A demo reel I made for Rachel Beausoleil, using footage I shot of her jazz vocal per­for­mance at the NAC Fourth Stage, as well as snip­pets of an inter­view I did with her. As a way of get­ting more expo­sure for future gigs, she asked for some video that she could shop around to dif­fer­ent venues. I agreed to make this demo reel for her in return for some tick­ets to the show for me and my friends.

It was a won­der­ful con­cert in an inti­mate set­ting. The reper­toire was quite var­ied — from waltz to Bossa nova to bal­lad — but all songs were per­formed as a jazz inter­pre­ta­tions. The setlist includ­ed Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and Evangeline by Isabelle Pierre.

Of spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance is that the per­for­mance was on Rachel’s 40th birth­day. She had planned the con­cert over a year ago as a come­back after hav­ing two kids and giv­ing up her time for them.

I can now embed videos in HD after acquir­ing a Vimeo Plus account; they look oh-so-sexy, and even bet­ter in full-screen.

One of the high­lights of the night was Tom Posner’s bass solo dur­ing Caravan (a clas­sic Duke Ellington big-band piece) clock­ing in at almost two min­utes. You can see how sur­prised Rachel is when Tom los­es him­self in the music and keeps going on this great flur­ry of notes. This solo is some kind of awe­some that I can’t even describe.