The Globe and Mail carried the following article in the July 25, 2001 Review section. It does not seem to be available on the Globe site.
The Globe and Mail * Wednesday, July 25, 2001
BY MARK MILLER, TORONTO
Michael Kaeshammer remembers clearly his first trip east from Vancouver to the Beaches International Jazz Festival in Toronto. Well, yes, it was only three years ago, but a lot has happened since then to the 24-year-old boogie-woogie pianist, who now does more than 150 shows annually in Canada, the United States and Europe.
"It was one of the first times I'd travelled around in Canada," he recalls in a telephone interview from his summer base, Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island. "Everything was new to me--staying in hotels, dealing with different people. I think the Beaches was a great way to get introduced to that."
Kaeshammer was given a spot in 1998 outside Aida's Falafel on the 15-block stretch of Queen Street East that the festival takes over for three evenings each July. By the end of his third night, he had sold more than 300 copies of his debut CD, Blue Keys, and walked away with at least $5,000 for his time and trouble.
Actually, it was no trouble at all. A few square yards of cement sidewalk may hardly seem like the proper "stage" for a serious young musician, but Kaeshammer (pronounced "Case-hammer") suggests that playing on the street is the "most fun" of all at the festival.
He'll be back outside Aida's from tomorrow through Saturday as the festival celebrates its 13th anniversary, but his trio with bassist Simon Fisk and drummer Damian Graham also has a place of honour among the five bands that will perform on Saturday afternoon at the Alex Christie Bandshell in nearby Kew Gardens--following Kollage and preceding singer Emilie-Claire Barlow, the salsa band Cimmaron and the Louisiana bluesman Tab Benoit.
(Sunday afternoon's Kew Gardens lineup, in order, comprises pianists Dave Restivo and Bill King and their respective groups, the Susie Arioli Swing Band, Sugar Ray Norcia and the Bluetones and Hammond B-3 organist Joey DeFrancesco.)
For the serious fan, the bandshell's the place to be. Out in the street, the multitudes that form horseshoe-shaped crowds, 15 or 20 people deep, around each of the festival's 40 bands, make listening problematic.
From Kaeshammer's perspective at the centre of attention, though, it works just fine. "There are no seats or stage, or anything, so people can stand right at the piano if they want. You can have a dialogue with them; it's a very intimate atmosphere. Further back you have heads popping up, because they can't see you, or can't hear you because of the sounds from the other bands. But you take a break--5, 10 minutes, not too long--and the people in the front move along and the people in the back move up."
Of course, boogie-woogie--with its blues-based structure, its driving, left-hand bass lines and its showy right-hand flourishes--is a sure-fire crowd pleaser. Kaeshammer knows firsthand the sort of electrifying effect it can have; he needs only to think back to his own introduction to the music at 13 as a classically trained pianist in his native Oldenburg, Germany. Already acquainted through his father with Dixieland jazz, he.heard a live recording of Germany's Vince Weber playing classic Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson tunes.
"I could actually hear the piano by itself and it really caught my attention. It was just amazing to hear one guy getting all that stuff out of the piano, being so rhythmical and improvising at the same time.... I could hear the audience, too, and I would get goose bumps when it got really excited."
Kaeshammer's classical background, with its emphasis on the independence of one hand from the other at the keyboard, made it relatively easy for him to pick up boogie-woogie's basics, and by 16 he was performing in local Oldenburg clubs. He continued to play casually in Victoria after his family moved to Canada in 1995.
At first, he attracted an older audience--folks who remembered boogie-woogie from the days, a half-century ago, when it was all the rage. "By the time I had developed a little more--learned a little more about jazz and classical music, and moved beyond pure boogie-woogie -- I found a lot more younger people coming out."
Indeed his emergence in the late 1990s coincided with the so-called "swing revival" that's just now tailing off. But Kaeshammer distances himself from the Cherry Poppin' and Big Bad Voodoo crowd. "It caught me a little by surprise when the swing revival came out and people told me that all of a sudden I was playing swing, or that they saw me as part of the revival."
True, he says, "If I were to play a boogie-woogie tune with a horn section behind me, that's what a lot of swing-revival bands sound like." But he doesn't just play boogie-woogie tunes--that's Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and Thelonious Monk's I Mean You on his third and latest CD, No Strings Attached-- and, nope, there's not a horn section in sight.
The presence on No Strings Attached of several New Orleans musicians - along with a changing cast of Toronto's finest--suggests a direction much different than swing, something rather funkier. At the same time, seven of the CD's 14 pieces are Kaeshammer's own, including the atmospheric Snow at Lake Simcoe, complete with a symphony orchestra, and the asymmetrically jazzy On a Rainy Day.
But if it seems as though he's trying to avoid being typecast strictly as a boogie-woogie pianist, he's quick to reaffirm his commitment to first principles. "When I write, and when I play, everything has a blues and boogie-woogie element to it. I don't think I'll ever lose that. And I don't want to."
The Beaches International Jazz Festival runs in Toronto from Thursday through Sunday. Information: www.beachesjazz.com or call 416-698-2152. Michael Kaeshammer opens Ontario's Markham Jazz Festival on Aug. 17. He'll undertake a nine-week Canadian tour later in the year.
Special to The Globe and Mail