While a few of this year’s Jazz Fest shows at smaller venues have sold out, like the Shuffle Demons and Doghouse Orchestra at Huff Estates, or singer Ale Nuñez at Sandbanks Winery, there are still plenty of sounds to get in on all around the County.

Two of the biggest shows are at The Regent Theatre. In themselves they represent the great variety that jazz has to offer. 

“Beyond category” is how Duke Ellington used to respond to the question “what is jazz?” and, now, just over a century after the first “jazz” recordings were made, the field—whether it is a single performance or a festival lineup—reflects the thought.

 On Friday the 14th, pianist Jeremy Ledbetter brings his energetic trio to offer a wide range of rhythms and flavours.

He likes to call their sound “cinematic,” and for good reason. As a young child he was obsessed with Disney’s orchestral masterpiece, Fantasia—so much so that his parents decided he needed either psychotherapy or classical music lessons.

They opted for the latter.

And then, Mr. Ledbetter says, he got into jazz “through the side door.” It was only as a teenager that he discovered the tradition that leads to jazz. The Delta Blues guitarist Mel Brown lived and performed in Mr. Ledbetter’s hometown of Kitchener at the end of his life. “He would do these weekly gigs and I used to sneak in,” remembers Mr. Ledbetter, with a touch of nostalgia. “I wasn’t old enough to get in, so right through the fire escape I’d go see him—once a week for three years.

“What really hooked me was the idea that there was that there was another type of music. I realized this is something that I could do: the virtuosity that I had acquired and had learned to appreciate was still very valid but with a lot more freedom of expression, freedom to be individual.”

From the blues, it was travel that expanded his musical horizons. “I spent 10 to 12 years traveling around Latin America in the Caribbean and living in places like Trinidad and Tobago. I spent a lot of time in Cuba and Brazil and Venezuela and it was always the music that would lead me to these destinations. I would hear a kind of music that would get its hooks into me and then I would buy a plane ticket to wherever that music was from and spend as long as I could there studying, taking lessons with musicians locally: learning, playing, jamming with people, going to shows.

“Jazz is such a beautifully open kind of music; it’s not in fact a genre: it’s an approach to making music. You can apply the jazz approach to any type of music and then you have an offshoot of jazz! Every musical culture in the world has sort of adopted this jazz aesthetic. Its most skilled practitioners have adopted the idea of ‘how about if we just take this and we just expand the harmony and make it more complicated and add a lot of room for improvising and virtuosic solos.’ The idea of jazz is that you just push on whatever the boundaries are as far as you can. You make things more sophisticated and challenging and open things up for individual expression and you can apply that to any kind of music.”

The audience can expect to hear Mr. Ledbetter’s trio blend its calypsos and socas with a touch of Bach and a helping of the Blues.

Saturday the 15th’s headliner is no stranger to the County and its Jazz Festival. Singer Emilie-Claire Barlow is the daughter of its former artistic director, renowned drummer Brian Barlow.

Enjoying special access to the Toronto scene from an early age, Ms.  Barlow made her debut in advertising jingles as a child. As she puts it, “I grew up in the studio.”

By the time she graduated from the Etobicoke School of the Arts, she was a working musician. “I started my first jazz quartet when I was 17 or 18 and we really just started playing private parties and local restaurants, expanding our repertoire, slowly but surely. I was very inspired by Holly Cole and her trio. They were taking these songs and really having their way with them. 

“Of course you start by copying. You learn all the solos and imitate before you are able to shape and find your own sound.”

By now, with fifteen albums to her credit, Ms. Barlow’s own sound, simultaneously performative, playful and intimate, underlies the great variety of her musical explorations. Now a resident of Quebec City, where she has learned French as an adult, her current album is a tribute to Franco-Canadian song. 

“I just discovered this whole other songbook that I wanted to pay homage to with this album. It’s also a love letter to Quebec, the warmth and welcome that I have had here getting to know a deeper immersion into the music and the culture and the language and the food.”

Ms. Barlow returns to Picton as a part of a wide-ranging tour, including six shows at New York City’s legendary jazz club, Birdland. “We’ve been playing small towns and big towns. We just finished a tour in in Texas, playing really high-end jazz clubs in big cities. Music fans are really there with open minds to hear something new: they’re requesting the French repertoire.

“I can’t wait to come back to the County. We’re going to do a great show with some of our most requested material, just trying to really present a nice overview, and definitely play some songs from the new album.”

The PEC Jazz Festival’s satellite shows, as well as after-hours sessions following these Regent Theatre performances, continue the entire week. 

See the centrefold, and visit pecjazz.org for tickets.