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Every festival has its weaker days, and while day five of the Ottawa International Jazz Festival had its clear moments, it also included some missteps. Still, even less successful performances are worth seeing—invariably a few "eureka moments more than justify the time. The very nature of the inherent risk in jazz means that some shows will work better than others.

After a series of early afternoon performances by local performers at a variety of venues, including saxophonist Nathan Cepelinski at the Rideau Centre and singer Karen Oxorn at the World Exchange Plaza, the Connoisseur Series at the Library and Archives Canada theatre continued to demonstrate why, despite its diversity, it's probably the most consistently excellent run at the festival. Pianist Bill Mays is no stranger to the festival, having played, amongst other times, with his fine trio at last year's Connoisseur Series. Mays continues to surprise, with a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge and graceful delivery that makes his interpretation of standards familiar yet unpredictable.

Alto saxophonist Bud Shank, like tenor giant Sonny Rollins, who played the evening before, is another jazz giant, and his participation at this year's festival exemplifies how the organizers have raised the bar for the OIJF's 25th Anniversary. His association with Mays goes back many years, and their performance was more like an informal meeting of old friends. The intimacy of the venue helped, but the relaxed way that they approached the material—each one giving and taking, pushing and pulling—revealed a sense of adventure in the mainstream.

Sometimes events transpire to create an unsettling situation that pushes creativity to even greater heights. During the pre-show interview, Shank apologized as he told the audience that his luggage had been lost and had not yet been located. Unfortunately, the music the duo was to play was lost with the baggage and so—like British comedian John Cleese's famous quote, "Adopt, adapt and improve —they decided to present a standards-heavy programme. Improvisation is a necessary component of just about any jazz performance, but being forced into an even more impromptu situation clearly egged Shank and Mays to surprising and greater heights.

Shank is a burly yet lighthearted man with an equally burly tone and the kind of imagination, facility, and exploration that allows him to be surprisingly liberal with the material. The duo's version of "My Funny Valentine was almost unrecognizable until a few minutes in; yet in retrospect, not only did their entry into the tune make perfect sense, it retrospectively revealed a deep reverence that didn't preclude them from finding new modes of interpretation.

Their totally unencumbered outlook on well-heeled standards like "Waltz for Debby and "You Go to My Head kept the set fresh and full of surprises. Their connection was as vivid as that shared by the Moutin Reunion Quartet's twin brothers from the previous day, with Mays and Shank making on-the-spot decisions that would take the material in unexpected directions. While they generally adhered to form, their rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic acumen was so sharp that the audience sometimes had to pay serious attention or stand the risk of getting lost. And yet, as far as they sometimes appeared to stray, they always magically found ways to bring things back into clear focus. People might have thought they knew what to expect from this seventy-minute performance, but they were ultimately as wrong as they could be, with Shank and Mays constantly and cleverly deconstructing and refashioning the often-covered compositions, making this another high point for the festival.

The 6:30 pm main stage performance of Michel Coté's Lapon Balèze's looked, on paper, to have definite potential. With a twin-percussion lineup that included steel drums along with a traditional drum kit and all manner of hand percussion, the front line of saxophonist Coté, trumpeter Aaron Doyle and bassist Allain Bedard—a ubiquitous figure on the Montreal scene who, in addition to performing in a wide range of contexts, is also head of the adventurous Effendi label—looked able to create a kind of post-Ornette Coleman vibe. Without any kind of chordal instrument to strictly delineate harmonic motion, it left Coté, Doyle and Bedard free to define movement through the interaction of their three instruments.

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