Lhasa

For some reason, I wasn’t able to catch Madeleine Peyroux when she played the Rochester Jazz Festival in 2005, so I made the trip to see her a few weeks later in Toronto. My memory may be faulty but I’m pretty sure she was the opening act, which seemed odd since I'd never even heard of the headliner, someone named Lhasa. It didn’t seem odd for long. Madeleine was a bit rough, but charming. Her set seemed more like a rehearsal. The crowd was polite but then, when Lhasa came out, they exploded. It was a spellbinding show. Most of the songs were in Spanish or French and if I understood those languages I suppose I would’ve have been bawling, rather than just wiping a tear away now and then. The woman communicated.