This past week we had the pleasure of attending a show at the Montreal Jazz Festival featuring our talented intern Elizabeth Skalak. We were blown away by her performance along with her high school jazz band Les Big Times and asked her to tell us about the biggest performance of her life. Read on to hear all about it.

Wednesday, July 8th 2009. Wow. There’s a day that I will remember forever. That day made me realize that my so-called “crazy dream” is what I was put on this earth for. It was truly, to this day (and probably for a very long time), the best experience of my life. What am I going on about? Performing live at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

In high school I was part of the jazz band where I played drums and sang. After a few years we became such a strong group that it got us to the Rio Tinto stage at the Jazz Festival, the BIG stage. We played a 13 song set, two of which I sang lead vocals. We played the classics from Duke Ellington, to Miles Davis, to Otis Redding. We’re three percussionists in the band so we took turns at the drum set. The first song I sang was The Nearness of You by Hoagy Carmichael. It was magical, it brought tears to some people’s eyes, I loved it! I also sang the last song on our set-list and let me say that we ended our set with a BANG! We played Aretha Franklin’s version of Respect. I had so much fun singing that song, even though I felt pressure to do it justice since it is, after all, an Aretha Franklin classic. I gave it my all and I think it was enough, more than anybody expected from me anyways. Everybody loved it, even Radio-Canada filmed us playing it!

That was without a doubt the best experience I ever had. The feeling I got was incomparable to anything I’ve felt before. It was a feeling so strong that the pre-show jitters I had were gone. Even after the show I felt a rush that was new to me. This whole experience just confirmed that I’m on the right path: I was born to perform. I had so much trouble writing this, because to explain what I’ve experienced on that day is pretty much impossible. Hope you got the gist of what I went through on that more than heart-stirring day.