Final day!

The Java Jazz Festival is officially over yesterday! Cannot believe I spent 3 days in a row jazzing and queuing (LOL!). Like yesterday, I was planning to come early to catch Yosuke Onuma playin but I got caught up in helping my Dad shaving Raysa’s head bald. I also missed my friend’s performance at the festival, hope he didn’t mind. Arrive at the venue at 4.30 with a cup of coffee in my hand ready for another whole day of jazzing. First up was trying my chances with Yosuke Onuma, no luck, its finished already. So we headed to Lisa Ono venue immediately, the queue is already really long! Thankfully Karin’s boss was already queuing so we can squeeze in.

15 min after the scheduled time the door open and Lisa Ono came into view with her red summer dress and long hair, all relaxed with the guitar on her lap and a glass of water and a cup of hot drink, exactly how I pictured her. The girl from Ipanema was her first song, apart from this song she also played 3 other songs from Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Her real voice is as good as she sound on her CD, clean and crisp, melodic and ethereal. Her voice portrays a summer at the beach – somewhere in Italy or Brazil perhaps - with you wearing your summer dress walking down the pier. Or you waiting for your friends for a Sunday brunch at a French Restaurant with a clean white minimalist interior and nicely folded napkins, sipping your club soda with Lisa Ono voice singing in French while gazing at the window thinking how beautiful the day is! I’m such a hopeless romantic, I really am a dreamer, when I listen to a song I will associate it with a perfect situation where the music is playing at the background.

One of the most interesting song that she played was Country Road which has been given a bossa flavor. You always had this mental image of Country Road with an annoying sound guy singing it, so it’s a bit weird when she played it and make it her own. She also performed Bengawan Solo as the closing song, if Pak Gesang was a Brazilian, maybe this is how Bengawan Solo will sound like, LOL! Apparently, Bengawan Solo was quite well known in Japan! I guess music really is a universal language, it doesn’t matter whether you understand the language or not you can still enjoy it. Like how I enjoyed Lisa Ono performance so much even though she only sang 2 song in a language I understand.

We we’re trying to catch David Benoit performance afterward, but it’s too late and we missed Reel People as well. Catch a bit of Kimiko Itoh/Yosuke Onuma/Koji Goto love their instrumentalist jazz more than the sound of Harvey Mason. Abit of Jaque Mate - which sound really blues - as well.

While waiting for Level 42 we were hoping from one stage to the other and ended up at Vikter Duplaix Project performance. The percussion player looked like Fidel Castro, seriously! Vikter Duplaix himself is a bit dreamy, he’s really funny and entertaining. He was singing freestyle where he started singing I really love Indonesia, I want a house in Indonesia, I wanna wife in Indonesia … LOL! Seriously, what’s wrong with this guy?

Level 42 pretty much sum up the nite for me, it was the last performance of the festival for me. Like expected, they were energetic and great! The only regret was that they didn’t sing my favorite song, Love in a Peaceful World, sobh sobh!