Kenny Werner and Gregoire Maret at the 2023 Ottawa Jazz Festival
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.Photo by Daniel Nawrocki
“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.
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