PICTURE SPECIAL: Beaches Jazz Festival

I never pass up a free meal, so I didn't hesitate to attend the gratis feast of music that is the Beaches Jazz Festival last weekend. It's an annual cornucopia of finger clicking, hi-hat riding niceness where acts line up 20 metres apart along the splendid Beaches area of Queen Street East, the trendtacular stomping ground of information architects, limp-wristed liberals and pseudo-politicos with their designer babies, $5,000 beachcombers and obscure breeds of dog. The unwashed masses (in this case intentionally unwashed, because dirt is in) are invited to saunter up and down, pausing whenever they hear a band they like or a snack they can't resist, including funnel cakes (no, I don't know what they are either).

So we headed for the festival, setting off as the sun set, and parked as close as we possibly could. Which wasn't very close. In fact, parking in the leafy surrounds of the Beaches was a debacle: I'd stop in a spot only to be informed by Tony that I was too close to a fire hydrant, or that the car was facing the wrong direction (which is an actual rule of the road, apparently). In the chaos, my ice-cold demeanour slipped, and I ended up driving on the wrong side of the road. I realised my mistake upon coming face-to-face with a bemused oncoming motorist, so I pulled to the side, put my hazards on and waited for him to pass... Of course, I was stopped FACING THE WRONG DIRECTION, and so had to reverse around the corner before the stickler would move on.

But I digress. The festival itself was very good, if not particularly jazzy. It would have been more accurately marketed as the Beaches Covers Band Festival, with such classic hits as Killing In The Name and Smells Like Teen Spirit channeled as funk classics... and funk is not jazz, man, unless we're talking jazz-funk fusion. Nevertheless, photos follow, and can be enlarged with a click: