I’m not going anywhere. I hope.
It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years.
Things got broken. Things got lost.
But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Anthony Bourdain

The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them.
But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.
He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake . . .
The man’s crime is different from other crimes – for it makes even crimes impossible.
G. K. Chesterton

In the hours following his very public death by suicide, CNN’s lachrymose anchor, John Berman, said, “Everyone wanted to be Anthony Bourdain.”

My first — admittedly sympathy-challenged — thought was why would we admire, revere, want to emulate someone who ends up hanging himself at the end of a rope? Since Mr. Berman was speaking on behalf of millions of admirers, all of whom, presumptively, would rather be alive than dead, we are forced to conclude that they hadn’t figured out that Tony Bourdain’s life was the beautiful lie that both he and the celebrity makers confectioned out of the disparate elements of his well documented life, a lie that, thanks to a complicit media, continues to thrive in the imagination of his vast society of worshippers and mourners, a lie, that 18 months since his passing, has not been submitted to a post-mortem.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised since it is in our DNA that at the behest of our inner groupie we seek out what is exceptional in others as a way of dealing with the banality of our own lives. And whether or not the person is real or a fantasy construed for our distraction and/or entertainment is immaterial. There is an existential void to be filled, and like antibodies on virus alert, our imagination springs into action. What matters is that we come to care about the larger-than-life person as if s/he is someone we know. “Seen from a distance,” writes Albert Camus, “these existences seem to possess a coherence and unity which they cannot have in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. He sees only the salient points of these lives without taking into account the details of corrosion.”

Tall, ruggedly handsome, unselfconsciously virile, smart and observant, he had it all and we all wanted it. He spoke directly from the heart to the heart of the matter; he was refreshingly unmannered, unedited. He once said “I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.” If, as Arthur Koestler observes in The Act of Creation, “a snob is someone who when reading Dostoyevsky is moved not by what he reads but by himself reading Dostoyevsky,” Bourdain was moved not his confession but by himself confessing while making direct I-contact with the camera.

His considerable appeal combined an unusual admixture of diffidence and nonchalance. He could be simultaneously cool and empathetic. He demonstrated that it was possible to be detached while wearing your heart on your sleeve. He had no qualms entering his misdeeds, regrets and all that is “foul and fair” into the public domain in language that borrowed equally from the X-rated and Barak Obama. As his popularity and ratings soared, Bourdain would have been keenly aware that audiences were hugely attracted to his confessional style, that his charisma was directly related to a willingness to enter his flaws and foibles into the public domain, and that his person — the star he had become — and not the exotic location was the take-away destination in Parts Unknown.

Not unlike hard-living journalist Hunter S. Thompson whom he greatly admired and who, incidentally, died by his own hand, he was trademarked as irreverent, a badge of honour that would over time alienate Bourdain from his essential self as he began to measure himself through the eyes and expectation of his growing fan base. Bourdain’s apparent facility and ease in every conceivable environment — from aristocratic France to the mosquito blighted jungles of Borneo – became the means to the end of swelling the ranks of his followers.

Over time, the attention and adoration became a drug he was unable to refuse, and he quickly learned how to assure his supply by becoming a work junkie. It was at this critical juncture his downward spiral began.

In the ninth or tenth season of Parts Unknown, and not as young as he once was (in his late 50s) Bourdain became obsessed with looking good and fit in front of the camera. To that end he lost weight, and began to work out every day, so that when a scene called for it, he was all too ready to remove his shirt and show us that middle age going on old was no barrier to projecting masculinity. That he was away from his wife and young daughter for 260 days a year was a choice that implicated both the physical and psychological pressures domesticity entails. Was Bourdain infatuated with his day job or running away from the truth of himself (ageing star) that staying at home would have obliged him to confront? Perhaps a huge chunk of both.

As he became a media star, the gap between his image and real self grew to unsustainable proportions. And he would discover the hard way that he couldn’t simultaneously be himself and untrue to himself. Hooked on the high of celebrityhood, he chose the latter and ended up sacrificing his personhood on the altar of audience expectation.

What kind of person, who, when invited over by CNN’s Anderson Cooper for a friendly dinner, sets up a camera in the kitchen? What kind of person provides for a small film crew when, shirtless, he’s at the gym working out with weights? How do we account for the shots he was belting back episode after episode in contrast to his teetotaling existence at home? Are we to believe that at the age of 60 Bourdain decided to have his upper body tattooed for aesthetic reasons — and not to appear cool and hip?

Before Bourdain lost his wife and daughter they lost him who was lost to himself.

It was only when he became a celebrity, only when the camera would provide the appropriate amplification, would suicide become at first a temptation and then an obsession that took over his life. One can only guess how many times Bourdain had imagined his demise and its after-effects before tightening the rope around his neck. Recreating the public mourning, the adulation and eulogies, the obituaries must have worked on him like a powerful drug that he required more of for the same effect — to the final effect that in the end it didn’t matter if he weren’t around to enjoy it.

By the time Bourdain slipped away he had become a star unhinged in the vacuous glitter of fame and celebrity. The only honest moment he showed the world was in the rendering of his final judgment on the phony he had become — by getting rid of it once and for all.

What really happened in that lonely hotel room in Kayserberg, France is that Anthony Bourdain strangled his persona in order to be free.

His suicide is a tragic reminder that when fame and celebrity conspire to estrange someone from his or her essential self, in certain instances nothing less than radical intervention is called for, and whether or not the afflicted one survives the ordeal is almost beside the point.

The critical distinction between psychology and philosophy is that the former encourages you to like yourself as you are, while the latter asks you to make yourself into someone you like. Given the proliferation of psychology and the virtual disappearance of philosophy from daily life during the past century, Bourdain, in a very real sense, didn’t have much of a chance. Everyone around him wanted him to stay ‘as is.’ Surrounded by sycophants and devotees, there was no one to help him address his radical self-estrangement, much less set him on the path to recover his essential self.

What kind of advice could he expect from his colleagues at CNN? Both Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon worshipped him, they wanted to be like him. And like the legions of his admirers, their hands, too, are on the rope that took him away from us. Where there should have been a helping hand (a real friend) there was only the unrelenting din of love and adoration and applause that became deafening.

Since Bourdain’s after life has been as much of a lie as was his actual life, the real person remains an enigma, and what was authentic in the man and his life is still waiting to be exhumed. The blinded-by-the-light media tried to explain away the suicide to a defective sequence of genes, conveniently exculpating itself and the star of the show.

If “the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak,” (Adorno) maybe one day, on his behalf, the people who knew Tony well will speak the truth to the aura that obscures him, to the worship and veneration that have disfigured him beyond recognition. Then again, if art is said to happen when the image is superior to the thing itself, we should be thankful that Anthony Bourdain sacrificed his personhood, gave his life for his groundbreaking Parts Unknown. We got what we wanted: entertainment and edification. CNN scored big time on the ratings. And Tony got what he wanted: fame, adulation and a robust afterlife.

The only thing we really know about Tony Bourdain is that he was not the television personality we came to know. Which isn’t to say he is not the good friend who is missed who is no longer around.

The question Elon Musk — the now middle-aged wunderkind founder of Neurolink, OpenAI and Tesla — asks is where can intelligence best operate, that is generate and command information. In light of recent developments in AI (artificial intelligence), he believes the cerebral cortex is no longer the ideal place.

Every living thing, from single cell organisms to multicellular life, wants to endure. The French philosopher Henri Bergson proposed that an élan vital (a life force) inheres in every living creature.

Elon Musk is convinced and fears that information and knowledge, expressed as an AI ‘independent’ of human volition, will soon possess this same élan vital, and be able to independently program its will to power and run amok over the earth and turn Homo sapiens I into a sub-species of vassals, which, it should be noted, will be business as usual for the majority of the earth’s 8 billion inhabitants.  That modern finance and industry (banking, aerospace, communications) would be dysfunctional without sophisticated computer technology is evidence enough for Musk that AI is already a force that is rapidly coming of age, and will soon be capable of autonomous self-reconfiguration, programming itself to aspire to and assume power.   

Egregiously (without a trace particle of evidence) attributing volition and desire to the lightening quick operations performed by state-of-the-art computers is a leap not into the unknown but a wildly speculative sphere that is properly the subject of science fiction and fantasy.  Noam Chomsky, among others, asks how can something mechanical, something incapable of sentience (feeling), want to dominate its surroundings in order to survive if it can neither live nor die? Survival is not, has never been, will never be an issue for the inorganic.  

Only a living Musk, and never a bus,
can behold the colours that dazzle at dusk.

Since it is in the interest of pure intelligence, presently housed in the neocortex which is housed in the human body, to self-perpetuate and dominate its environment, Musk foresees the day when this same intelligence, for its own preservation, will be able to limbically leak itself into the inorganic, (recombine with AI), and thus, instantly, become unlike any intelligence ever known or envisioned.  He postulates that affective limbic leakage will allow AI to conduct its operations without human intervention, and that Homo sapiens I and all other species will be subject to AI control.

AFFECTIVE LIMBIC LEAKAGE

Either by design or inadvertence, there is no evidence that the organic has ever limbically affected or fused itself with the inorganic, despite proximity and contiguity. Globally, billions of operations are conducted daily that purposively and productively engage the organic and inorganic: the living arm of a carpenter driving a dead nail into a two-by-four; my flesh and blood fingers punching keys on a dead keyboard, but none of these operations has ever breathed life into the inorganic.  Yet when Musk looks into his crystal ball, he sees the day when a cortex-generated human life force will be able to fecundate a computer chip (or a central processing unit) such that chip will be able to will itself to power.

Since the future is an unknown quantity, Musk can’t be proven wrong, but there is no empirical example of the organic ever having infused the inorganic with life.  The reverse is certainly verifiable, where the inorganic (a lethal dose of mercury) is absorbed by the organic (a plant) which is rendered inorganic (dead), but that process does not infer its opposite, that human intelligence will be able to meld with AI intelligence such that the latter will be capable of sentience.  

Humans, despite recent developments in AI, are still light years from understanding the animal brain much less the complex workings of human intelligence. Do we understand what allows a bird to take flight and perfectly land on the top of a pole, or how this same bird brain finds its way to its winter home after an 8000 mile journey without a map or GPS? That a mechanical AI might one day purposefully or accidently inhere itself with the essence of life or that the essence of thinking can be cross fertilized (the equivalent of limbic leakage) with a mechanical AI is at best a wishful thinking that responsible thinking should not truck.  

In this new world there will be not so much the haves and have-nots, but the ‘chipped’ and the ‘chip-nots,’ the former whose knowledge and intelligence are equal to the sum of all known knowledge and intelligence, while the latter will be represented by Homo sapiens I as he is presently classified, a dwarf species compared to his ‘chipped’ counterpart.

The chip or the device is likely to be modeled after the inter-cortical brain interface (presently in a developmental state) or BMI (brain-machine interface) which allows, for example, paralytics  to control a computer mouse or to write an email via brain impulses by simply thinking the activity or task to be performed. So if I am one of the chipped and am travelling in a foreign country, I merely have to think a thought that I wish to be translated and it will be instantly available, and my speech, the combined physical gestures that generate it, will respond accordingly.  

In respect to the sum of knowledge that is currently available to the individual, the challenge – a work in progress — is to overcome the access lag, the time required to retrieve and process the information.  

As Musk correctly points out, we are already exponentially wiser with our fingers on the computer, our portal to the Internet (the summa of all knowledge).  He reminds us that it wasn’t so long ago we had to retrieve and then open a dictionary and shuffle through the pages to find the meaning of a word.  An operation that once took about a minute can now be executed in seconds by punching in the word under a Google search. With an intermediate BMI interface, or a chip implant, we’ll soon be able to think the question and answer in a single movement. At some future point in time, the operation will be reduced to synaptic time, and we will have become irreversibly dependent on the chip-extension of ourselves now wholly integral and integrated with the cortex.

In this brave new world, newborns, who are routinely vaccinated at birth, will be fitted with a cortical chip that can be externally updated as required. They will be classified as Homo sapiens II.  As to all the others, like today’s have-nots, who comprise the chip-nots, they will be classified as Homo sapiens I. If present world migration patterns are determined by wealth and opportunity, in the chipped world emigrational flows will chase the chip producers and the medical specialists who execute the transplant. Cybernated communities will be the future points of light to which humanity will be drawn since prosperity will be a function of having overcome the ponderous time interval between information request and delivery.  

So it’s a red herring to suggest that humans will be taken over or peripheralized by AI.  Human beings, as fully-fledged cybernated entities, will be AIs, and sufficiently distinct from intelligence-challenged Homo sapiens I to merit an updated taxonomic entry (Homo sapiens II).  

Technology genius-guru Marshal McLuhan (1911-80) understood that all mechanical extensions of our selves result in physical atrophy of the body part that has been extended or replaced. With the invention of outer wear, body hair disappears; students raised on calculators are unable to perform the basic operations of multiplication. Therefore, should we expect the human brain to atrophy as the chip takes over central command, especially if thinking, planning and judgment become peripheral to survival? Or will the brain, through its intimate (quasi-conjugal) relationship with the chip, enjoy an unprecedented increase of its capabilities?

Stay tuned.

However mistaken is Musk in his prediction that human intelligence will be able to leak its essence into a mechanical intelligence, he has opened up a necessary realm of inquiry that directly implicates the future of the species.  For this alone, he deserves a place at the table at the highest levels of government and a full dispensation (carte blanche) from the scientific community.  Dismissing him as a charlatan or sophist does incalculable disservice to his deep reservoir of thought-provoking ideas and the conversations they arouse as well as to those illustrious giants (visionaries) who possess that exceptionally rare gift of vision (always a hit and miss proposition) and prescience, the sina qua non of invention and discovery, the bedrock upon which civilizations survive and thrive.   

Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.  

Richard E. Byrd

The French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard proposes that reversibility is the basis, the guarantor of human agency, that all our worldly concerns and engagements are proportionate to reversibility, that we are drawn to, engaged by situations where an outcome or expectation need not necessarily occur.  Mechanical cause and effect or anything predetermined simply cannot compete with the excitement generated by  contingency that animates, for example,  financial markets or sporting events.

In 1971 John Lennon (dead at 42 in 1980) recorded the song “Imagine.”  Eight years later, Bob Marley (dead at 36 in 1981) recorded “There’s So Much Trouble in the World.”

In answer to the troubles that were plaguing the world, Lennon was trying to imagine a new world order, one that Marley characterized as “no care for you no care for me.”

Where the Marley lyric falls short is in its lack of breadth.  It’s not only “no care for you no care for me” but no care for the planet that is now on the endangered list. To quote Bill Maher in a rare moment of eloquence: “we eat shit, we breathe shit.”

The data points are no longer disputable: The world is over-heating, our erstwhile good air has been compromised by ozone and particulate matter, there’s a plastic cesspool the size of France floating (farting) in the Pacific, and “the water line is rising and all we do is stand there” on the corner watching the erstwhile good earth being turned into an open sewer.   All in the name of consumption, the guarantor of happiness, so we are told as soon as we draw our first breath.  But despite the science and the proliferation of “save the planet” initiatives, the Greens are losing out to the Browns (the skatamakers) because corporations, and not governments, write the rules.

At the top of the “no care” list – our elected leaders come a distant second – is the corporation, likened, by Joel Bakan, to a psychopath in its cold-blooded behaviour. In his book (The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power), the author describes the corporate entity, whose tentacles are everywhere, whose appetite is insatiable, as rapacious and immoral in pursuit of lucre.

During the 2009 financial meltdown, the Canadian government bailed out Chrysler with a 1.2 billion dollar tax-payer funded loan. Shortly thereafter, Chrysler reincorporated as Chrysler Fiat, which earned 4.3 billion in 2017.  Since the old non-performing Chrysler received the loan, the Canadian government was unable to recuperate it, and (including accrued compounded interest) had to write off a  2.6 billion dollar loss.  Now we all know that the law that allowed old Chrysler to finance the new Chrysler wasn’t drafted by the shoemaker or the candlestick maker. The corporation wrote the law specific to its interests, lobbied (paid off) the government to enact it, thus legalizing an act of grand theft against the Canadian taxpayer. That the fate of the planet is in the hands of the world’s most powerful (immoral) corporations is not an exaggeration but a numbers backed fact that should worry us all.

The Guardian reports that 100 companies are responsible for 71`% of the world’s global emissions.

Corporatism thrives, feasts on consumption, the algorithm that is inexorably rendering the earth uninhabitable. Most experts on both sides of the debate now agree that ocean temperatures are rising, fish stocks are depleting, the coral reef is on life support, 10% of all the earth’s children suffer in varying degrees from asthma, while the life expectancy curve is flattening out despite medical advances in all disciplines.  Why? Because we can’t stop wanting what everyone else has regardless of utility.  The corporation specializes in turning us into a horde of insatiable wanters.  Our ever-expanding get lists, which dwarf our bucket lists, are as unobtainable as the fugitive happiness that getting promises. We want to earn more because we want more, as if happiness is an order or quantity to be filled out.

From our earliest years we are encouraged and then rewarded for being a coin clink in the chain of consumption.  There once was a time when respect and status were conferred on those who could save and store.  Today, those same rewards are accorded to the devotees of consumption.  It’s not the guy with a 15-year-old car but a new car that gets the woman, just as every young man knows or learns the hard way that women are attracted to mega-consumers.

Proportionate to our growing appetite to consume is our contempt for the natural rate of product degradation.  Clothes that would normally last five years are chucked after six months. The typical Canadian consumer ditches 680 pounds of textiles per year, 85% of it clothing. We can’t wait to replace our cars, computers and digital devices because marketing experts convince us we are unhappy or unsatisfied with the older versions.

We shouldn’t be surprised that in the 1930s — ironically during the Great Depression — the then already morally suspect corporation introduced the notion of built-in obsolescence, the deliberate producing or manufacturing of inferior products in order to shorten the interval between product purchase and replacement.  Following the example of the fashion industry, car manufacturers began to radically redesign their fleets from year to year in order to persuade the consumer that he would be happier with the newer, hipper version. The term throw away culture became current in the 1950s, referring to disposable tableware (mostly plastic) and packaging. Eighty billion pairs of chopsticks are thrown out annually. In 1969, in his seminal The Waste Makers, Vance Packard exposed “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals.”

Without overstating the case, scientists and environmentalists warn that if we don’t reverse the consumption paradigm, the earth will be unrecognizable in the not so distant future.  Every known environment suffers from varying degrees of toxicity because our ability to think for ourselves — wean ourselves from consumption dependency — has been co-opted, hi-jacked, vitiated by the corporation.  Our unregenerate thoughtlessness – the necessary invariable in any corporation’s success indices — is the great enabler.  The corporation pulls the strings, calls the shots.  We are the pawns, the foot soldiers doing the bottom line’s bidding. We have traded away – not a kingdom – the earth for a horse.  In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom writes: “The thoughtless are always going to be prisoners of other people’s thoughts.”

Once it takes root in the mind, it is very difficult to extirpate the greed bug. Microsoft, a multi-billion dollar company whose value exceeds that of many individual countries, without any outside consultation or regard for the well-being of the planet, during the past two decades has – on the flimsiest of pretexts — suspended support for Windows 2000, then Windows XP, then Windows 7, forcing hundreds of millions of users to change their operating system, 95% of whom were happy with their software.  The truth of Bill Gates is that while he is giving away millions of dollars to fight malaria and other worthy causes, he is already planning to replace Windows 10, and millions of us will have to retire a product that would otherwise last a lifetime.

Giving Up Cows And Cars

But it is still not too late to reverse current trends and  regain control of our critical faculties provided we begin to question our most basic assumptions about life and what constitutes happiness.  As more and more of us fall ill from over-consumption as a consequence of envy, depression, obesity, dysphoria, isolation (in the West, 50% of adults now live alone), some of  us – the stricken and the damned —  will begin to question  the virtues of consumption and its dubious promises.

How is it that the wealth of nations is not an indicator of happiness but of production and consumption?  Why is growth not a measure of becoming wise but an increase in the value of goods and services? Why are markets more concerned with GDP and not the unit number of pesticides and herbicides and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl) found in the food chain?  To whom do our eyes belong when they behold the jaundice coloured pall that hangs over every major city in the world if all we do is check into another mall and make another purchase on our debit cards?

Corporations spend billions of advertising dollars (supplied by us, the consumer), to get us interested in products we don’t need, and to get rid of things that are still useful.  The corporation understands that if the masses were to be suddenly stricken by the equivalent of a preservation virus, it would collapse, and with it, the entire world order that is responsible for the world’s present peril.

The challenge then is to convince the consumer that in order to save the planet and himself from extinction, he must begin to honour the products he consumes by allowing them to assume their natural rate of degradation, which just happens to be a priceless undertaking everyone can afford.

However unrealistic or idealistic it must seem imagining a world order based not on consumption but preservation, it is not a world unknown to us.  From man’s early history until the Industrial Revolution, saving — providing for the future — was prized above everything else.  Man, in order to survive, had to learn how to make last the hides that he wore on his back, to preserve and store food supplies to get him through inclement weather, crop failure and political upheaval.  His utensils, hunting and farming implements were especially valuable.  The tribe, and later the village earned their fitness by learning to Save and Preserve, injunctions informally spoken of as the S & P, an ancient index that commanded universal respect until it was co-opted by finance.

Once the nations of the world find the will to prioritize the launching and dissemination of a coordinated series of  S & P  initiatives, a new world order will become a reality, and with it, a new configuration of winners and losers.  Among the big losers will be corporations in the manufacturing sector as product demand crashes. Industries based on preservation of land and water will thrive as will the health sector and research and development.  Industrial and agricultural pollution, over time, will cease to be a major problem; life expectancy will increase, and there will be exponentially fewer children whose IQs are adversely affected by air-borne pollutants and contaminated water.

But none of this is likely to come about in the absence of a catastrophic event.  Man will continue on his present perilous course until Venice and other cities go under water, or tens of thousands of city dwellers are poisoned by toxic air trapped in by weather inversions.  Meteorological studies single out Delhi, Beijing, Cairo, Varanasi and Mexico City as likely candidates, and if and when it happens it will be irreversible, and thousands of people might lose their lives in a matter of days. In the weeks that follow, the tragedy will be compounded due to lack of facilities to dispose of the decomposing bodies.

If we still can’t see the writing on the wall, are these fatalistic futuristic scenarios — the wake up calls that finally incite us to action — our best hope since it is self-evident that we are  unable to command ourselves to act pre-emptively, to do what we know is right?

Man is his own worst enemy, and if he continues to refuse to make peace with the flawed species he sees when he looks into the cracked mirror, his home – The Earth — will soon be another casualty of the war he is waging against his intractable nature.

Left to his own inadequate devices, man reveals himself as incurably inclined to see what “he wants to see and disregards the rest” – a state of mind that portends increasing unrest in a restive world.

“Clear days are so good and free.” — the iconic lyric sung by Flora Purim on Chick Corea’s iconic album Light As a Feather. Especially in northern climes, the lyrics evoke those perfect days we associate with the summer that comes and goes all too quickly.

When it comes to celebrating summer, there’s nothing like the now world renown 10-day Montreal International Jazz Festival (MJF) that begins a week after the solstice. What makes the festival special is that not only are the “clear days so good and free” but there are hundreds of free concerts that begin at noon and continue until closing time. Yes, for the duration of the festival there’s a Havana Moon hanging high over Montreal. Unnoticed in the 1000ds of positive reports the MJF has generated over the years is that it is above everything else a people’s festival. On any given day, you (family and/or friends) can attend the many free outdoor concerts that are strategically embedded in the heart of the festival. Along with the music you’ll also discover that the city is a magnet for the world’s polyglot of languages, which redounds to the festival’s continually evolving creative programming that attracts music and culture lovers from the four corners of the globe.

THE FREE SHOWS CONCEPT

In the early 1980s, when festival founders Andre Menard and Alain Simard were growing the MJF, they had an idea which would become the template for all festivals looking to survive the financial burdens mega-events invariably generate. They understood that the best way to introduce listeners raised on pop, rock or rap and hip-hop to the more demanding and complex language of jazz would be to provide it free. If jazz is now one of the mainstays of the city, it’s because Menard and Simard created the ideal conditions for listeners to expose themselves to an unfamiliar musical language while having fun. Jazz is a constantly evolving form with many different approaches to structure and expression (free-form, bee-bop, manouche, fusion, cool, swing, The American Songbook); and thanks to the free shows listeners can try them all out and then pick and choose.

LOCATION = CLUB JAZZ CASINO

Location location location is not only the buzzword in real-estate, but also for festival venues; and where steel and cement make up the core of the city centre, anything that is green and grows will attract the undivided attention of city folk starving for the natural world. Three years ago, the festival brain trust presciently introduced a new venue called Club Jazz Casino of Montreal.

Another jewel in the crown of Montreal music is Papa Groove. When lead singer Sebastien Francisque gets it going, wardrobe malfunctions among the female contingent of the audience are an occupational hazard. The best way to describe their music and its brain-friendly effects it to imagine Frank Zappa, Snarky Puppy and James Brown injected into an unstable particle accelerator and spun out as anti- matter. Don’t bet on staying seated for too long during their back to back 10 pm performances June 28th and 29th.

If it’s voice you like, you can’t go wrong with England’s Zara McFarlane (June 28th, 6 pm). Hers is a jazz-inflected world music that benefits from the tight chemistry generated by her band. Zara isn’t afraid to be herself in her ear-arresting original material.

July 3rd at 6 pm will feature the solo guitar wizardry of Thomas Carbou: he’ll be playing his haunting original compositions plus a couple of covers.

If raunchy, infectious Cuban is your thing, Cuban-born now living in Montreal Rafael Zaldivar (July 3rd, 8 pm), in his latest reincarnation (he also plays straight-ahead jazz) is guaranteed to deliver the goods.

And don’t miss the electric soul-funk-rock of Fredy V and the Foundation: (July 6 and 7, 10 pm). Along with Fredy keep your ear trained on the voluptuously vagrant voice of his backup singer Melissa Pacifico. She is no less important to the group concept than Jordan Officer to the Susie Arioli sound.

Finger-agile, French-born guitarist Stephane Wrembel modernizes Gypsy Jazz on July 7th, 8 pm. He’ll make you forget about Bireli Lagrene. And finally, in the spirit of jazz the way it was, make a point of catching the straight-head, no-nonsense playlist of MTL HB5 (July 4th, 8 pm).

With 40 concerts on slate at the Casino Jazz Club, it can be likened to a mini festival all unto its own. There’s nothing quite like it in Montreal for both the music and ambience.

Better yet, Club Casino is only one of many outdoor venues that features free shows — more than 350 — throughout the festival.

Thanks to the free-show concept, one of the jazz festival’s enduring note-perfect rites of summer, it’s all yours for the taking, the people’s festival.

https://www.montrealjazzfest.com/en/Programmation/Horaire