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Jazz Fest day five began with me standing at the Rio Tinto stage while listening to the last half of Cécile Doo-Kingué's set at the adjacent Rogers stage, then catching Fabiola Mendez's show at the Rio Tinto stage in full, then catching the first half of Cécile Doo-Kingué's second set, and then attending the Naïka show.

Fabiola Mendez and her band are from Costa Rica and they played latin based Jazz influenced songs, sung in Spanish leaving a lot of time for solos from Mendez herself, playing a special electric Quattro guitar (10 strings sorted into five pairs of doubled) and her bass guitarist who he himself was playing a five or six string electric bass guitar.

Next was Cécile Doo-Kingué with a band that played a Rock and Blues combination. She is originally from Cameroon and spoke French equally well to us in the audience as she also spoke English. Of the bands I've heard over the last few days this one sounded like one of the ones I enjoyed the most.

I left the Doo-Kingué show a bit early, at around 20h30 so as to get to the biggest stage area (the TD stage) in hopes of obtaining a good spot for the Naïka show, however, this didn't go exactly as planned. There are two main entrances to access where the audience goes for this TD stage, one at the north end of Jeanne-Mance and another at the south end of Jeanne-Mance with the stage at the corner of JM and de Maissoneuve, and the tail end of the audience at the JM and St-Catherine. The past few days I managed to get to a near the front position by walking through the north end (the stage end) and gently snaking my way inwards. Last night I attempted this also, but already with 50 minutes before show time, the front area was too dense with people. I walked around the grounds to then enter by the south entry and found I could walk forwards and I ended up probably at 5/7ths of the distance, so not quite at the back, but behind the halfway point. Over the next 45 minutes the space around me got denser and denser with people until it was likely as dense as it had been at the front when I first arrived.

I had not heard of Naïka before this performance, but the thousands of girls and young women in my immediate vicinity clearly had, and sang along with almost every song. Naïka sang pop songs with a Latin drum beat backing. She had both French language and English language songs and she spoke to us in both languages. More than once she exclaimed how insane this concert was - that so many people were present.

I waited for perhaps four minutes standing more or less where I had been, once the show was over, to allow the crowd around me, and the crowd between me and the metro entrance, to thin out. Once I got to the metro, wow, the platform going in the opposite direction was full.