These eyes have seen a lot of love

It was another weekend of music in the Peg. The jazz fest just ended and I caught the tail end of it. Saturday night saw the city's entire population of 20-35-year-olds gather at the Pyramid Cabaret to see Seu Jorge do his thing. This is the guitarist who covered all those Bowie songs translated into Portuguese in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I gotta tell you, yeah he has chops and yeah he has style -- but I couldn't help thinking: "Dude's not as interesting when he's not covering Bowie." His samba tunes were groovy but repetitive, and not quite fun enough to make me want to dance.

Sunday night and a free pass from Anthony Del Col, hoops-star and token white guy at Chris Smith Management back in the T-dot, brought me to the Burton Cummings Theatre to see the Jacksoul/Divine Brown concert. Didn't know too much about their music before going, but it didn't matter -- both acts put on great live shows (Divine's voice is exactly that). But again, the highlights were the COVERS. Jacksoul pandered to the crowd with, appropriately, Burton Cummings' "These Eyes", and followed that up with Blue Rodeo's "Try". Great versions of these tunes. And they easily got the biggest crowd reactions of the night (okay, yes, it was an audience of suburban white folks, but still...). In fact, Jacksoul's new album is all covers.

Which shows to go ya, you can't beat good songwriting. As always, writing is key. And I'm only being a little self-serving when I say that.

Addendum (in which our intrepid explorer discovers yet again, just how small Winnipeg is): Sitting beside me at the Burton Cummings Theatre were two friendly young women. One is the ex-girlfriend of Jacksoul's guitarist. The other works for a manitoba film producers agency, and knows everything there is to know about Falcon Beach.