A Great Evening!
In Seattle, Laurie and I are fans of JazzVox, which presents top-notch jazz singers in about the most intimate musical setting you can have: someone’s living room. In 2017 we went to a JazzVox concert featuring Hetty Kate, an Australian singer. She was great and, as we always do, we hung behind to talk with her a bit. She told us that she was on her way to Paris, where she was going to live and explore working in the jazz vocalist world there.
We’ve followed Hetty since and she and I swapped emails sporadically. When we went to France in 2018, we were able to see her twice, once in a small jazz club and once in the bar at a fancy hotel. She was great, and she has since been successful in establishing herself in the European and Paris jazz scenes.
Planning this year’s trip I saw that she was singing at Café Laurent again so off we we went, bien sûr. Again, she was great, and funny! Honestly she could be a stand-up comedienne. She has grown musically since we last saw her seven years ago, and it was great to catch up with her again.
This was one totally fun night! Pretty cool to watch a singer up on the stage and know that she’s a friend! Even better because it was Hetty’s birthday, which caused the bar denizens to send her a few glasses of champagne. We hope we can catch her again soon and we wish her bon chance in her jazz singing career here in Paris.
P.S.
The hotel at which Hetty sang is pretty nice, to say the least. It’s gained its fifth star since we were there in 2018. Rooms start at about $825 per night. And prices in the bar were, um, breath-taking: we wanted to order a bottle of wine since we were going to sit there for several hours, so we picked a very nice Sancerre rouge, the second-least expensive bottle on the wine list, at 91€, which is $105. Yes, $105 for a bottle of wine in a bar — an elegant bar, but a bar nonetheless. We made that bottle last three hours, so we called it our “$35 per hour” bottle. We can say, though, that it was worth every centime to see Hetty sing and have time to catch up with her.