“I wanna be Lezlie Harrison when I grow up.”

Cory Weeds said that quote about vocalist's Lezlie Harrison's two-nighter on June 21 and 22, 2024 at Frankie's Jazz Club during the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. The New York-based vocalist with North Carolina roots fronted a Vancouver trio of Chris Gestrin on organ, André Lachance on guitar, and Jesse Cahill on drums to usher Frankie's into the jazzfest.

While I'm pretty sure Weeds was honouring Harrison's winning personality, the two have deeper similarities than you might realize at first blush; Harrison is a bit of an impresario herself, being a host and interviewer on WBGO jazz radio and having co-founded the venue The Jazz Gallery in NYC. Weeds met her through organist Ben Paterson, who played on two of her records: Soul Book, Vol. 1 (2020) and Let Them Talk, released on Cellar last year. (Paterson has two Cellar albums of his own.)

Among Harrison's stage banter themes was her love of the 1970s culture in which she was raised. One of the Soul Book, Vol 1 cuts that came up across the two sets I heard on night one, Friday, June 21, was the early-70s Philly soul song "People Make The World Go 'Round". Here's Harrison's version on record:

And here's The Stylistics' original recording:

Working in the same decade but from a lateral direction, Harrison also sang her arrangement of the Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle", which she included on Let Them Talk. Her album cut is a great match for how the band sounded live:

André Lachance's guitar playing was different in how much more rounded, relaxed, and beboppy it was versus the performances from the albums' guitarists Saul Rubin (Soul Book) and Matt Chertkoff (Let Them Talk – no relation!), which have a lot of that decade-appropriate George Benson energy.

Harrison danced excitedly and often on stage to Gestrin's organ soloing. Gestrin and Cahill were the ideal duo to round out this gig, cooking along as they do, even carrying into a joint Frankie's double-header; David Sikula jumped in on guitar to form a new trio under the drummer's name for 11:00 PM that night.

Night one's most memorable moment was also concise proof that Harrison was a bona fide New York jazz musician. I've still yet to visit NYC, but I hear that when a jazz club presents two sets of music there, those sets have two mutually exclusive audiences – the house "turns over". That might be why Harrison, after her version of "Ain't No Sunshine" from Soul Book, confidently bid a fond, extended farewell to the full house of us who enjoyed her first set. Although she was explicit in referencing the idea that a new house of people would be coming in before she returned from the set break, fifteen minutes later she ended up making great humour of how we were all still there and ready to hear more. She's no diva, and we're laughing with each other.

Then, Harrison had to confront the fact that she didn't prepare two full, separate sets of music. But this I also enjoyed – they just started calling tunes at the end of set two, ranging from the classic "Kansas City" blues number to "Fly Me to the Moon" to the Beatles' "Yesterday". After enjoying both sets of that charming night of music, I had to agree with Weeds' statement in full.