Radha Tailor's blog

I went to the Enwave Theatre at Harbourfront on Wednesday night to see Brazilian singer and pianist Eliane Elias for the first time. The theatre was already packed when I walked in ten minutes before showtime. My friend and I found seats in the middle of the top row, the perfect place to see the entire stage.

Guitarist Rubens de la Corte, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Mark Walker played a beautiful introduction for the Grammy-nominee, who walked out onstage in a deep V-neck black dress and gorgeous four-inch heels and was greeted with warm applause. I was in awe.

As Jacky Terrasson walked onto the stage at the Glenn Gould Studio Tuesday, the ladies to my left giggled with excitement. A handsome gentleman in his 40s, the German-born Terrasson, son of French and African-American parents, gave a smile and a small wave hello before sitting down at the grand piano.

When jazz flutist Bill McBirnie takes the stage, he has a single goal. "Give them something they didn't expect but exactly what they wanted."

A stack of sheet music covers a pile of music books on his desk at his St. Clair Gardens apartment in Toronto. An entire wall is dedicated to CDs and music. Horns playing a bebop melody stream quietly in the background as he talks about the range of jazz that he plays, and the variety of bands in which he is performing during the 2011 TD Toronto Jazz Festival.

Mose Allison makes it look effortless. At 83, the Mississippi-born pianist drove the packed auditorium at the Enwave Theatre on Sunday night through a set of wry, idiosyncratic blues and jazz, with boogie woogie from his early days heard intermittently throughout the performance. Each of his 19 songs (including a memorable encore of "My Brain") was different from the last.