Stanley Clarke Band show marred by technical problem

Last night I was at The Stanley Clarke Band show at the Main Stage theatre at Nathan Phillips Square at Toronto City Hall as part of the Toronto Jazz Festival. You may have heard about the various protests surrounding the G20 Summit over the weekend. So the protesters showed up about a half hour before the concert. I don't know why they were there but they were gone by the time the show began. Opening the show was veteran bassist Dave Young and his current quartet. Young has been a fixture of the Toronto jazz scene for years and has been the bassist of choice of touring musicians for many years. His band is Kevin Turcotte on trumpet, Robi Botos on piano and brother Frank Botos on drums. I didn't care for Turcotte but the rest of the band was solid and it was a very good opening set. Legendary bassist Stanley Clarke brought with him the Japanese born piano sensation Hiromi along with Israeli keyboard player Ruslan Sirota and drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. Hiromi played the grand piano and Sirota played electric piano and synthesizer. They all appear on Clarke's new album. If you've never seen Hiromi, she's this tiny girl from Osaka and she approaches the piano with incredible energy. She looks like a teenager but she's actually 30 years old. I made sure that I was positioned to watch her hand movements and her hand dexterity is very comparable to someone like McCoy Tyner or Mulgrew Miller. And she's cuter than those guys. She's phenomonal and I enjoyed her very much. Sirota has been playing with Clarke for a couple of years including in the band SMV. He's a solid player but he obviously knows that Hiromi is the show and his playing is more subdued as a result. Bruner is a very powerful drummer in the tradition of Tony Williams. This appears to be his first big time gig. Clarke plays both bass guitar and upright bass. He started getting feedback when playing the upright bass on the second song. A couple of guys came on stage and tried to fix the problem but they had to take a break in the middle of the show. The problem turned out to be a faulty pickup. I think the audience lost some energy after the unscheduled break. Maybe Clarke would have been wiser to abandon the upright and stick to the bass guitar. It was unfortunate but Hiromi's energy certainly helped the audience recover. Things turned out OK in the end. It was a very good show and I wouldn't mind seeing Hiromi again.