Cautious Clay stuns at Blue Note Jazz Club residency

Over the past weekend, Cautious Clay started and finished a small four-day and eight-show residency at the Blue Note Jazz Club. This jazz club is a small but legendary venue that gives audiences an incredibly intimate space to hear their favourite artists. Because of how small the venue was, you could really tell the people there were huge fans of Clay’s music. Clay greeted the crowd all smiles explaining what a privilege it is to perform in the city he lives and is writing music in.

A full-fledged jazz band backed him up the whole time just filled with incredible talents. Cautious Clay’s sound flows in between pop, R&B, and rhythmic jazz, and this venue blended into his own unique style. Although Clay’s main instrument for the night was his vocals, he showed incredible skills on the guitar, saxophone, and even more on the flute. His flute solos were incredible and absolutely a highlight of the performance paired beautifully with the rest of the jazz ensemble.

The show featured some of Clay’s older fan favourites like “Roots,” “Shook,” and “Agreeable”. A lot of his songs were also performed at a slower tempo which allowed his voice to stand out. During the performance, Clay debuted a fair amount of new songs including “Tokyo Drift”. He spoke a great deal about the process of his songwriting and how he’s probably written over sixty songs while producing his new album. Whenever he introduced a new song Clay also touched on how he thought his songs felt and sounded like certain times of day. He teased a lot of new songs this evening and promised an album is coming sooner rather than later causing plenty of excitement in the room.

It was a special, not-to-be-missed show. Hopefully, we will be hearing about an album release from Cautious Clay and a new tour within the next few months.

All images by Jen Roman