November 30, 2004
Zoilus's Jolly Dec. Gig Guide
And now, dear Torontopians, Zoilus scrapes out the barrel to find you something other than Christmas-carol recitals and performances of the Messiah to attend in the coming month. Comme d'habitude, it will expand as shows are announced. Zoilus picks are marked with a *, including this week's Guilty Pleasures dance party, Keren Ann (pictured above), Ted Leo, The Gossip, Nas, Rufus Wainwright, Death From Above, Final Fantasy, Shawn Hewitt, Stars, etc. etc. Catch it on the flip. [...]
Corrections & additions welcome.
Sources include the 20hz.ca Toronto board, Eye, Now, Greg Clow, Canoe.ca, Soundlist and ye olde email.
WED DEC 1
* NINJA HIGH SCHOOL, WORLD PROVIDER, DAIQUIRI, THE STATUTORY APES => Sneaky Dee’s, 10 pm, $5
* GUILTY PLEASURES dance party => The Beaconsfield (Queen & Beaconsfield),10:30 pm, free
* ELLIOTT SMITH TRIBUTE w/ CHRIS WARREN, THE BICYCLES, DAN GOLDMAN, JESSIE STEIN, GRAHAM POWELL, LUKE JACKSON => Holy Joe’s (above Reverb), 9 pm, pwyc
SUNDAR SUBRAMANIAN compositions => Music Gallery, 12:30 pm-1:30 pm
JOHN ABERCROMBIE, DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 30-Dec. 4)
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
LOS STRAIGHTJACKETS, PONTANI SISTERS BURLESQUE, KAISER GEORGE, THE HIGHRISERS => Horseshoe, $12.50
THE KILLERS (leukemia/lymphoma benefit) => Kool Haus, $22.50
DAMAGEPLAN, SHADOWS FALL, THE HAUNTED => Phoenix, 7 pm, $21
WORLD AIDS DAY benefit w/ THE DUNES, HONEY CONCEPT, WREN CITY CHURCHES => Rivoli, 8:30 pm, $10
DAVE CELIA, MENEW => Drake, $5
CHRONIC FUTURE, REASON DISAPPEARS => El Mocambo
STARFEST (World AIDS day fundraiser) w/ THE DUNES, HONEY CONCEPT, WREN CITY CHURCHES => Rivoli, $10
PAPA ROACH => Opera House
EXITMAN, TYLER SUMMERS QUARTET => Rex
DON GLASER TRIO => Senator
IMPROVISORS’ POOL => Ralph Thornton Centre, 765 Queen St. E., 7-9 pm
ANDY CREEGAN => Cameron
DEF COM SOUND SYSTEM, RANDOM KILLING => Horseshoe
THURS DEC 2
* KEREN ANN => Drake Underground, $10
* FISHBONE => Lee's Palace, $18.50
* FEIST, HOWIE BECK => Phoenix, $15
KATE MAKI cd release w/ NATHAN LAWR, RUTH MINNIKIN, RYAN BISHOPS, DALE MURRAY => 360, $7
LOUISE BESSETTE (Piano) => Music Gallery, 8 pm $20
BOLLY WOULD: Smashing Pumpkins Appreciation Night w/ WINTER EQUINOX, FREEDOM CA, DJ SHAUNNA LEIGH = Vatikan, 9 pm, $5 (some proceeds to Street Outreach Services)
OH SUSANNA, ELLIOT BROOD => Hugh’s Room, $16
AARON BOOTH, ANOTHER BLUE DOOR, PETER ELKAS => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30, $7
JOHN ABERCROMBIE, DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 30-Dec. 4)
COLLECTIVE SOUL => Opera House, $27.50
MINGUE, REMAINNAMELESS, DEBASER => Reverb, $5
THE RUSSO/BENEVENTO => El Mocambo (downstairs)
THE RIDERLESS, GRASSY KNOLL, WINTERSLEEP, GERMANS, OH BIJOU => Sneaky Dee’s
THE MASTER PLAN (ex-Dictators, Fleshtones), PURPLE TOADS, THE PARIAHS => Horseshoe, $9
JULY 26th MOVEMENT, SHOWROOM => Cameron House, $5
KEVIN QUAIN, SHARRON McLEOD QUARTET => Rex
TORU DADO => Senator
ANTI-HERO, THE FLAIRS, SCARLET SINS, PRINCESS RIOT => Dungeon (Oshawa)
FRI DEC 3
* GENTLEMAN REG => El Mocambo
* MATTHEW DEAR, SWAYZAK => Mod Club, 9 pm, $20
* EARSHOT presents MICHAEL HYNES => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $20 (students $5)
* AFRICAN BLUES with ADAM SOLOMON, NDIDI ONUKWULU, SLIM ET DONNE => Silver Dollar
* LEFTOVER DAYLIGHT series presents ALDCROFT/FRASER/MOTT, LERNER/FREEDMAN/BATEMAN, PICKLE JUICE ORCHESTRA’S COBRA => Arraymusic Studio, 60 Atlantic Ave., 9 pm, $10
CITY FIELD (w/ Matt Murphy) => Bovine Sex Club, 9 pm, free
JOHN ABERCROMBIE, DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 30-Dec. 4)
LARS FREDERIKSEN & THE BASTARDS, ROGER MIRET & THE DISASTERS => Opera House. $14
SIMA BINA, DASTAN ENSEMBLE => Toronto Centre for the Arts, 8 p.m., $45
THORNLEY, DOCTOR => Lee’s Palace, $15
FRONTIER INDEX, DRIVEWAY, 68 PORNO MAGS => Horseshoe
SPITFIRES & MAYFLOWERS, THE BICYCLES, GUEST BEDROOM, HONEY DEAR => 360, $7
1000 CURES, LADYBUG THRUSTS => Sneaky Dee’s
SHUYLER JANSEN => Mitzi’s Sister
MELISSA STYLIANOU TRIO, DAVID VIRELLES/JASON PALMER/WARREN WOLF => Rex
DAIKI YASUKAGAWA => Senator
TOM COCHRANE => First Canadian Place
STEPHEN FEARING, FRIDGE MAGNETS => Hugh’s Room
THE TOM WAITS STORY w/ members of NEW KINGS, CAUTION JAM, ELIZABETH BROMSTEIN, DAVID JAGER of the Scandelles => Rancho Relaxo,
ALEXIS BARO "Blows Be-Bop for Dizzy" => Trane Studio, 9:30 pm
SAT DEC 4
*PEDAL TO THE METAL 2 craft fair with THE SILT, VITAMINS FOR YOU, THE PAULS, AIDAN BAKER, THE GUEST BEDROOM => The Rivoli, 12-5 pm, pwyc or food-bank donation
* THE COMPOSER/IMPROVISER: ARRAYMUSIC w/ Lori Freedman => Music Gallery, 8 pm Dec 4 $20
* BROKENBERLIN feat THE SOCIETY SUCKERS, AARON SPECTRE, SINCERE TRADE, c64 => IV Lounge, 10 pm, $8 (or Oasis?)
* TORONTO JAZZ ORCHESTRA w/ JANE BUNNETT, MARCIA WHITEHEAD benefit for African AIDS relief => Ursula Franklin Concert Hall, 90 Croatia St., $75 (students $20)
* MEDESKI, MARTIN & WOOD => kool haus, 8 pm, $30
* RIZDALES, BACKSTABBERS => Canadian Corps Hall (201 Niagara), $10
*SAL PRINCIPATO of LIQUID LIQUID (DJ set) => Supermarket (268 Augusta), 10 pm, $10
BIG PRIMPIN dance party => Stones Place
THE.WPP (Witness Protection Program), VIKING CLUB, CANCER BATS => Adrift Indoor Skate Park, 299 Augusta Ave., 8 pm, $6
MARRON MATIZADO => Lula Lounge
CUFF THE DUKE => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $8
EXPENSIVE SHIT, w. DJs CAPT EASYCHORD and NUNK => 56 Kensington
WINDVOYAGER & THE NAVIGATORS OF HOLLAND, BRONCO CHARLIE => Dufferin Hotel (Dufferin south of Queen), free
CLUTCH, FU MANCHU, NIGHTWISH, HIGH ON FIRE => Opera House, $24.75
JOHN ABERCROMBIE, DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 30-Dec. 4)
A JOYFUL NOEL w/ JAYMZ BEE, TRENT ARMAND KENDALL, SHAWN SKIER, NATALIE DOUGLAS => Toronto Centre for the Arts, 2 pm and 8 pm, $60
BENEVUTO-ROSSO DUO (organ-drums) => El Mocambo
STAGGERED CROSSING, SHAKER, SHANNON WEIR, EVEN STRANGERS => Horseshoe, $8+ food donation
ROBIN BLACK AND THE INTERGALACTIC ROCK STARS, THE FLAIRS => Lee’s, $7
CRUSTY X, SECTOR 7 => 360
THE BASEMENT PROJECT => El Mocambo Upstairs
ASHES OF SOMA => Mod Club
SHUYLER JANSEN => Cadillac Lounge, 4-7 p.m.
ED VOKURKA SWING TRIO, PAT CAREY’S JAZZ NAVIGATORS, AMANDA MARTINEZ LATIN JAZZ ENSEMBLE, DUNCAN HOPKINS QUARTET => Rex
SOPHIE MILMAN/BILL KING QUARTET => Senator
DEBBIE DAVIES => Silver Dollar
EVALYN PARRY, RAYMOND MACLAIN => Acoustic Harvest Folk Club
TECHNICITY, more => Looking Glass (582 Church), 5-9 pm, free
SHARRON McLEOD QUARTET => Trane Studios, $5
SUN. DEC. 5
* Rough Idea presents: MELISSA STYLIANOU, JAMIE REYNOLDS, MATT WIGTON => St. Andrew-by-the-Lake Church, Centre Island, 3-5 pm, pwyc. Also at The Tranzac, 11:30 pm, pwyc.
* THE GOSSIP, STARLIGHT DESPERATION => Lee's Palace, $10
* TED LEO & THE PHARMACISTS, MATT POND PA, THE JUNCTION, THE MELIGROVE BAND => Mod Club, 7:30 pm, $12
* KEITH JARRETT, GARY PEACOCK, JACK DEJOHNETTE => Roy Thomson Hall, 8 pm, $49.50-$124.50
* EARSHOT presents MICHAEL HYNES => Montreal Bistro, 7 pm, $15 ($5 students)
* PATRICIA O'CALLAGHAN => Hugh's Room, $20
* ROOM 101 (Games You Play Sitting Down) => Drake Underground, 7:30
FORBIDDEN MUSIC OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC w/ JORDAN KLAPMAN => Miles Nadal JCC (750 Spadina), 11 am, $5-$8 (Note MORNING time)
NASSAU, THE BURDOCKS, LET LOWNS, DJ Positive Spin => Wavelength 242 @ Sneaky Dee’s, pwyc
PORKCHOPS w/ VICTOR BATEMAN (bass), BRODIE WEST (sax), JAKE OELRICHS (drums) => Rex, 9:30 pm
DOPE, MOTORGRATER, TWISTED METHOD, HELL’S KITCHEN => Opera House, $15.50
ELECTROCHOC w/ DAVID B => Tequila Lounge, 8 pm, $5
FRAMEWORK, BLUESKY BORDERLINE, FIASCO, THE COMB => 360, matinee, $7
SUNDAY NIGHT FEVER feat. DJ MARKY HOLLYWOOD => 360, $5
NICOLE STOFFMAN, CLUB DJANGO, SABRINA TROPPER, PORK CHOPS FOR DINNER => Rex
ALAN GLICKSMAN presents GLADTOES improv matinee => Gladstone Hotel, 2 pm-5 pm
JACKIE RICHARDSON, GEORGE KOLLER, KEN WHITELEY => Hugh’s Room
MON DEC 6
* STRANGE FOLK w/ MARCEL AUCOIN, SUSIE BURPEE (dance), GEORDIE HALEY’S
* ROBERTO OCCHIPINTI QUINTET w/ HILARIO DURAN => Ontario Science Centre
KURT SWINGHAMMER, LARGO NORTH, JUSTIN RUTLEDGE => Cameron House, 8:30 pm, $7
EVERYTIME BAND => Holy Joe’s (above Reverb)
TORONTO JAZZ ORCHESTRA Stan Kenton tribute => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm, $10
CAREY WEST TRIO, U of T STUDENT JAZZ => Rex
THE PICKUPS => Sneaky Dee's
DEAD LETTER DEPT. => 360
HARKNESS, EYE OF MOURNING => Horseshoe
RIKOSHAY "Stomp" CD release => Revival, 9 pm
TUES DEC 7
* CONTINUUM presents “CONVERSELY” => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $20/$10
* HALL & OATES => Massey Hall. $45-$55
* ESPRIT ORCHESTRA members SIGHTREAD chamber works by ALEXINA LOUIE, MICHELINE ROI w/ discussion => Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave., 7-9 pm, free
THE AMBIENT PING presents ARMS FULL OF SOUND => Gladstone, 9 pm, pwyc
JANE SIBERRY, JEREMY FISHER, ADRIENNE PIERCE => Hugh’s Room (also Dec 8)
TONY QUARRINGTON, CLASSIC REX JAZZ JAM w/NICK BROWNMAN ALI => Rex
LE FREAK, C’EST CHIC performance art => Drake, 8 pm
THE LAST SURVIVOR, REIGN OF TERROR, FEIZEK => Fun Haus, $10
MIRACLE ON SPADINA food-bank benefit w/ JACK DE KEYZER, SHAKURA S’AIDA, STEVEN AMBROSE, DANNY B, ROBBIE ROX, CARLOS DEL JUNCO, JEANNIE MACKIE, GARY KENDALL, JAKE LANGLEY => Silver Dollar, $15
SOPHIE MILMAN/BILL KING QUARTET => Senator (Dec. 7, 8, 9, 11)
WED DEC 8
* RUFUS WAINWRIGHT => Mod Club, $29.50
* TORPOR VIGIL DREAM BAZAAR => Cameron House, 8 pm
* SUCCESS BY SIX: K-OS, SAM ROBERTS, SARAH HARMER, JIM CUDDY, KATHLEEN EDWARDS, TOM WILSON, DANNY MICHEL, MATT MAYS, MICHAEL ONDAATJE, RON McLEAN, CATHY JONES => United Way fundraiser, Phoenix. $27.50
JANE SIBERRY, JEREMY FISHER, ADRIENNE PIERCE => Hugh’s Room (also Dec 7)
MARCEL AUCOIN, MICHAEL J'S DIMESTORE ORCHESTRA => Tranzac, 10 pm
HOLIDAY GOSPEL w/ KINGSLEY ETIENNE, BETTY RICHARDSON, GAYLE BERRY, MUTHADI => Trane Studio
NQ ARBUCKLE => Maple Lounge, Rivoli (upstairs), 8 pm, free
TERRY SYLVESTER (The Hollies) => Westin Harbour Castle
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
SWITCHFOOT, TURN OFF THE STARS => Kool Haus, $22.50
NOVEMBER ALLSTARS => 360
THE CLIKS, SONIC ARIA, HUNTER VALENTINE => Sneaky Dee's
MICHAEL DUNSTON QUARTET => Montreal Bistro
EXITMAN, ROB McCONNELL TENTET => Rex
SOPHIE MILMAN/BILL KING QUARTET => Senator (Dec. 7, 8, 9, 11)
IMPROVISORS’ POOL => Ralph Thornton Centre, 765 Queen St. E., 7-9 pm
BEN GUNNING (Local Rabbits) => El Mocambo
IRQ BREAKCORE w/ CRUSHKILL, SKEETER, GHETTOCYB.ORG, FLOPPY RELEASE 004 => Funhaus, 9 p.m., free
THURS DEC 9
*HU TSA TSA presents WELL-TEMPERED KLEZMORIM "chamber klezmer" => Robert Gill Theatre (U of T), 214 College St., 8 p.m., $15
* DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979, PANTHERS, VIETNAM => Lee's Palace, $8.50
* FINAL FANTASY, LOLLIPOP PEOPLE, ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL => Sneaky Dee’s
* REID JAMESON, AUDIBLE, DYLAN STUDEBAKER at the SPACING ISSUE #3 LAUNCH => El Mocambo, $5-10
THE VORCZA TRIO, WORD PEOPLE => El Mocambo Upstairs
GARNET ROGERS => Hugh’s Room
MAN MADE LINE, INSTRUMENT, ARIETTA => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm
CATCH 22, BLUE SKIES AT WAR, THE REASON => Opera House. $17.50
U OF T PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE => Music Gallery, free
TOMMY AMBROSE QUINTET => Montreal Bistro
KEVIN QUAIN, ROB McCONNELL TENTET => Rex
SOPHIE MILMAN/BILL KING QUARTET => Senator (Dec. 7, 8, 9, 11)
MELISSA McLELLAND => Phoenix
AUTOMAN => 360
FRI DEC 10
* SANTA CRUZ w/ILLUMINATI, SHAWN HEWITT, WOLF PARADE => Lee’s Palace
* CHAKRA WAGON with BROWNMAN & THE ELECTRIC TRIO, LAL, STOP DIE RESUSCITATE, DYNAMO, BADNUTBEATS => 360, $15
* DOUG TIELLI => Tranzac
ALEXIS BARO "Blows Be-Bop for Dizzy" => Trane Studios, $10
"SENSOR" w/ ELLIOT LAZOR, THE DUKES, ERIC DOWNER => Project, 126 Sherbourne, $10 (canned goods collected for Daily Bread)
THE PAULS, TRADITION, NIK NAK => 403 Adelaide St. West (House Show!), 3$
SUPERGARAGE => Horseshoe, $6
MAXIMUM RNR, DOWNBELOWS, CLASS ASSASSINS, G-MEN => Sneaky Dee's
THE LOST CAUSE => Clinton's, $6
THE NEW DEAL, MADRID => Opera House, $20
JOHN NEUDORF QUINTET => Montreal Bistro
MELISSA STYLIANOU, ARTIE ROTH QUINTET => Rex
MIKE TULL, DENISE BENSON, ANDREW ALLSGOOD => Andy Poolhall (489 College), free
ATHERETIC, BLOODSHOTEYE, SHATTERPOINT, EVIRUS, WETWORK, BLEAK DESTINY, 19 DAYS, BEYOND DEATH Memorial Benefit to Chuck Schuldiner => Rockit, 7 pm, $12
KELLEY HUNT (Kansas City), REUBEN CHERRY => Healey’s
JASON McCOY => Club 279
SIMON WILCOX, TOMI SWICK => Rivoli
SPOILED ROTTEN, PANTYCHRIST, G-MEN, RANDOM KILLING, SNOT ROCKETS => Horseshoe
TANGLEFOOT => Hugh’s Room
SLEEPING NINE, LOST CAUSE, SUGARKILL => Clinton's, $6
JOHN & JENNY'S ROCK'N'ROLL PARTY w/ REAL GONE, TWISTIN' TARANTULAS => Silver Dollar, 9 pm, $5
SAT DEC 11
* NAS, ROYCE DA 5’9” => Kool Haus, $40
* MORRIS PALTER => Music Gallery $15, 8 pm
* SOCIAL ARTS FUN RAISER w/ LENIN I SHUMOV, SILENT FILM SOUNDTRACK, STABLES CLUB BAND, FALL OF THE VIKING GIRLS (“multi-media puppet show”) => Sneaky Dee's
* WOODCHOPPERS ASSOCATION (with Lina Allemano-trumpet, Brodie West-alto sax, Blake Howard-drums, Scott Cameron-sax, flute, viola & vocals, Richard Gregory-bass guitar, Dr. Pee-piano, Lewis Melville-guitar & Dave Clark-drums), MOUNTAINSIDE BAND, MAGNA CUM LOUD, JOE LAPINSKI => Tranzac, 10 pm, pwyc
JOE STRUMMER/CLASH TRIBUTE w/ G-MEN, DOWNBELOWS, SPEED KINGS => Horseshoe
CARLOS BASTIDAS & MAPALE => Orale Bar & Lounge (111 Yorkville)
BACK TO THE UNDERGROUND 6th Anniversary: Battle To The Finish w/ MATHEMATIX, RUBEX CUBE, KUROCK, TRX, MATISSE, JASON PALMA, NAV, DJ MONDO, DJ SMOOTHIE, HEIST => 360, $15
SOUR KEYS, BEEP, DEPT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, GRADUATION DAY => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
LEVIRIDE, ROMEO LIQUOR STORE, RED LIGHT RIPPERS => Oasis, 9 pm, $5 or free w/food-bank donation
CINDY CHURCH, MURRAY MCLAUCHLAN, IAN THOMAS etc => Oakville Centre
JAZZ MATINEE w/ JEFF HEALEY & THE JAZZ WIZARDS => Healeys, 4-7 pm, free
SIBLINGNORTWIN, ALIVE AND LIVING, OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RADAR, WINTARY, SIMEON ROSS, OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RADAR, ALIVE & LIVING, SIBLINGTOWN => El Mocambo, pwyc
BUMP N HUSTLE w/ DJs PAUL E LOPES, MIKE TULL => Rivoli
BROWN HORNETS => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $5
POP NOIR w/ JULY 26th MOVEMENT => Lot 16, 1136 Queen W., free
SMEAR CAMPAIGN => Mod Club
ALANNAH MYLES => Hugh's Room, $27.50
ED VOKURKA SWING TRIO, LAURA HUBERT BAND, AMANDA MARTINEZ LATIN ENSEMBLE, SATURDAY NITE FISH FRY => Rex
SOPHIE MILMAN/BILL KING QUARTET => Senator (Dec. 7, 8, 9, 11)
INNER CITY SURFERS, THE HANGDOWNS => El Mocambo
TIESTO, DJ SEAN MILLER, DJ MIKEL CURCIO => The Docks, $40
JACK DeKEYZER => Silver Dollar, 10 pm, $12
SHARRON McLEOD QUARTET => Trane Studios, $5
DEAD CELEBRITY STATUS, OUT OF YOUR MOUTH => Lee's, 10 pm
SUN DEC 12
* POMEGRANATE femme-klezmer Hannukah party => Tranzac Club, $14. 7:30pm.
* THE NEIN, FRANK FB_A, YARA, DJ Ryan McLaren => Wavelength 243 @ Sneaky Dee’s, pwyc
* ES, BLACK FOREST/BLACK SEA, FLYNNS, GASTRIC FEMALE REFLEX => New Works Studio (319 Spadina), $5
BRADYWORKS (Tim Brady et al) => Music Gallery, $15, 8 pm
KOLLAGE CHRISTMAS JAZZ w/ ARCHIE ALLEYNE, DOUGLAS RICHARDSON, ALEXIS BARO, ROBERT BOTOS, RON JOHNSTON, KAMIL DEWHURST => Trane Studios, $10
CHRONIC D w/ RONDA RINDONE (clarinets), JEAN MARTIN, EVAN SHAW, JASON HAMMER, COLIN FISHER => fuse room (418 College), pwyc
AWESOME (featuring ANIMALMONSTER) w/ DJs RORY THEM FINEST, STUBERMAN @ Opening for "The Scourge" video/art installation by WENDY MORGAN and CHRIS MILLS w/ music by FANTOMAS => Drake, 7 pm, $3
KUSH => Mod Club, 10 pm, free
CRADLE OF FILTH, ARCH ENEMY, BLEEDING THROUGH, HIMSA => Kool Haus
KEVIN QUAIN & THE MAD BASTARDS => Cameron
KELLY & THE KELLY GIRLS => Mod Club
NICOLE STOFFMAN, LES SINGES BLEUS, SABRINA TROPPER ,THE 5 SPOT => Rex
LINDY => Rivoli
NANCY WHITE, LINDA GRIFFITHS, ERIKA RITTER, DR. DRAW => Hugh’s Room
MOVIE NIGHT w/ FESTIVAL EXPRESS => Club 279, 7 pm
BAJAGA I INSTRUKTORI => Opera House, $30
MON DEC 13
* TRAMPOLINE HALL => Sneaky Dee’s
KUSH => Mod Club
JIM GALLOWAY’S ECHOES OF SWING JAZZ BAND => Montreal Bistro, 8 pm to 11 pm
CAREY WEST TRIO, BRUCE CASSIDY’S HOTFOOT ORCHESTRA => Rex
RISE AGAINST => 360
KURT SWINGHAMMER => Cameron House, 8:30 pm, $7
THE LUMINOLS, POOR PELLY, LITTLE PILGRIMS, VANADIUM, MANIC - Silver Dollar, 8 pm, $5
TUES DEC 14
* THE NEIN => Horseshoe, free
* FADO! PORTUGESE BLUES w/ JANE BUNNETT/SPIRIT OF HAVANA, MIKE SIRACUSA => Glenn Gould Studio, 8 pm, $25
* DEEP DARK UNITED => Tranzac
JAYMZ BEE's ROYAL JELLY ORCHESTRA w/ PATRICIA O'CALLAHAN, BIG RUDE JAKE, CHISTOPHER PLOCK, JOHNNY FAVOURITE, MELISSA STYLIANOU, ALEX PANGMAN, more => Mod Club, $20
SATYRICON, INFERNAL MAJESTY, THREE INCHES OF BLOOD => Opera House. $18.50
DJ EVIL DEE, DJ BAZARRO, DJ LAW, DJ FASE, DJ FATHOM => Fez Batik, $10
THE MUSIC => Kool Haus. $20
BRIAN BYRNE, KIM BINGHAM, DOCTOR => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $5
THE MUSIC, PROJET ORANGE => Kool Haus, $20
D.E.W. EAST (Alex Dean, Barry Elmes & Steve Wallace)/REG SCHWAGER => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm (Dec 14-18)
TONY QUARRINGTON, CLASSIC REX JAZZ JAM => Rex
HEATHER BAMBRICK/RICHARD WHITEMAN TRIO (Dec. 14-19) => Senator
WED DEC 15
* CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
* KEVIN HAINEY’S THOUGHT PRESERVE LAUNCH w/ FEMME GENERATION, BAYONETTES, GASTRIC FEMALE REFLEX, DJ DAVID DACKS, films, etc. => Cameron House, $7 ($20 w/novel)
* GNN, VIDIOTS => Drake Underground, 7 pm
* NQ ARBUCKLE => Maple Lounge, Rivoli (upstairs), 8 pm, free
* NATHANIEL DETT CHORALE Caribbean Christmas choir, SIGNAL HILL ALUMNI CHOIR (from Tobago) => George Weston Recital Hall, 5040 Yonge, 8 pm, $26.50-$38.50 (also Dec. 17)
*THE UNSUNG (Vanessa Hansen, Jayme Stone, Rob Clutton); PAUL CRAM (clarinet) w/ KEN ALDCROFT, ROB CLUTTON, NICK FRASER; LINA ALLEMANO/PAUL CRAM/CHRISTINE DUNCAN/ JOE SORBARA => New Work Studio (319 Spadina upstairs), 8 pm
FEMME GENERATION => Cameron House
THE RIGHTEOUS AND THE HOLY II w/ HANNAH, LOOMER, ANDREW VINCENT, JAY CLARK => Horseshoe. $8 (also Dec. 16, $12 for both nights)
MIKE MURLEY/DAVID OCCHIPINTI => Mezzetta Cafe, 681 St. Clair W.
FREE TIMES 24th ANNIVERSARY w/ NOAH ZACHARIN, LAURA FERNANDEZ, AARON WRIXON, GIRL NAMED SUE, D'ARCY WICKHAM, RUSSELL LEON => Free Times, 320 College
PILATE, BOY, MEMORY BANK => Mod Club, $18.50
THE POSTAGE STAMPS, DEBASER, GRADUATION DAY, DIVINE BROWN => Holy Joe's, $5
D.E.W. EAST (Alex Dean, Barry Elmes & Steve Wallace)/REG SCHWAGER => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm (Dec 14-18)
EXITMAN, JOE SHABASON QUARTET => Rex
HEATHER BAMBRICK/RICHARD WHITEMAN TRIO (Dec. 14-19) => Senator
MAFATA LEMPHENE QUARTET => Trane Studios, $5
THURS DEC 16
* NATHAN LAWR & MINOTAUR ORCHESTRA, WIL KIDMAN (Constantines), SAMIR KHAN (Kepler/Weights & Measures) => El Mocambo
* FOX THE BOOMBOX, AIDS WOLF, DEATH PARADE, HENRI & THE ADORABLES => Sneaky Dee's, 9 pm
* THE RIGHTEOUS AND THE HOLY II w/ JOHN BORRA, CHRIS HART, FIFTYMEN, THE SHOVELS => Horseshoe. $8 (also Dec. 15, $12 for both nights)
READ YELLOW, THE TWO KOREAS, GUESTS => Silver Dollar, 10 pm, $7
GREG HOBBS, THE GOLDEN DOGS, ANGIE NUSSEY, LINDA M., SARA KAMIN => Rivoli
GASOLINE MAGAZINE XMAS HOLIDAY BLOWOUT w/ CMON, CRASH KELLY, TRICKY WOO, TIJUANA BIBLES, STARVIN' HUNGRY => Fun Haus, $10
A MAN CALLED PABLO cd release => San Lorenzo Church (2981 Dufferin)
JANE WAYNES "Last Waltz" => Clintons, free
QUARTETTE => Hugh’s Room, $22
THE MARK INSIDE, THE HOOKS => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
PILATE, BOY, PETER ELKAS => Mod Club, $18.50
DEAD LETTER DEPT, LEFT BEHIND, FULLY DOWN, DRAWING A DAY => 360
EL'S ROCKPILE => El Mocambo Upstairs, $5
D.E.W. EAST (Alex Dean, Barry Elmes & Steve Wallace)/REG SCHWAGER => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm (Dec 14-18)
KEVIN QUAIN, ROGER CLOWN & STOOPY => Rex
HEATHER BAMBRICK/RICHARD WHITEMAN TRIO (Dec. 14-19) => Senator
WHITNEY SMITH BIG STEAM BAND => Lee’s Palace, 9:30 pm
OLIVER BLACK, ROCKETFACE, THE MARBLE INDEX, THE TREWS => Opera House
ANONYMOUS => Rockit
FRI DEC 17
* HAWKSLEY WORKMAN, MR LONELY => Eastminster United Church (Danforth east of Broadview), doors 7 pm, $25
* EMILY HAINES w/ GUY MADDIN FILMS => Church of the Redeemer, $17.50
* LEFTOVER DAYLIGHT series presents LOLLIPOP PEOPLE (w/Friendly Rich, Scott Good, Mike Olsen, more), MICHAEL BATES’ “OUTSIDE SOURCES” (w/Quinsin Nachoff, Kevin Turcotte, Mark Timmermans) and MIKE HANSEN/TOMASZ KRAKOWIAK/MICHAEL SNOW => Arraymusic Studio, 60 Atlantic Ave., 9 pm, $10
*THE HIGH DIALS, FRONTIER INDEX, SHOWROOM => 360, $7
NATHANIEL DETT CHORALE Caribbean Christmas choir, SIGNAL HILL ALUMNI CHOIR (from Tobago) => George Weston Recital Hall, 5040 Yonge, 8 pm, $26.50-$38.50 (also Dec. 15)
FOGGY HOGTOWN BOYS HOLIDAY HOOTENANNY w/ CREAKING TREE STRING QUARTET => El Mocambo
ALEXIS BARO "Blows Be-Bop for Dizzy" => Trane Studios, $10
ALEXISONFIRE, PLANET SMASHERS, SLEEPER SET SAIL => Kool Haus. (sold out, second show Mon. Dec. 20)
ARMAND VAN HELDEN => The Docks, $25
GOLDEN DOGS, THE SPADES => Rivoli
SUCK MY DISC XMAS PARTY => Sneaky Dee's
"THE RED BALL" w/ RHYTHMICRU, MORE OR LES, DJ FASE => Reverb, $10
MARC JORDAN => Hugh’s Room
KAZZER => Tonic
MATT DUSK => Winter Garden, $39.50
LOWEST OF THE LOW, CHEAP SUITS, THE IKE REILLY ASSASSINATION, PILATE => Mod Club, $18
THE SKYDIGGERS, CASH BROTHERS => Horseshoe, $15 (also Dec 18)
FIVE BLANK PAGES => “the Edge,” 228 Yonge, free, all-ages, 9 pm sharp
MATT DUSK, CORAL EGAN BAND => Winter Garden Theatre, $39.50
HILARY DUFF, whose name sounds dirty => Air Canada Centre, sold out
D.E.W. EAST (Alex Dean, Barry Elmes & Steve Wallace)/REG SCHWAGER => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm (Dec 14-18)
MELISSA STYLIANOU, CANADIAN JAZZ QUARTET => Rex
HEATHER BAMBRICK/RICHARD WHITEMAN TRIO (Dec. 14-19) => Senator
REZ BLUES w/ PAPPY JOHNS BAND & MURRAY PORTER => Silver Dollar, 9 pm, $10
SAT DEC 18
*M1 ACADEMY "All B-Girls School" edition w/ LADYBUG MECCA (Digable Planets), MASIA ONE, TARA CHASE, ZAKI IBRAHIM, more => El Mocambo, $14
* STARS, THE STRING SECTION => Mod Club, $15
* HOWIE BECK, JOHN SOUTHWORTH => Rivoli
* ALTERED BEATS w/ ENDUSER (Cincinatti), ATOMLY (Chicago), DJ FISHEAD (Montreal), BLACK MARKET (Montreal), C64 => I.V. Lounge, 9 pm-3 am, $10
* MICHAEL BATES' OUTSIDE SOURCES => Pilot Tavern (22 Cumberland), 3 pm
* FRED SPEK & HIS CAMP COMBO (w/ BRODIE WEST, BLITZ, RYAN DRIVER, FRED SPEK) "goofy standards & novelty jazz" => Up Bar (233 Roncesvalles Ave), 10 pm, free
"CUBAN CHRISTMAS" w/ HILIARIO DURAN, ALBERTO ALBERTO, ROBERTO OCCHIPINTI => Lula Lounge, $15 ($45 w/dinner, salsa lesson)
ROBOT, 9 AM SOCIAL, 665 "Together We're Christmas" => Poor Alex, free
DEMONS CLAWS, LEATHER UPPERS, BRUTAL KNIGHTS, BOYFRIEND MATERIAL => Cinecycle, $7
THE SILVER HEARTS Christmas Show => Silver Dollar
MARYEM TOLLAR => Glenn Gould Studio
GEN SUB presents I AN EYE, SILENT SEYMOUR, SATELLITE OF JUNE, A THOUSAND CURES => Drake, 9 pm, $8
NIGHTWISH => Opera House, $27.50
THE SKYDIGGERS, CASH BROTHERS => Horseshoe, $15 (also Dec 17)
WHITE COWBELL OKLAHOMA => Lee's Palace. $13
SUCK MY DISC presents POSTAGE STAMPS, GRADUATION DAY, DIVINE BROWN => Sneaky Dee’s, 9 pm, $5
THE MIDWAYS, THE GLADS => 360
SINKIN' SHIPS, CLASS ASSASSINS, CRIMSON MIRE => Sneaky Dee’s
MS BENEFIT => Drake Underground, $10
D.E.W. EAST (Alex Dean, Barry Elmes & Steve Wallace)/REG SCHWAGER => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm (Dec 14-18)
ED VOKURKA SWING TRIO, JEROME GODBOO/DAVID ROTUNDO, AMANDA MARTINEX LATIN JAZZ ENSEMBLE, NOJO CHRISTMAS BENEFIT => Rex
HEATHER BAMBRICK/RICHARD WHITEMAN TRIO (Dec. 14-19) => Senator
JEREMY P. CAULFIELD, ADAM MARSHALL, TASK => Project Nightclub (126 Sherbourne), 11 pm-7 a.m., $10-$15
CALIBAN ARTS THEATRE HOLIDAY PARTY w/ DOUG RICHARDSON (sax), WALEED ABDULHAMID (guitar, perc.) => Trane Studios, $10
BETTY & THE BOBS => Hugh's Room
3TARDS, MATADORS, TIT FUCK ME JESUS etc. => Kathedral, 7 pm, $8
RANDWICHES, TIN STAR BAND, CHARIOTS OF SHAME => Cameron, $7
SUN DEC 19
* MICHAEL BATES "OUTSIDE SOURCES" => Rex, 9 pm
* DEEP DARK UNITED, WINTER EQUINOX, DJ Sh’Buggy => Wavelength 244 @ Sneaky Dee’s, pwyc
*STARS, CHAD VANGAALEN => Mod Club, doors 5 pm, $15
ROOM 101 => Drake Underground
HEATHER BAMBRICK/RICHARD WHITEMAN TRIO (Dec. 14-19) => Senator
COUNTRYPOLITANS => Cameron House
MON DEC 20
PRE-HOLIDAY BLAST OFF w/ FROGGY => Drake Underground, $5 + food item
ALEXISONFIRE, MONEEN, RAISING THE FAWN => Kool Haus, $20
GEORGIA AMBROS SEPTET “Christmas Special” => Montreal Bistro
CAROLIN MARTIN-ROWE QUINTET => Rex
BARENAKED LADIES => Massey Hall, $39.50-$69.50, Roy Thomson Hall (also Dec 21)
KURT SWINGHAMMER => Cameron House, 8:30 pm, $7
Holy shit, it's more HILARY DUFF => Air Canada Centre, doors 6 pm, $49.50
TUES DEC 21
DON CASH and friends => Sneaky Dee's
HOLLY COLE => Roy Thomson Hall, $49.50-$69.50
BRIAN BYRNE, KIM BINGHAM => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $5
BARENAKED LADIES => Massey Hall. $39.50-$69.50 (also Dec 20)
WED DEC 22
* CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
* MIA SHEARD (usually Tamara Williamson) annual holiday benefit for Daily Bread Food Bank & Amnesty Int'l, w/ RON SEXSMITH, BOB SNIDER, HAYDAIN NEALE (Jacksoul), KURT SWINGHAMMER, BOY CHOIR OF LESBOS, DAN GOLDMAN, ARLENE BISHOP=> Rivoli, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, $10
* MIKE O'NEILL, KELELE BROS., SCRIBBLED-OUT MAN, MOUNTAINSIDE BAND => Horseshoe
ED VOKURKA JAZZ VIOLIN ENSEMBLE => Montreal Bistro (also Dec 23)
MIKE WEBSTER SEPTET => Rex
JOHN McDERMOTT => Roy Thompson Hall
MAFATA LEMPHENE QUARTET => Trane Studios, $5
THURS DEC 23 (my birthday!)
* BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA CHRISTMAS SHOW, MAVIS STAPLES Tribute to Mahalia Jackson => Massey Hall, 8 pm, $49.50-$69.50
*BROWNMAN & The ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, 9 pm
*WAX MANNEQUIN, WINTARY, THE FIVE MILE ROAD => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
1000 CURES => Sneaky Dee’s
ED VOKURKA JAZZ VIOLIN ENSEMBLE => Montreal Bistro (also Dec 22)
ANDREW BONIWELL QUARTET => Rex
CANADIAN BRASS => Roy Thomson Hall
GWYNETH BAILLIE, BOYCHOIR OF LESBOS, ZAYLA WEEDZ => Mitzi's Sister
FRI DEC 24
no known shows yet
SAT DEC 25
CHRISTMAS SHOW => Mod Club
"XMAS ABSINTHE" w/ DJ DEMENTIA & STEVEN => Vatikan
SUN DEC 26
* KICKASS KARAOKE => Drake, 9 pm, pwyc
BOXING DAY MOVEMENT w/ DJs Aki, Jason Palma, Nav, John Kong => Supermarket, 268 Augusta, $5 (all proceeds to Daily Bread food bank)
QUARTETTE => Hugh’s Room
SHIT LA MERDE => Sneaky Dee's
ERNESTO CERVINI => Rex
THREE DAYS' GRACE, THORNLEY, GRADY (w/ Gordie Johnson) => Docks, 8 pm, $25
MON DEC 27
THE GARDENS FAITHFUL, KICK ME KENNETH, RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, CANARY MINE => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $5
STARFIELD => U of T, Dec 27-30
THE 4 MIKES => Rex
KURT SWINGHAMMER => Cameron House, 8:30 pm, $7
TUE DEC 28
* KINKS TRIBUTE w/ MORE PLASTIC, 3 GUITAROS, more => Clinton's, $5 or free w/ two non-perishable food donations
* CHRIS QUINN, JAMES THOMPSON followed by JESUS TRIBUTE NIGHT => Tranzac, 8 pm
STARFIELD => U of T, Dec 27-30
BRIAN BYRNE, KIM BINGHAM => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $5
JIM GALLOWAY TRIO (w/ROSEMARY GALLOWAY) => Montreal Bistro (Dec. 28-Jan. 1)
EDUARDO ALIS QUARTET => Trane Studios, $5
KIM MITCHELL => Club 279, 8 pm, $20
WED DEC 29
* WOODCHOPPERS’ ASSOCIATION => Drake Underground, 9 pm, $5
* CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
* GUILTY PLEASURES 01 hosted by Tyler Clark Burke => The Beaconsfield, 1154 Queen W., 10:30 pm
DON ROSS => Hugh’s Room
PAVLOV'S DOGS, VANDERPARK, KELLY BURROWS => Holy Joe's, $5
RIDE THEORY => Horseshoe
JIM GALLOWAY TRIO (w/ROSEMARY GALLOWAY) => Montreal Bistro (Dec. 28-Jan. 1)
STARFIELD => U of T, Dec 27-30
MAFATA LEMPHENE QUARTET => Trane Studios, $5
THURS DEC 30
* DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979, CONTROLLER CONTROLLER, AIDS WOLF => Kathedral, $10
BROWNMAN & The ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, 9 pm
SEA SNAKES, PROELIIS FERE, LORD AND PEASANT, TANZEN =>Sneaky Dee's , 9 pm, $5
LEVIRIDE, HUNDRED MILE HOUSE, TENTH PLANET => Horseshoe
THE 9 AM SOCIAL, MATH, LOBSTER ROCK TOKYO => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
FIRST NIGHT TORONTO w/ ANDY STOCHANSKY, CHOCLAIR, MADVIOLET JIM CUDDY => Distillery District, 55 Mill, 7:30 pm, $15
FIRST BORN UNICORN => Horseshoe
THE CLIKS, SEEING THINGS =>Cameron, $7
SMOKEY CAMPBELL'S "Life's Too Short" Indie Showcase => Drake Underground, pwyc
FRYGIRL, AUXETIC PULSE => Holy Joe's, $5
JIM GALLOWAY TRIO (w/ROSEMARY GALLOWAY) => Montreal Bistro (Dec. 28-Jan. 1)
STARFIELD => U of T, Dec 27-30
FRI DEC 31
* MERCER UNION DIRTIER NEW YEAR'S EVE w/ DJ AYRES, COSMO BAKER, SUPERPEAKNICK, THE DUKES, DIDI 7 => Studio 99, 99 Sudbury, 10 pm to daybreak, $25-$40
* NEW YEARS VAZALEEN w/ LESBIANS ON ECSTASY => Lee's Palace
*THE SADIES => Horseshoe, $17.50
* BARRIO LAB ORCHESTRA, DJ KID CONGA, ALVARO C => Drake Underground, $30 adv., $40 door (incl. party favours, chompers at midnight, bar snacks)
* "AY CARUMBA!" w/ TIJUANA BIBLES, SKIN TIGHT OUTTA SIGHT REBEL BURLESQUE => Gladstone, $30 (incl. hors d'oeuvres, champagne/tequila shots at midnight)
* DO RIGHT NYE w/ DJs JOHN KONG, FASE, CIRCLE RESEARCH, SON OF SOUL, ABDOMINAL => Supermarket, 25 Augusta, $25 (incl. champagne toast, party favours, etc.)
* DOING IT TO DEATH NEW YEAR'S EVE PARTY w/ NO DYNAMICS, IV (w/ members of Creeping Nobodies), BBQ, NICK FLANAGAN, WES ALLEN, DANIEL VILA => Thymeless, 355 College, $5
*REPUBLIC OF SAFETY w/ DJ OMRI KATZ (direct from The Manhuntagon) => 868 Dovercourt Rd. (N of Bloor), 2 am, PWYC donations for RoS recording
CONTROLLER.CONTROLLER, UKULA => El Mocambo, $30
"URBAN BAZAAR" w/ MAGNETA LANE, DJ JEDI, STICKY RICE => Rivoli, $40
NEW YORK DOLLS TRIBUTE w/ members of FORGOTTEN REBELS, TEENAGE HEAD, more => Rancho Relaxo, $12
CHRIS WHITELEY, VICTOR BATEMAN, BUCKY BURGER, JOHN SHEARD, DAN WHITELEY, etc. => Hugh’s Room, $85 incl. dinner
ILLUMINATI, OLIVER BLACK, NO WARNING & THREAT SIGNAL, JAGERETTES => Bovine, $10
TRANE NEW YEAR'S PARTY w/ RADIO NOMAD, ALANA BRIDGEWATER => Trane Studios, $15
GROOVEYARD, LESTER McLEAN, MICHAEL OCCHIPINTI, PAUL NEUFELD => The Rex, $39.95
FUcT XMAS w/ LUNCHMEAT, The 9AM Social, more => The Dufferin Hotel, free
BLOWUP NYE w/NASSAU, THE MELIGROVE BAND, various DJs => The Swallow Lounge, $35 (incl. buffet etc)
DETSORGSEKALF, MACABRE, THRONE APART => Rockit, $20
FIRST NIGHT TORONTO w/ GREGG LAWLESS, THE SATALLITES => Distillery District, 55 Mill, $15
MURDER SQUAD TO, THE G-MEN, HANDS OF DEATH, RANDOM KILLING => Sneaky Dee’s
NEW YEARS EVE BASH => Mod Club
THE MIDDLE EIGHT => Free Times Cafe
JIM GALLOWAY TRIO (w/ROSEMARY GALLOWAY) => Montreal Bistro (Dec. 28-Jan. 1)
MILK w/ DJs FELIX & GANI, JASON PALMA, MIKE SITCHON => Una Mas, $25
JIMMY BOWSKILL BAND => Healey’s, $30
DOWNCHILD, DOC MACLEAN => Silver Dollar Room, $35 ($55 advance w/dinner), 8 pm-3 am
SVOOK w/ CONTACT, KING SUNSHINE, INTERGALACTIC FAERIE FUNK, TELEFUNK SOUNDSYSTEM more => El Mocambo
CHEERLEADER, GOAT HORN, CJ SLEEZE, THE HALLOW, PERDITION, more => The Vatikan, 1032 Queen West, $20
PLUS a lot of other dance club action too, of course (see here
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 30 at 7:09 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Notes on Hip (II)
Some points that didn't get made in the mad whirl of this weekend's column: As I said, in John Leland's Hip: The History, a sound analysis of the wend and way of "hip" through the past few centuries comes to a fishtailing anticlimax when he hits the slippery turf of the present day. Seems as though Leland is at his best filtering through the received wisdom, and has trouble with material that's not old enough to come predigested.
So he lopes through obvious observations of the ubiquity of the signifiers of the old hip - delayed marriage, loosened social ties, sexual openness, etc etc. - especially in "rebel sell" advertising. Yet of course what was hip in the past nearly always becomes the appropriated common coin in the marketplace of the next generation - that cycle has been fairly consistent for a century. He also notes that the "white nigger" status past white hipsters vied for is now a suburban trope, the "wigger," equal parts minstrelsy and actual racial realignment.
But he snoozes on the globalization of hip that's being brought about by a couple of forces - first the huge access to cultural information that the Internet allows, and second actual economic globalization, which is accelerating change, creating a global elite and a global ghetto, those populations repeating the urbanization patterns that western people went through in the 20th century but at hyperspeed and a previously unimagined scale, which is hot with its own cultural piracies and fusions. (See previous posts on "shanty house" and like noize.) I think "hip" is going to have more and more to do with being jacked into that stream of invention and evasion - and to the extent that "hip" is an interesting category at all (and I agree with Leland that, considered as the channel between mainstream and margin, the productive mistranslation of symbol and sound between the two, it's really interesting), what's hip in the next half-century will pose a real challenge to the smug alterna-whateverism of the North American indie-activist-small-press-etc-etc hipster that's thrived the past quarter-century. (Edited to add: Aaron's observation that crunk and the Nashville Muzik Mafia both hail from "red states" touches the same moving target.)
So here's the hip replacement: Leland shoulda called his last chapter "When Hips Collide," (referring both to the aforementioned clash and to doin' the bump, which is eternally hip), rather than dwelling on trucker caps and other stupid ephemera. In fact, speaking of trucker-hat planet, Leland might even have mentioned Vice magazine's ongoing, infuriating campaign to make open racism and sexism "hip" again - from a global ghetto perspective, perhaps that will prove sadly prescient.
Given Leland was a hip-hop journalist for years, you'd expect him to do better on these subjects. Then again, he's also a former editor of Details; from that p.o.v., the book's a helluva lot sharper than you'd expect.
Further listening: The new Afrika Bambaataa disc shows him still rockin' the world party with sounds from all over you cannot help but bump to. He's a million in hip-hop years but he sounds younger than all the bucks. And Peter Margasak (veteran crit from the Chicago Reader) has a new all-terrain-vehicle, a blog called Worldly Disorientation that's proving to be a good road guide to the whomp of the global ghetto, as well as the world's politer and less perilous precincts.
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 30 at 1:24 AM | Linking Posts
November 27, 2004
Notes on Hip (I)
What's up, docs and dockettes? Today's column, hot off the grill. I know this one's kinda loony tunes (Mrs. Zoilus tells me it helps to read it twice, but who reads an article twice?). Clarifying footnotes to follow.
* * *
HIP AND SUAVE AND BADDER THAN BAD
The men of the Handsome Boy Modeling School seldom make whiteness an explicit subject. You have to read between the tracks
OVERTONES
By CARL WILSON
Saturday, Nov 27, 2004
The Globe & Mail
Bugs Bunny zooms over to the Handsome Boy Modeling School in his stretch SUV, Elmer Fudd's limo zigzagging behind in hot pursuit. (Old habits, like old rabbits, die hard.) Soon Bugs is reclining on a salon chair in a silk robe, waggling a carrot like Groucho's cigar and yammering orders for a proper "ear grooming."
"I know I said 'asymmetrical,' doc, but watch dem clippers! And d'you mugs have any fleur de sel for dis here cancer stick, or do I have to burrow all da way back to Cannes?"
Bugs was having his carotene-saturated blood changed in Switzerland before Keith Richards was a glimmer in Muddy Waters's eye, but lately he's been taking it easy. He does cameos, but mostly concentrates on charity work -- research to cure cliff plummet, rifle-knot backfire, anvil-related indentation and other ills inflicted in his wild days. He's giving some back.
"My apologies, sir," his stylist pipes up. "But to tint the highlights, I need to know, um: Are you black or are you white?"
"Well, back in the day . . ." Bugs begins, then shrugs. "Eh! You know. Not as white as the Mouse, not yet. Mebbe as white as you are."
"Pardon, sir, but I'm not -- "
"You hoid me, doc. Now make wit' dat hare dye."
Bugs won't be fenced in, not since he read New York Times reporter John Leland's new book Hip: The History, in which Bugs features as America's Most Animated. Leland's survey ranges from Walt Whitman to DJ Spooky, but for one chapter (called "Hip Has Three Fingers"), he lingers over the streetwise ways of jazz-age cartoons. Bugs, he writes, "navigated the gulfs between high culture and low, male and female, power and sass." Not to mention straight and gay and, of course, black and white.
The book's sustaining insight is that hip is a pure gone-crazy product of America -- Euro-America and Afro-America forever stalking and outfoxing each other, the nation's sick compulsion, and mother of all its invention.
The term goes back further than Bugs guessed: Hip dates to the 1700s, imported by slaves as hepi, "to see," and hipi, "to open one's eyes," in the Wolof tongue of coastal Gambia. Similar passages brought in cool, dig, jive and honky: From slave lore on to blues, jazz, rock and beat poetry, hip has been the inside language of outsiders, the lexicon of camouflage and parody, a concealment that reveals.
What Bugs digs most is his depiction as a modernist trickster, in the line of jesters and "wascals" going back to the African hare deity who quick-changed into America's Br'er Rabbit. A society invents tricksters to undermine its own rules, so it can move on, says Leland, bringing up Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and Richard Pryor.
And now there's hip-hop, with its roots in the rhyming-insult showdowns known as "signifying," after a trickster type called the Signifying Monkey. No wonder Eminem's 8 Mile character was named Rabbit, Bugs thinks. ("Note to self: Could I mebbe make a buck off that?")
But Eminem also marks the spot where Leland's engine runs off its rails: the present. He suggests multiculturalism has demoted whiteness to just another self-aware ethnic performance, a kind of "whiteface." (Besides Slim Shady, trucker hats come up a lot.) But if white hipsters are post-white, does that make hip blacks post-black? Bugs freestyles his critique: "That tar baby's stickier than taffy/ So this guy ducks the issue like Daffy." It's as if Leland just gave up and went for the happy, rainbow-coloured ending.
For 21st-century Hip Studies, ambi-racial Bugs much prefers the approach here at Handsome Boy Modeling School. The proprietors are hip-hop trickster-producers Prince Paul and Dan the Automator -- albeit, in false moustaches, as Chest Rockwell and Nathaniel Merriweather.
Their hallmarks were set in 1999 with the cult album, So . . . How's Your Girl? -- goofy sketches, scrunchy sound collages and guest stars galore. They impersonate suave clotheshorses, but "handsome" here is code for a rereading of hip. As the booklet in their new disc says, "It's a handsome thing, you wouldn't understand" -- a zinger even more pungent when paired with the album's title: White People.
It's full of pink-complexioned guests such as Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle), Cat Power, Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), Jack Johnson and even John Oates (as in "Hall and"), plus a few Saturday Night Live has-been comics. Whiteness is seldom an explicit subject (save in the sly Julee Cruise-Pharrell Williams duet, Class System), but the question hangs flapping on the line between the tracks.
In the video for the album's classic-sounding lead single, World Gone Mad, rapper Del tha Funkee Homosapien's brown face breaks up through the surface in a box full of white Styrofoam packing peanuts. Jamaican singer Barrington Levy croons a heavenly hook, and Del drawls, "The situation's bad, not meanin' good," reversing Run-DMC's milestone 1986 hip-hop chant, "Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good."
"Heeeyyy," Bugs breaks in. "Leland says 'Bad meaning good' goes back to slave plantations, too: Say you said a runaway slave was good, that was trouble. But if you said he was bad, who could prove you meant good?"
So what's up with Del? "Ehh, maybe he had enough doubletalk."
Consider last week's demise of a classic hipster, Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan. He lived the off-kilter addict's life, transfigured it into his wild performances, and what does he get? Just an inadvertent audio obit in the illicit, Queen-meets-hip-hop mash-up that's all over the Web these days, A Night at the Hip-Hopera: It has ODB rhyming over the riff to Another One Bites the Dust.
By giving gorgeous, funky makeovers to cheese-rockers, yet playing their own shtick for anything but cool, it's as if Handsome Boy shuffles hip's racial deck: "This century, how about you come up with raw material and we do the appropriating?"
"Yep, that's the ticket, doc," says Bugs, shaking out his coiffed head and chomping down on his carrot. "I figgered that out a loooooong time ago."
cwilson@globeandmail.ca
Read More | The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, November 27 at 2:13 AM | Linking Posts
November 26, 2004
Musical Energy Pellets, Eat 'Em Up
Kim Cooper and David Smay, who put out the terrific Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth! anthology a few years ago, have a new book. For the past dozen years Kim's been the editrix of Scram magazine (which has a get-lost-for-hours compendium of disc reviews online), which was fighting the forces of snark in music long before The Believer ever thought to do it for books; instead Kim throws herself full-bellyflop-dive-style into enthusing about and championing greatness that might otherwise pass you by. The new tome, Lost In The Grooves, cranks up mission control with essays on everything from King Crimson to Cal Tjader, Swamp Dogg to Pac-Man Fever, by a host of contributors from a Meat Puppet to Rick Moody.
How do I know all this? Because they did an entertaining phone-in on NPR today. Funny thing was the awkward moments when listeners would call in suggesting "lost" albums like Forever Changes or "introducing" Nick Drake, and Cooper and Smay would have to strain not to respond like snooty record-store clerks. (They pulled it off, though.) Other callers managed to stump the authors with paeans to Tin Huey and the Flirts and one managed to make a poignant case for the lost-ness of Smokey Robinson, not forgotten but somehow looked-past.
Photos from this week's Tin Tin Tin should be up this weekend, by the way, and of course check tomorrow for this weekend's Overtones column, a bit of a hyperactive romp around John Leland's Hip: The History, the new Handsome Boy Modelling School, ODBituaries (that link is a must-read, by the way!) and the Kleptones.
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 26 at 4:45 PM | Linking Posts
November 23, 2004
The Rockismford Files, Chpt. CIX
In the absence of a real post (column deadline, show to do, etc.), here's some entertaining debatery for those who recognize that last week's column was an entry in the disorganized sport of writing about rockism without ever mentioning rockism.
And why would one play such a game? Because when you do mention rockism, people go apeshit, and then other people are pushed to play rough.
Or screw all that and go have a fight worth having, between your ears, by listening to dj/Rupture's amazing post-election mix. (Via Dissensus.) And read Weisblott's typically on-the-needle reflections on the passing of Toronto rock-era AM-radio royalty, "Shotgun" Tom Rivers.
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 23 at 7:49 PM | Linking Posts
November 22, 2004
A Toast! Cocktails That Wag For Everybody
First of all: The November gigs list has been updated, with some highlights (including Tin Tin Tin of course) bolded for the rest of the month.
Second, I wouldn't normally quote PR except in spoof (and the line below about "looking forward to executing within our new team" is a good example why) but this is a passage of note in the Toronto scene. Everything the Arrayfolk say about Allison's leadership below is true and then some. She's done fine work that's widened the interplay between the warped-pop-folk-jazz-improv world Zoilus moves in and the tux-wearing, degree-toting types associated with Arraymusic, she brought Christian Wolff to town etc etc - don't be a stranger, Allison.
ARRAYMUSIC ANNOUNCES PERSONNEL CHANGE
Arraymusic, a champion of experimental and contemporary chamber music in Canada, announces the departure of its artistic director, Allison Cameron, who has resigned from her position effective December 31, 2004. [...]
A prominent composer whose work is often performed in Canada, the United States and the Netherlands, Allison indicated she is leaving Arraymusic after four-and-a-half years to devote herself to her personal artistic pursuits.
While Allison's departure was unexpected, the Arraymusic Ensemble, board and management understand her desire to return to full-time composing. Allison confers a strong artistic legacy for a new artistic director to build on. She also leaves Arraymusic with stable finances, after lending her support to operations throughout the organization’s 2003/04 season.
“We’re sad to see Allison go, but we appreciate her need as an artist to reaffirm her commitment to composing,” says Arraymusic’s board chair, Maggie Keith.
Allison’s work has been exemplary since she joined Arraymusic in 2000. She introduced groundbreaking events like SCRATCH! and supported such innovative productions as Rat-drifting through the Arraymusic Studio. The Studio is livelier than ever, bringing in substantial revenue and a fantastic mix of artists from Toronto’s experimental, new music, alternative and jazz communities. Allison also oversaw the production of two Arraymusic CD recordings featuring members of the Arraymusic Ensemble in performance and supported the development of a new website and first-ever webcast of the ensemble in concert. Her work has ensured the vibrant continuation of Arraymusic’s Young Composers Workshop.
Blair Mackay, a percussionist with the Arraymusic Ensemble and musician’s liaison to the board, says, “Allison had a good run as artistic director. She brought a lot of new and successful commissions to the ensemble and moved the group into fresh musical territory.”
“Allison has really helped raise the profile for an important fringe element of Toronto’s music scene by including artists from the improvisational community in Arraymusic’s programming,” said outreach co-ordinator Jerry Pergolesi.
“I was looking forward to executing within our new team,” says general manager Sandra Bell, “but I think Allison’s departure will be great for her and represents a new opportunity for Arraymusic to move towards our goal of artistic renewal. Besides, we’ll continue to realize Allison’s legacy – at Arraymusic, we keep a tribute torch burning.”
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 22 at 5:03 PM | Linking Posts
November 20, 2004
Horrified Observations of Horrified Observers
Have you heard about this group Horrified Observers of Pedestrian Entertainment, who are giving people (mostly) old rock albums if they get rid of their Ashlee Simpson discs? In this week's Overtones, such forces of smug condescension meet the spirit of idiosyncratic eclecticism .... and the wrong side dies. Witness the showdown.
Who are they to say that Britney's trash?
OVERTONES
By CARL WILSON
The Globe & Mail
Sat. Nov. 20, 2004
This week only, The Globe and Mail offers a reprieve to the good people who have been duped into buying "classic" rock: Turn in your substandard albums by U2, Led Zeppelin or the Grateful Dead and we will supply superior CDs by Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears.
If this deal sounds ridiculous, it should, since I by no means intend to honour it: Who am I to tell you what's substandard or superior? And what would I want with your stupid Led Zeppelin albums?
Yet if I made the exact opposite appeal, as a coalition of cultural smugs in L.A. and New York did this week, it seems I'd get a tastemaker's bouquet.
A group called Horrified Observers of Pedestrian Entertainment (HOPE) has garnered ovations from Rolling Stone to the BBC for offering to exchange any CD by lip-synch-scandal singer Ashlee Simpson for "one of a higher entertainment quality." Egged on, they expanded the trade to Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Linkin Park and "any boy band."
HOPE admits lip-synching is a red herring: It's been all over music for decades, mostly to permit acrobatic concert choreography. Their beef is "low quality." Measured with their own Qualitometer.
The daring crew's proposed substitutes are safe, canonized 1960s and 1970s rock and soul stars. The few fresher offerings include Neil Hamburger, a standup comic whose shtick is that he's not funny - oh, I bet Britney fans are going to like that tons more than dancing to the percolated beat of her hit Toxic.
When HOPE first began punking celebrity culture, it targeted Paris Hilton, who is renowned due to what Daddy rakes in and a talent on view only in a fuzzy clandestine video. HOPE picketed her "book" signing with placards: "Why are you famous?" and "I'd rather watch a Stephen King porn than read a Paris Hilton book."
That protest seemed like a clever attack on the wealth-worshipping cult. This one is just a bunch of stiffs looking down on other people's ideas of fun, specifically HOPE's "entertainment and media professionals, students, journalists and citizens" (read: insular honkies pushing 30) sneering at the pleasures of teenaged girls: Shut up, little fillies, making us antsy with your semi-orgasmic squeals. Sit down and nod along to old hippies. For four hours. I said shut up.
Another group, called You Have Bad Taste in Music, is more direct: They attend pop concerts in army helmets and shout abusive slogans through bullhorns at the crowd in the parking lot. It's much like the Bush regime's foreign-outreach program, You Have Bad Taste in Religions and Political Systems.
I dislike some of the music on these groups' hit lists, too, just not on principle. Some is gaudy, body-wriggling pop joy; some ain't. But their stunts are only smarmy genteel sequels to Disco Demolition Day in July, 1979, when a mountain of disco records got torched at a Chicago baseball game and the smoke cut short a double-header.
Disco was indeed oversold then, as teen-pop is now. But the vitriol is never so caustic when we're flooded with weak rock. The backlash always seems the worst when the top tunes are being made for black people, girl people and gay people: "Disco sucks, dude."
That 1979 campaign forever smeared one of the most technically, rhythmically inventive genres in pop. Lingering discophobia was one reason that techno, house, jungle and other 1990s innovations never broke big in North America. Likewise, today's rockin' reactionaries are missing out on the producers who fill the best bubble-gum chews with startling flavours of dissonance, sliding slantwise beats and psychotic sonic comedy.
All us would-be snobs could take a lesson from a recently rediscovered patron saint of the open ear: Arthur Russell was a classically trained cellist, rock and folk fan and composer from the cornfields of Iowa who spent much of the seventies studying Indian ragas, befriending Allen Ginsberg, curating performance art and nearly joining the Talking Heads. But as a young gay man in New York in the mid-seventies, one night he inevitably ended up at a disco.
Beyond the throbbing sexuality, Russell heard a universe in the reverberating drums, ululating divas and hand-claps of the anthems at Paradise Garage and Studio 54.
Soon he was collaborating with disco producers to mix his own silky, drifting compositions into big-beat banquets such as Dinosaur L's Go Bang and Loose Joints' Is It All Over My Face, underground classics at last available on 2004's The World of Arthur Russell. Now they'd call it "Intelligent Dance Music," but Russell would snap back that dancing was always pretty smart.
He also crossed over the other way, smuggling disco's looping hooks into his minimalist experiments, speak-singing along with his wired-up cello in a way, as his friend Philip Glass said, nobody's done before or since. He said he was after "Buddhist bubble-gum," a goal best realized in the vast oceanic flutter and cerebral lullabies of 1986's World of Echo, finally out on CD this month (with a haunting DVD). Pop variations occupy a less-consistent archival disc, Calling Out of Context.
Russell was sadly forgotten by the time he died of AIDS in 1992; the loss is just being recognized. Yet he was also a maddening tinkerer, forever revising his music and leaving it incomplete. What remains is like a torn notebook of half-remembered dreams of steamy dance clubs and cloud-covered aeries. The wending melodies suggest someone blithely tossing away his heart's desire, and then at the last second stretching out, diving to rescue it.
Russell's story cautions against ever presuming to know what history will consider trash. And that gives me hope against HOPE.
cwilson@globeandmail.ca
Read More | The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, November 20 at 1:36 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
November 19, 2004
'Is It Atomic?' 'Yes, Sir: VERY Atomic!'
Come on and dress me dress me dress me In my peek-a-boo blouse With the lovely inner lining made of Chesapeake mouse I want my polka-dotted dickie with the crinoline fringe For I'm going do-mi-do-ing on a do-mi-doe binge!
It's Tin Tin Tin time again - my monthly "music scene mash-up," coming up Wednesday Nov. 24 in Toronto. This month it's all about the Seuss. Did you know it would have been Dr. Seuss's 100th birthday this year? It's the Seussentennial! And so for this final T.T.T. of 2004, we have a tribute to Seuss's only live-action film project, the insane and beautiful musical starring the kid from Lassie - The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., pictured above. (Warning: That final link is so obsessively devoted it may be hazardous to your sanity.)
The players on this one have been scheming up true evil genius, and we will be screening bits of the new Dr. T DVD throughout the night. The idea was inspired by Dan Goldman's cover of Because We're Kids on his latest album, Through a Revolution. Then we found out that there was a musicians' cult around the movie in this town, with jazzman Jean Martin having recorded several Dr. T tunes. So off we went!
But there's more to see at this month's T.T.T. than on Mulberry Street. Read on.
Tin Tin Tin, Wed. Nov. 24 @ the Drake Underground Presents:
* Toronto's freshest female MC, MASIA ONE, with Alex Lukashevsky's weirdly wonderful DEEP DARK UNITED
* A tribute to DR SEUSS's forgotten-classic 1953 live-action musical THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T. with singers JOHN SOUTHWORTH, DAN GOLDMAN and CHRISTINE DUNCAN and THE 5,000 FINGERS BAND (JEAN MARTIN, DON SCOTT and friends)
* When strangers duet: MATT COLLINS (Ninja High School) and NICK "BROWNMAN" ALI (Cruzao, Gruvasylum, Marrón Matizado, Nick Ali Quartet) get their Estonian horn drone on with ARVO PART's "Concerto for Trumpet"
Also featuring the irresistible makeout mixes of the GLOBAL POP CONSPIRACY and the psyche-soiling set design of MARGAUX WILLIAMSON.
Again, that's Wednesday at the Drake Hotel Underground, 1150 Queen St West (corner of Beaconsfield). Doors 9 PM, Show 10 PM sharp. PWYC, $5 to $10 suggested, all profits go to the artists.
*Please, show up.*
At Tin Tin Tin | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 19 at 5:13 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
November 17, 2004
'Some Men They Take Your Heart Away/ Some Men They Take Your Eyes'
get your mind out of your pants.
generally, I'd try to creep past fashionly boys -
you're like "hey pumpkin, wanna dance?"
even the boys, girl,
where the ladies are tight,
you fuck like a gayboy, hon,
you ride, ride, ride!
If those lyrics aren't enough to persuade you Torontoistas to come out to rYAN kAMSTRA's CD launch tonight, dammit, I don't know what is.
Maybe the thought that it's a queer-straight semi-drag Can Can at the Vatikan, Toronto's tiniest twee-est goth bar?
Maybe some mp3's, also available on Ryan's page? Maybe the promise of a stage show by painter-videomaker Margaux Williamson? She promises: "There will be paper bull's skulls. There will be people in love. There will be a bit (a very small bit) of glitter. There will definitely be tight pants."
Maybe an all-star dancer cast of Tyler Clark Burke, Sherwin Tija, Matt Crookshank, Lisa Pereira, Ben Phelan, Marlena Zuber, Dan Goldman, Leslie Taylor, Jill Binder, Alex Winfield, Eric Hart, Randy Ray, David Best, Erin O'Hara, Laurie Petrou, Marc Piccinato, Elana McMurty and more?
The fact that Ryan's a poet, novelist and award-winning pornographer? Or even that I sing back-up on the album, in a choir of non-singers that Ryan put together, kinda the way some film directors cast non-actors?
Don't argue, just hustle:
i want an army: The November Show
Wednesday November 17, 9 PM
The Vatikan. 1032 Queen Street West. $5
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, November 17 at 2:21 PM | Linking Posts
Ladies and Gentlemen, I Think We Have a Winner...
... in the rockism sweepstakes: Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs list.The top-ranked tune is Like a Rollin' Stone, which is fine - blatantly self-serving, since the title contains the magazine's name! but better than Hey fucking Jude - but get this: More than 200 out of the 500 songs date to the sixties, including 15 of the top 20. (Nirvana is the only representative of the past decade-and-a-half in that tier.) The Scotsman concludes that therefore, "The list proves that the 60s was really the decade that made music," rather than, "the list proves that the 60s was really the decade that made Rolling Stone magazine and it's never gotten over it."
It turns out (see story linked in the first 'graph) that "voters were told to focus on 'the rock 'n' roll era'." That sucks great balls of fire. (Note: not worksafe.) I realize that lists is for suckas. And I realize that in fact, there are as many good folks among boomers as there are in any generation. But sometimes I just can't wait for them to, well, die.
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, November 17 at 1:59 PM | Linking Posts
November 16, 2004
Put a Tamil Tiger In Your Sonic-WMD Tank
In the spirit of Aaron's edict (see prev. comments) against blogging-on-blogging, but also in the spirit of being on deadline with two other stories:
Go read S/FJ's New Yorker piece on the amazing M.I.A., whose stuff I slept on all year till, coincidentally, last week, when I discovered that this 27-year-old Tamil refugee in London has been issuing some of the most mind-and-body-division-destroying blastifestos to come from the noise-liberation front in many a day.
Sasha's themes in "Bingo in Swansea" are very close to what I was talking about last week in re: Brazilian baile funk and global shanty house music, to wit: "... most of what you find in the world-music section tends toward the gentle, melodious, and uplifting, as if the world were that way"; and "actual, on-the-ground world culture: synthetic, cheap, colorful, staticky with power."
(He does mention baile funk and Diplo further down in the piece; Diplo, it's worth mentioning, is at the Mod Club in the T-dot on Fri.)
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 16 at 7:38 PM | Linking Posts
Torontopus' Tentacles
(Note: This entry has been rebuilt after being hacked by some asshole.
The comments (here and elsewhere) on my last post call out for clarification: No objection to folks making a living, and I don't think the gov't should convene a royal commission on blog concentration. By "corporatization" I didn't mean CanWest: that Torontoist has recruited some (talented) Posties was just a sidenote, not a conspiracy theory. But Gothamist going Starbucks may presage the future of blogging, at least in part, just as many alt-weeklies are now parts of chains rather than independent publications. That doesn't make them sellouts - except literally. (A lot of them have turned into squishy lifestyleist advertising rags, but not all.) Economy of scale makes the shift kind of inevitable.
But since blogging has been idealized as a DIY media form, the Gothamist chain is shaped like a question mark. If the blogosphere circa 2008 will look very different than now, that seems worthy of conversation.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 16 at 1:38 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
November 15, 2004
The Empire Strikes Blog
Pardon the tuneless interruption, but:
A new era of blogging arrives in town today as Torontoist goes live in beta - an operation of NYC's mammoth Gothamist, which has also franchised its suffix out to Chicago, London, San Francisco, D.C. and Los Angeles, to be followed by Philly, Seattle, Boston, Paris and Tokyo. (Watch this space for the announcement of Zoilurope, Zoilufrica and Zoiluntarctica!)
Unfortunately, in Canada, "Torontoist" sounds like an epithet, the geographical equivalent of "rockist." They should have followed the mama-blog's model and gone with a pet name, like Hogtownist or T-Dottist.
Seems like somewhat tough news for Marc Weisblott, who was attempting a Torontoist-type operation with his Better Living Centre, but maybe the competition will be good for both parties, Post-Globe style. (Except of course that said competition is not entirely good.)
And who is Torontoist? They seem to be aiming young, and to lean slightly National Post-wards. Editors are Joshua Errett, a fledgling music scribe, reviews editor at Umbrella Music and fairly fresh from the Queen's Journal ; and Sarah Lazarovic, a freelance writer-artist-animator who's dabbled in all sorts of things writing for Eye, the Post, the Globe and elsewhere. She was briefly Culture Editor of the McGill Daily , which makes her some kind of spectral student-journalism descendent of mine. (I held that job in... well, never mind.) Also on the masthead: Mediaworld bloggers such as J. Kelly Nestruck (a Post contributor) and Valerie Belair-Gagnon; Post columnist Jason Chow; another former Dailyite, Jason Rehel; S.A. (Sean) Carrie (all I know is that he guest-blogged for Nestruck in the summer); and one Benjamin Errett. We're guessing he is Joshua's brother, but he also turns out to be the Kevin Bacon of the bunch, as several contributors were formerly caught under the covers together at Ben's site, Plastic Benjamin.
Okay, enough investigative journalism. Contents so far include sarcastic remarks on Shelagh Rogers and Jonathan Franzen's smarm-faceoff to see who can fawn over Alice Munro most, an analysis of the goy-to-Jew aesthetic ratio in Mamma Mia!, news of George Strombolopoulis moving from MuchMusic to CBC, mockery of the Globe's "7" entertainment tabloid, an announcement of tonight's Trampoline Hall (hey, thanks), and a smoochy for Devendramamine Banhartburn (see below).
They could stand to take a minute or two more to edit each item - contrary to the first-thought-best-thought school of blogging, they'll find the first quick-hit that comes to mind is fine, the third or fourth might be funnier and smarter. Or maybe I'm just projecting. Their subjects seem well-chosen for the presumptive target audience - local blogheads and print junkies - but I'd love to see a little better balance of medialand and real street-level life, as in getting up from the computer and going outside. Still it's in the must-read category for Toronto denizens, but on a broader level, this new stage in the professionalization (and longterm corporatization) of blogs and the interowebatron in general bears wary, squinty-eyed watching.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 15 at 4:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
RIP ODB
The Wu-Tang's time as emperors of the hill maps pretty closely to the long period when I was almost totally checked out of the hip-hop department. So I'm not schooled. But even if you're looking the other way you can't miss somebody like Ol' Dirty Bastard/Big Baby Jesus/Dirt McGirt/Rusty Jones. Until he's gone, and then all you can do is miss him.
News | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 15 at 12:36 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
November 14, 2004
Can You Name All Six?
Mrs. Zoilus and I took in the Six Organs of Admittance/Devendra Banhart show at the Music Gallery on Friday night. A packed house full of bright-eyed (and pale-faced) Torontopians bantering intensely about bands and classes and more bands, filling the pews of St. George the Martyr and the aisles and the floor – it was a buoyant place to be.
Wasn’t sure at first how I felt about Mr. Six Organs (Ben Chasney): His intense Faheyesque acoustic guitar picking was compelling, but his singing and speech frequently seemed a little swallowed and awkward - not uncommitted, no, and his melodies and words courageous and vulnerable, yes, full of musical stretches and handstands and yarns yanked inside out unravelled from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk & so forth. But I was a'fearing the young rover lacked gut, wondered if it weren’t all a bit too academic, if the sweet fuzziness would ever push on to full heart force.
By the end of the set, when he had his acoustic leaning up the amp so it heaved and groaned like a ship caught in an icefield, and he was crouched on the ground field-hollering out a tune overtop the feedback and slamming his knee regularly on the stage to torque the vibrations of the strings and provide nerve-end percussion – that question was settled like a gangfight.
My affection for Six Organs was only increased when the much-ballyhooed Mr. Banhart came out in full pre-Islam Cat Stevens regalia and shortly brought on his band of bearded brothers. I had come because Banhart's case was nagging at me. I praised his albums when I first discovered him, but over the following year they began to seem less satisfying; by the time I mentioned him in the psych-folk column I was steering clear of endorsement. Sometimes you just need to witness the music in person to resolve mixed feelings: You need to check out the aura, whether it has dimension and colour or you see right through the halo like a smoke ring. Very theoretically dodgy I know. But: I walked away from – actually, walked out on – this show knowing what I thought.
Banhart has charisma to burn and he'd fiddle obliviously on as it did. He's got this fantastic from-the-beyond Tiny Tim-fairyland vocal style and he plays guitar with true musical facility and he’s got the tunes and he’s got the genie of inspiration. He’s been a positive influence on the scene, his personal magnetism pulling the shiny gold stars over to this outside-the-margins folk shit. (The Golden Apples of the Sun collection he curated for Arthur magazine is folktabulous.) But he doesn’t make me feel, want, think, gasp. Mild amusement in three or four songs has become acute annoyment. It’s tossed off, there’s one line in a hundred that doesn’t just slip through your fingers like greasy cookie dough – and frankly he creeps me out.
Mrs. Zoilus asked if this was some kind of cult, and while I teased her about it at the time I can see where the question was coming from: Banhart seems like he's leading some EST scam-seminar, radiating his own sexy self-assurance and bloviating on about how you can get it too if you just sign up, maybe sleep over, maybe lend him a couple grand, etc. etc. In fact he grew up partly on some kind of ashram, some sort of orange-tissue-paper-robe compound, so maybe it's not all the kid's fault. But I'd rather break bread with the repo man.
I think Banhart still has the potential to grow up and out of it – he’s got the gift, no question -- but right now there’s just goopy ego syrup at the caramel core of his whole thing. Maybe if I were a groovier, more blown-windows-of-the-mind kind of person, it wouldn’t grate, but I ain’t and it does. By midshow it had turned into a Deadhead-dance-party thing and that was our cue to make an exit. (Stuart Berman of Eye said to me as I slipped by him, “What? You’re going to miss the Ben Harper Love Jam?” which I thought was hilarious.) I’m sure lots of the bright-eyed young things were digging it. Hell they were shouting with spotaneous joy, so pure of heart were they. But y’know, check the parking meters.
(Need a witness? Get the total opposite skinny from For the Records. Who somehow already knew we were there!? And he's got photos.)
Somebody somewhere on the interwebs remarked that Joanna Newsom was “everything I was led to believe Devendra Banhart was” and that’s bang-a-gong bang on: From now on it’s Newsomania and Ban the Banhart around here. (Suggested appellations: "Defakera Banhart!" "Devendra Badheart!" "Defenestratemenow,please Banhart!" "Big Fucking Dealvendra Banhart!" and "Deadvendra Borehead!" Plus did you know his middle name is Obi? After Mr. Wan Kenobi? And that he got his first name from his mom's guru? All true. But ok, I'm getting carried away.) I’ll be picking up some Six Organs of Admittance supersoon as well.
Oh and to show we don’t just hate all hippies by reflex, just most of them on principle: We still vote Animal Collective.
Live Notes | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, November 14 at 11:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
November 13, 2004
Everybody in da Shanty House
Today's Overtones column is a whiplash tour of recent Brazilian sounds from Caetano Veloso, Arto Lindsay (with a detour into DNA) and baile funk. I'm indebted to Matt Woebot and his idea of Rio funk as "shanty house" and "post-world-music," quoted at length toward the end. The girl from Ipanema comes in for some sassin'. Read it now ...
Getting back at phony Braziliana
By CARL WILSON
Saturday, Nov 13, 2004
If you're making a trashy art-house movie, an easy way to signal which sultry damsel will become the obscure object of desire is always to strike up a little bossa nova when she saunters into frame - ideally Astrud Gilberto singing Girl from Ipanema.
Sure, it reduces Brazil's vast musical vocabulary to one suggestive swish, but that's the kind of shorthand Western pop culture loves to make out of "world music" -- an African choir for pious Third World suffering, the twang of a sitar for heading into the mystic, whole societies ground down to grains of spice.
As technology compresses geography, though, increasingly both sides can play that game. Since American dominance comes with ever-higher stakes, the rest of the world is hijacking ideas with a fervour.
The process comes under scrutiny on the latest album from Caetano Veloso, a giant from the bossa-nova era through his leadership in the sixties upheavals of tropicalia (when rock-influenced innovators were jailed or exiled for offending the military government) to today, when populist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's reform agenda is stymied by foreign debt and internal division. A Foreign Sound is Veloso's first album entirely in English, at once a tribute to and an interrogation of American popular music.
The album begins with Carioca, a piece of phony 1930s Braziliana concocted for the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical comedy Flying Down to Rio, for which the stars never even flew down to Rio. Veloso performs a similar search-and-rescue mission on kitschy old Feelings - originally written by a Brazilian (Morris Albert) passing himself off as an American in Paris.
And he gets his revenge for decades of being called "the Brazilian Bob Dylan" with a rattlingly syncopated cover of It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) that makes Dylan seem merely the American Caetano Veloso: "Even the president of the United States," he sings with a wink, "sometimes must have to stand naked."
The disc's title is lifted from a line in that song: "So don't fear, if you hear/ A foreign sound in your ear." Veloso's gambit here is to remind Western listeners that, to most of the globe's population, Hollywood movies are foreign films and English is a foreign language.
His point is not to vilify English. Many of these are songs he loves. As Veloso told Parisian newspaper Le Monde, "I don't have a simplistic vision of imperialism: Tropicalia aimed to take account of the complexity of things. But, against the logic of winners and losers, dear to American puritans, my preference is to present original human experience."
In another interview, he cautioned: "If one thinks that he can mix anything with anything, he's in danger of getting lost. But nowadays you can't really avoid facing it. Even if you just concentrate yourself in a national, closed, stylistic world, you're just responding to the necessity of recognizing mixtures and the dialogues of styles and cultures. It is the era of comparison, that you can put things side by side and suggest surprising comparisons that will change your way of thinking and feeling."
One of the most surprising dialogues comes with his cover of Detached by the obscure New York "no wave" noise-rock band DNA. From the original's snarl of electric guitar, one-finger bass and yelps, Veloso produces an orchestral arrangement that sounds like an atonal composition by Edgar Varese or Alban Berg.
The twist is that the singer and guitarist of DNA was Veloso's American friend Arto Lindsay, who grew up partly in Brazil as the son of missionary parents. After a brief, firefly flash of notoriety on the early-1980s downtown-Manhattan art scene - available for the first time in its full kinetic glory on a new CD, DNA on DNA - Lindsay followed an artistic path that led him back to Brazil on a sort of quest of personal decolonization.
Since the mid-1990s, he's released a series of superb discs sung in English and Portuguese to a sinewy sine wave of electrified samba, with lyrics of metaphysical, erotic abstraction and a backbeat borrowed from hip-hop and funk, with DNA's spasms of white noise reduced to an occasional accent. He's also become a producer in Brazil, and (along with fellow former art-rock geek, David Byrne) an envoy to northern audiences for many of the country's greatest talents. Yet Veloso cheekily reminds his friend of his least-Brazilian phase.
Meanwhile, on Lindsay's latest album, Salt, I detect a bit of the metallic clatter and streetwise stamp of Brazil's latest wave of stylistic mutation, hailing from the hillside shantytown slums in the north of Rio, the favelas. The latest, rawest example of Brazil getting its own back from American pop culture is favela dance music, known to music mavens by monikers such as carioca funk and funky do morro ("hill funk"). In its native land it's just plain "funk," but it doesn't sound much like the genre an American would identify - it's funk as in sweat, not style.
The current popular phrase is "Rio baile funk," after a new compilation of "favela booty beats" assembled by German music critic and DJ Daniel Haaksman, one of the hottest musical fetish objects of this fall. It offers a taste of the sound heard at the all-night parties or bailes attended by hundreds of thousands of people every weekend in Rio since the 1970s.
These bailes are subject to gang violence, police raids and the kind of middle-class dread that generates urban legends (often reported as fact in the Rio press) of copulating conga lines and underage orgies. Yet it's worth remembering that samba itself, now considered the apex of Brazilian sophistication, was born in the favelas of the previous century and got exactly the same sort of official contempt and harassment.
For years, baile DJs played mostly American soul music, but in the late 1980s, one DJ Marlboro is credited with having introduced Rio to Miami bass - the rump-shaking electro sound of 2 Live Crew and other salacious Florida party bands. What sounded good banging out of the tricked-up car stereos of teens cruising the strip in Miami was even better from the mammoth speaker systems that are the pride of the bailes. Before long, partygoers were adding shouted rap to the beats in Portuguese, along with technically crude samples of samba and other pop hits, accordion, sirens and car horns.
The Miami sound was swiftly eclipsed in American hip-hop, so that over the next decade baile funk became a Brazilian exclusive. Now it's coming full circle: "Favela chic" parties have begun popping up in London and Paris, with the London DJs of Slum Dunk releasing their own Carioca Funk compilation next week. Haaksman has noted the irony of a German collecting a Brazilian sound that appropriates the Miami bass inspired by New York electro that was influenced in turn by German 1970s computer pop like Kraftwerk.
North Americans may have taken to the sound of digital samba from the likes of Bebel Gilberto and Juana Molina. But by comparison, that's merely Girl from Ipanema Goes to Mars. Baile funk doesn't whisper "Come hither." It screams "Shake it!" and shimmies till it shakes off everything, most of all its own beleaguered poverty.
Internet music writer Matthew Ingram, better known as Woebot, positions baile funk in a global phenomenon he calls "shanty house" music, together with the "grime" (à la Dizzee Rascal) of London housing projects, and the twists on hip-hop from South Africa's kwaito and the desi of the South Asian diaspora.
It's "the new strain of post-world-music," he says. "The concept of 'world music' is inextricably intertwined with concepts of the natural, the earthen and the rooted. However, the new wave of global urban music is mercilessly hooligan in its agenda, synthetic by choice and necessity, often produced in a crucible of urban existence, yet more extreme, precarious and violent than that which characterizes the temperature of New York, London, Berlin."
Woebot speculates that this desperate edge will keep pop from assimilating shanty house. And yet earlier this year, a bastardized version of baile funk by hip-hop artists from elsewhere in Brazil, remixed by Fatboy Slim, became the soundtrack to a Nissan SUV commercial; and desi is already all over recent R&B hits.
As Veloso said, it's an era of "surprising comparisons" - and the ferocity of favela funk makes you wonder if it could become an era of surprising comeuppances. Meanwhile, you may find more than a few "foreign sounds" creeping into your own body English. But they won't be swaying compliantly in the tropical breeze.
Read More | The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, November 13 at 4:05 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
November 12, 2004
This Is Not, In Fact, The Place
Apropos of nobody's big debate: Everyone, including the Arcade Fire (who cover it in concert), seems to call This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) his/her favourite Talking Heads song. I think that may be one of my favourite love songs, in fact, but to like it best as a Talking Heads song is not really to like the Talking Heads, is it? Life During Wartime, Once In A Lifetime, even, if you want a ballad, Heaven... these are Talking Heads songs, while TMBtP seems more like a "I bet you didn't think Talking Heads could do this" song. It is almost a cruelty, like a lover saying to another, "I like you best when you are least yourself." This least-representative, most-popular dyad seems like a commonplace syndrome, though at the moment I'm at a loss to produce another example - Coltrane's Favourite Things, maybe?
Not that both aren't great: They aren't exceptions by virtue of being shit, or pandering for approval or what-have-you. They are happy exceptions, but songs you do not so much have to like the band's inborn pneuma in order to treasure. We could make separate lists for each of those categories. Incidentally, would said lists then be rockist? Or could we name someone whose oeuvre consists of nothing but these sorts of happy exceptions, and would that then be the best popular music records artist ever? It's late Friday afternoon, so let's call that our homework.
Meanwhile on Nipplegate=Death/moral-cultural values/freethought vs. the fundies/etc. - read Frank Rich (if you don't mind pre-empting your Sunday morning - I mind, too, but I got spoiled so now I'm spoiling you) and The Stranger (I don't agree but it's cathartic).
Typically enough, the media have now overcorrected and ruled by sheep-stampede that moral values are defined by religiosity, that the correctness of morality is determined by who won an election in a deeply corrupt electoral system, that this explains the election and the election explains it. Simply put, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the population of the United States are scary Jesus freaks. Karl Rove figured out a way to get them out to vote their homophobia, which cancelled out the quite-successful efforts of those well-known satanists Bruce Springsteen and Puffy and MoveOn and so forth because it is a winner-take-all system that only grudgingly answers to the name "democracy." That doesn't mean all America is scared of Janet Jackson's nipple. America is mostly not red or blue but purple (you've seen the maps by now, I won't link them) and the sun ain't yellow, it's chicken. As Leon Wieseltier has written, in as staid a place as The New Republic:
"Perhaps the most odious feature of contemporary conservatism is its equation of success with virtue. In the realm of economics, this long ago resulted in the strange belief in the moral superiority of the wealthy, a vulgar Calvinism according to which money is a proof of merit and riches are a mark of righteousness. How else is wealth acquired in America, after all, except justly? And now, in the aftermath of the election, the equation of success and virtue, the conflation of outer worth with inner worth, has been extended to the realm of politics. We are instructed that the Republicans won because they have 'values' and the Democrats lost because they do not have 'values.' (Or quantitatively speaking, 59.5 million Americans have 'values' and 55.9 million Americans do not have 'values.') Winners are good, losers are bad."
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 12 at 5:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
Strokes of Scenius
I've got a piece in today's Globe and Mail about the Morr Music tour (featuring Lali Puna, Styrofoam, Duo 505 and the Go Find), in Toronto on Saturday, and the 416 improv festival, running all through this weekend. Guaranteed political-rant-free: Instead, it's a decent little intro to the muso theme of "scenius," to which the copydesk then gave a totally inane headline that makes me grind my teeth into shrapnel. Look at the headline on this post - it could have been that easy!
Anyway, I notice less of the local improv scene is represented in this year's 416 than usual; I assume there is a scandalous, gossipy sort of reason for this, and expect my informants to tell me now. There's competition in the form of a Leftover Daylight gig at the Arraymusic space tonight that looks especially strong: a Joe Sorbara-Nick Fraser drum duo; a band led by Brodie West with Alex Luchachevsky, Tania Gill, Ryan Driver, David French, Doug Tielli; and a set by John Kameel Farah. Me, I'll be at the sold-out Devendra Banhart/Six Organs of Admittance show tonight at the Music Gallery. (As discussed in last week's column.) I will report back tomorrow.
Also tomorrow (Sat. Nov. 13) my regular Overtones column appears in the Globe. This week, we take a mental flight down to Rio to chat about Brazilian music, including favela booty beat . Listen to the great mixes at that link, then come on back for the 'splainin' amanhã.
Or if Gretchen's booty is more your speed, go visit Nancy and Sluggo at the Opry.
It's just possible we'll have a moment later today to address this whole Nipplegate=Death argument, but we are still running behind panting like a deaf-ear dog when it comes to the new Emine(meme)m.... [...]
Let's get scenius
By Carl Wilson
Friday, Nov 12, 2004
What is pop without a pop star? In a culture that craves celebrity the way a fishing village depends on boats, the vocabulary strains to cope with creativity that springs from a conglomeration rather than a charismatic leader. We know what to do with movements, if they come complete with enemy lists, manifestos and identifying haircuts. But what can be said about loose circles of the like-minded?
Yet collectivization is the shiny, happy, dirty little secret of art. Songs that make the charts are usually not brainchildren of untrammelled artistes, but the aggregate spawn of producers, singers, writers, studio musicians, the past musicians and peers whose styles they're biting, and a mess of marketing maestros.
Sampling makes the method so explicit as to trigger legal action, and much of the public is still choking down that lesson in how sausages are made, but it's only a mechanized version of a folk process as ancient as song itself -- as old, in fact, as thinking. (Consider those thieving dogs Homer and Shakespeare.)
A couple of Toronto events this week illuminate what clown-prince pop subversive Brian Eno calls "scenius" - the "intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene," rather than some lone Great Man of history.
For a grand example, think of the Enlightenment, or more minutely, the simultaneous blooming of be-bop, abstract expressionism and beat poetry in 1950s New York. These days, perhaps look to present-day Munich, home of the German label Morr Music, which has become a gathering point for an incestuous crowd that wants to make techno music more sensitive to the nuances of human feeling.
Founded by record collector Thomas Morr in 1999, the label has released about 40 recordings by two dozen different artists, hailing mostly from Germany but from as far afield as right here (Toronto synth enthusiast Solvent has a disc on Morr).
Fresh from the label's fifth-birthday party back home, Morr has sent an old-fashioned package tour North America's way: It arrives in Toronto tomorrow and includes Duo 505, Styrofoam, The Go Find and label standouts Lali Puna, featuring the querulous coo of Korean-born, Portugal-bred singer Valerie Trebeljahr.
Besides frequent crossover in personnel, albums on Morr tend to share a sound: They're layered with airy electronic beats, filaments carved out of the fat drum-machine sound of dance music as if with a crystal scalpel. But they also have lyrical melodies, sometimes computerized and sometimes on conventional instruments.
When there are vocals, they are not the whooping exaltations of rave anthems but half-whispered verses of loneliness and romance that wouldn't be out of place in indie rock, although generally delivered with a cooler Teutonic distance.
Some fans and foes call Morr's style "indietronica," but "computer pop" might be less off-putting. The label's early definitive compilation was jokingly titled Putting the Morr Back in Morrissey, but a more apt parallel can be found on a later sampler that included a full disc of Morr artists covering songs by Slowdive, the long-forgotten British "shoegazer" guitar band, contemporaries of My Bloody Valentine.
The Morr mob translates the lush droning strings and mumbled vocals of that brief moment in pre-Britpop to computers, but staves off monotony using the broad sonic palette from 1990s techno, ambient and avant-electronics. They're far from the only players in that game, but they're among the most richly reliable.
For less pre-programmed pleasures, this weekend also offers the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival, which has become an annual highlight from the fringe of the city's jazz and improv action. It began Wednesday and continues through tomorrow. Some of the ensembles are ongoing concerns, others are one-offs, but either way the music is conceived on the spot. Don't expect pop from the trio with guitar, drums and trombone, much less the one featuring piano, "heat sink" and cookie tins. But they're decidedly collective creations.
Toronto improv circa 2004 hasn't evolved a signature style, but it tends to be marked by Canadian restraint: The musicians trade gestures without trampling on each other's space. The raw material may be "noise" more than rhythm or melody, but with a gentle touch. It seldom becomes a barrage (except when it does).
There will be electricity in the air at the 416 too; the series climaxes tomorrow with Powerbuch, a quartet featuring the laptop and synth of local composer John Kameel Farah (a techno fan himself) alongside drums, trumpet and sax.
It may not attain "scenius," but it's a celebration of sociable ingenuity, and that's the first foothold on the way to the heights.
The Morr Music Tour is at Lee's Palace tomorrow, starting with the band The Go Find at (roughly) 10 p.m.; Styrofoam performs at 11 p.m. and Lali Puna at midnight. $15 in advance. 529 Bloor St. W., 416- 532-1598. The 416 Festival is at the Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Ave., 9:30 tonight and 8:30 p.m. tomorrow. Suggested donation $5.
Read More | The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 12 at 12:35 PM | Linking Posts
November 10, 2004
About Cheatin'
That's Gretchen Wilson, who, besides her excellent taste in surnames, has released some of the best singles of the year - most recently When I Think About Cheatin', which is the fiddlingest, weeping-steel-guitariest tune to hit the charts in some time, even in this traditionalist-swinging phase of the hardcore/softshell country cycle, yet with just the right flourishes to make it also very Nashvegas 2004. The song's got that true-blue bruised wisdom that you look to country for: "When I think about cheeeeatin'/ I just think about you leeeeavin'," runs the key line, a cause-and-effect calculation that gleams its eye at the temptation (erotically enough, in the verses) but is hip to the price. Yet in the bits of 21st-century-diva sculpture in her way of coming out of the high notes, it has the sumptuousness of country-pop, too, a balancing act that only seems easy when a rare somebody pulls it off.
All of you who needed Jack White's say-so to get into Loretta Lynn, here's where to look for a genuine update of Ms. Loretta's fighting spirit. It's not just Neko Case who can get the job done. (About Neko's new semi-live disc more later, perhaps; it doesn't benefit by being in the twilight zone between concert and studio, and it's a case of can sing the phone book, does sing the phone book, if you know what I mean.)
The old-fashionedness of the Gretchen song is stressed by the vid, which features Wilson beltin' from the stage of the Opry as the Ghosts of Oprys Past materialize around her. Country Music Television tells me it's based on an occasion when she and her husband snuck in and sang on the Opry stage while it was closed, though the fantasy's sweetly outdated since Wilson's now hit the stage there several times over not-for-pretend. Her success would have been hard to imagine a couple of years ago, when country was still on the supermodel-girl-power trip, but now think of it as Reason Number One Not To Hate the Red States. (Case in point: The idea of putting Gretchen up here chased away the temptation to put up the glowering visage of John Ashcroft, who Jon Stewart told me tonight is leaving the White House "to spend more time rounding up and questioning his family." Ding-dong, one witch is dead, no doubt to be replaced by wartier witches yet.)
Also on cheatin': Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I'm trying to break the habit of ranting about politics every time I try to talk about music, and a little abstention is good, the fundies tell me, for the soul, even if it's a lousy substitute for sex education. Oops, I did it again. (Also, I'll have pieces in both Friday's and Saturday's Globe and Mail, so I am working on work instead.) Political joke of the day comes for once not from the Daily Show but from Slavoj Zizek, whose new book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle derives its title from an old kneeslapper of Dr. Freud's: Q: "Why was my kettle broken when returned it to me?" A: "I never borrowed your kettle. And it was fine when I gave it back to you. And it was already broken when I borrowed it." That's killing 'em in Fallujah this week.
Meanwhile, I've been gradually adding alternative reading to the Links page, so why not click up there and bounce around till I'm calm enough to post without the current sulfurous stink of righteousness?
News | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, November 10 at 1:42 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
November 6, 2004
Middle America's Dr. Seuss-Gone-Porno Nightmare...
.... is our Youtopia. And other post-elekkktoral phantasies. In this week's Overtones - starring Animal Collective, above, and all their furry-nonconformist, post-ballot-boxing comrades - as you'll find out on the flip.
C'mon everybody, clap your paws
By CARL WILSON
The Globe & Mail Review
Saturday, November 6, 2004
Well, so much for the human race.
If the events of the past week have left you feeling dazed and misanthropic, there's a musical movement ready and waiting to help you cheer up and drop out of the whole damn species. New York duo Animal Collective supply its manifesto on their recent album Sung Tongs: In a manic chant over a powwow-style drum beat, they babble, "Everyone is welcome, everyone is welcome/ Tigers, tigers, tigers, tigers, tigers, tigers, tigers, tigers . . ."
And with that, the two young animorphs who call themselves Avey Tare and Panda Bear usher in the new era - where everyone can join the party, so long as you walk on four feet (flying, crawling, drifting, flowing, blowing, hopping and digging are also copasetic) and are therefore ineligible to drive, shop, serve in the military or otherwise screw up the world.
Just at the moment, that sounds mighty fine to me.
Animal Collective, performing in Montreal and Toronto later this week, is one of the best and most prominent representatives of what's quickly becoming an international network of atavistic musical eccentrics, variously dubbed new folk, free folk (as in "free jazz"), anti-folk, acid folk and perhaps most commonly psych-folk, as in psychedelic. In a cover story last year, Wire magazine called it "the New Weird America."
Most of the artists hail from the blue states, especially California, where the old-time countercultural whiff of sandalwood incense hasn't completely faded from the air. Devendra Banhart got Britain talking with a TV appearance in May in which he sat barefoot on a Persian rug to sing his gnomic folk koans. He brings his shaggy vibe to Montreal and Toronto this Thursday and Friday along with Ben Chasny, the haggard guitar-picker who goes by the handle Six Organs of Admittance.
Another bestially named New York group that's in Canada next week, the Animentals (also known as Oriental), wears animal costumes and uses motion sensors to trigger its electronic noise, "all creating the mood of a magical forest" (on Monday at Rancho Relaxo in Toronto). The next week, Sufjan Stevens arrives in Montreal and Toronto, his gentle hymns dedicated alternately to Christ and to each of the 50 states, and Animal Collective associate Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti tour comes on like Syd Barrett gone New Wave.
Keep an ear cocked, too, for Joanna Newsom (the 22-year-old San Francisco harpist whose The Milk-Eyed Mender is one of the year's best albums), White Magic, Josephine Foster, Espers and CocoRosie; in Canada there's the Silt (member Doug Tielli plays the Tranzac in Toronto tonight), Eric Chenaux and Michelle McAdorey, Victoria's Frog Eyes and the communally minded multitudes of the Montreal music scene.
The movement is musically diverse, with the further-out fringes sounding like all the experimental rock and jazz of the last 40 years shaken and baked -- some, such as New York's Black Dice and Michigan's Wolf Eyes, even sound like extreme Japanese noise. But others reek of Donovan, Nick Drake, John Fahey, the Fugs or the Holy Modal Rounders, the winking holy-fool folkies reincarnated in people not yet born when woodland-creature camouflage was last any sort of viable option (except when backed by high-voltage machismo, as in the trippier moments of Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull).
The Incredible String Band has actually reformed to mark the moment, currently touring the U.K. with Newsom. These are the outsiders who took footpaths less travelled after Bob Dylan's electric guitar supposedly assassinated the "folk boom."
Pop culture has its own ecology, with no dead ends, only detours. Every style ever voiced goes on murmuring forever, until one day it suddenly stops sounding goofy again and becomes exactly what people need to hear. It's a reassuring proof of the resourcefulness that keeps our scavenger race in coconuts and funeral songs on this cosmic Galapagos.
The psych-folkies, with their rabbit masks and names like the Jewelled Antler Collective or the Skygreen Leopards, are city and suburban kids imagining their way into the consciousnesses of vegetables, mammals, insects and swamps -- writing songs from the perspective of the teeth of a crocodile or the hair of a badger, creatures they've probably never even seen in real life. They're moved by the same environmental and animal-rights ideals many young people now hold far dearer than any old-paradigm ideas of left and right, with both raging sentimentalism and startling humility. If this keeps up, the next civil-rights movement will be to give ducks and moose the vote.
And why not? They couldn't do much worse. In the U.S. election this week, it seemed somehow the distinction between gay marriage and Islamist terrorism got lost, both muddled into what heartland Americans seem to feel is a world gone mad.
Just as it defies their common sense that suitcase bombs could be left on the sidewalk of Main Street, so does the idea of two guys sealing their vows with a kiss. The very suggestion flips them out into surreal visions of an overwhelmed natural order: "What's to stop three men and two women from getting married? What's to stop someone from marrying their dog?" And from there, what's to stop talking ostriches from running for Congress? What's to stop drinking fountains spewing palm oil? What's to stop refrigerators laying eggs and penguin orgies breaking out in line at the bank?
In the work-play of the psych-folk collectives, the penguin orgy is in full swing, and the little tuxedo-clad dudes deserve some mood music. Amid all the fretting over how to kowtow more abjectly next time, how to "frame" issues for people who think "moral values" involve who sleeps with whom but not where you drop your bombs, there's an enormous relief in finding these freak-flag-flying anthems. These musicians have opted out of the culture war by decamping for an imaginary time zone where it never even began.
While the Democrats take their beating from the fundamentalists and promise to do better, the psych-folksters cruise the interstates in vans loaded down with sparrows and tree frogs, their speakers blaring: "It's all true! We'll build our crazy Dr. Seuss-gone-porno utopia no matter what you do! And guess what? You're not invited!"
Maybe it's the political equivalent of pleading insanity, but right now we can use the reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in democracy.
cwilson@globeandmail.ca
Read More | The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, November 06 at 4:19 AM | Linking Posts
November 5, 2004
What We Were Waiting For
Strangely, that does make me feel a bit better.
You're forgiven, almost-half-of-America. We know you did your damndest. We'll even keep fantasizing that your outnumbering was very slyly voter-frauded into existence (note: perhaps in 25 years some Republican insider will have a deathbed guilt fit and fess up what happened, but we suspect that fact is, thanks to a flying wedge of pulpit-prodded homophobes, we did lose, sorta-fair and very goddamn square).
And since so many of you have been asking, we'd be delighted to have you come join us in Canada. You'll have to sustain a little flak from our more anti-American countryfolk, but some of us really crush on you almost-half-of-Americans. (However, that doesn't mean you can automatically immigrate. You think we can automatically immigrate to your country? Hah.)
Anyway, after a few days' sulking, I am prepared to get on with it. In fact I've already been getting on with it back in the real world before now, writing this week's column. It is loosely about the rising Psych-Folk Nation, what Wire called "the New Weird America," the bluest and most stateless of blue states, Americans of the wildest, Walt Whitmaniest, Emma Goldmanickest, Harry-and-Jack-Smithiest lineage, dissenters down to their dirty fingernails and fuzzy toes, and in the latest generation they are imaginatively dropping not just out of U.S. society-if-you-can-call-it-that, but out of the whole stinkin' human race.
I'm talking Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Wolf Eyes, Espers, CocoRosie, Animentals and so forth, in a tone that may in some respects be still kinda desperate and unhinged: It was written yesterday, with a full 24 hours' less recuperation than this message. So check it out in tomorrow's (Saturday) Globe & Mail (or check here for further instructions) - and then, if you are a qualified mental-health professional, drop me a line to tell me precisely what kind of medication I need.
Meanwhile I'm going to see Ray, to remind me why we've loved (and lost) America before and no doubt will again, someday.
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 05 at 2:38 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
November 3, 2004
Ka-Thunk
That sound you hear is my fucking skull banging against the fucking wall. Zoilus will return tomorrow, when I've gotten some of the current fear and loathing - oh, the loathing - out of my system.
News | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, November 03 at 1:10 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
November 2, 2004
Like a Blog Over Troubled Waters
Luca's comments on that last post are real good, go read 'em. Meanwhile if you need some non-political brain relief, go over and see Aaron, he'll hook you up with all the sillyhead linx and pix U can bare LOL! He and I will pick up our Eminem discussion later (preview: I don't agree!).
Me, I am cruising the MP3 blogs for aural succor in advance of plunging into the morass tonight and for who knows how long thereafter. Let Said the Gramophone bathe your ears in Ida's Dream Date. Listen to the pop pop pop from one of the countries being irredeemably fucked by the so-called war on so-called terror with Yulduz Usmanova of Uzbekistan's Tak Boom (including a most improbable dancehall break) or the very soothing indeed Chant by Anja Lechner and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, both courtesy of Chris Porter. Fluxblog eases your mind by moving your ass to Eddie Hazel's What About It?.
And, to get back to politics again, seek out the pop-the-vote tune by Chris Stamey and Yo La Tengo (several versions here), the South Park P-Diddy Vote-Bumpin' parody everybody's linking today ("shake them titties when you vote, bitch!"), a hella lot of politicial hip-hop links from Royal Music and a rallying cry from Dan Bern courtesy of Kingblind. You can watch Bruce Springsteen give a better campaign speech than any of the actual candidates (and sure, sing a song, too) here. And you can keep listening to "Music Blogging for Democracy" all day long if you follow the sound of preachin' to Songs:Illinois. (Note: Avoid the Creekdippers' anti-Bush song. It sucks rocks, complete with a flute solo.) The Big Ticket, thankfully, adds Leonard Cohen's Democracy, one of the best, queerest political songs ever - "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay/ I'm junk but I'm still holdin' up this little wild bouquet:/ Democracy is comin' to the U.S.A." That "visionary flood of alcohol" is gonna sound pretty good at about midnight tonight too. After which it will be appropriate to, a la Animal Collective, Panic.
If time permits, further toonage plus tard. If not, see you in the next era. And if you are American, please do vote today. Over your borders and across the seas, we are counting on you.
Sail on, sail on, O mighty ship of state/ To the shores of Need, past the Reefs of Greed, through the Squalls of Hate/ Sail on, sail on, sail on....
News | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 02 at 3:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
November 1, 2004
A Thought (Beta) & Good Luck to Us
Building the calendar (below) takes up time, and like the whole world I am too wigged about tomorrow to post much - which I figure is the reason Kelefa Sanneh's front-page feature in the Times Arts & Leisure section about Ashlee Simpson & "Rockism" hasn't drawn more commentary.
I thought it was a fine piece that seized a good moment to address the matter, but had a couple of reactions - that anti-rockism, even though it's correct, always seems a little hysterically magnified (ignoring the fact that pop-ism has in fact long won this argument on a broader cultural level, except maybe number of books published from its p.o.v., and number of books seems kind of a rockist-minded measure; also ignoring that rock is in large part still pop and always has been; also never resolving whether it's rockist to apply rockist principles to self-proclaimed rockers); that the lip-synching argument didn't get made well here (lipsynching allows the pop singer to do more, such as to put on a big flashy pleasure-centre-stimulating visual performance, but was Ashlee up to anything like that on SNL, where the value has always been the 'live-ness' of the performance instead?); and finally, and this is the "thought" referred to above ...
... isn't the distinction between rockism and pop'ism exactly the same as the one between modernism and postmodernism, and in that case might we be a tad more forgiving to slow-adapting rock fans on, well, epistemic grounds?
Ready, set, riposte!
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 01 at 7:13 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Burnin' November
Ellen Allien, at the Mod Club on Nov. 26.
Check the flip for Zoilus's monthly Toronto shows calendar - rock, jazz, hip-hop and electronics are all in the house. Hope to see you, for instance, Toronto readers, at the 416 Festival of improvised music, the Blow show Nov. 6 or Del/Aceyalone/etc. at the Phoenix that afternoon or Venetian Snares late that night, the Laibach show, the Animal Collective show, the Fred Eaglesmith residency later in the month at Hugh's Room, the David Essig show there this week, the Morr Music/Lali Puna show at Lee's mid-month, Ryan Kamstra's theatrical-extravaganza CD launch Nov. 17 at the Vatikan, Psychic TV on the 18th, the Cyrus Chestnut/Wycliffe Gordon gigs at the Senator towards the end of the month, Greg Clow's cool Sunday electronics nights at the Tequila Lounge, and of course at Tin Tin Tin on Nov. 24.
Additions and corrections more than welcome. The calendar will be updated throughout the month.
MON NOV 1
MUSE => Kool Haus. $23.50
SARAH BRIGHTMAN => Air Canada Centre, $49.50-$89.50
SOLEDAD BROS., BRUTAL KNIGHTS => Horseshoe, $10
INCUBUS, THE MUSIC => Copps Coliseum, Hamilton, $47.50-$25.50
Nine Mondays: VOICES JOINED => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $12
AUGIE MARCH => 360, $8
THE FUTUREHEADS => Lee’s Palace, $12
TERESA TOVA w/RICHARD WHITEMAN, DANIEL BARNES, ARTIE ROTH, JOHN ALCORN, GEORGE EVANS, DAVID DUNBAR, SUSAN HENLY => Rex, $15
TUE NOV 2 (ELECTION DAY!)
RON KORB => Hugh’s Room
NU MUSIC NIGHT 11th Anniversary w/ UNCUT, NATHAN WILEY, FRONTIER INDEX, MOBILE => Horseshoe, free
CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE, DR JOHN, SHEMEKIA COPELAND => Hummingbird Centre
STARTING LINE, YELLOWCARD, THE MATCHES, CRAIG’S BROTHER => Kool Haus, $20
THE BLOKK SEXTET => Trane Studio, $5
GREEN DAY, NEW FOUND GLORY, SUGARCULT => Air Canada Centre. $35.50-$44.50
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20, Nov. 2-6
RON DAVIS => Top o’ the Senator, Nov. 2-7
ST. ANTHONY’S FIRE, THIRD VERSE, STRANGERS BY DESIGN, MY SOFT FREQUENCY, AIDAN => Drake, $5
THE SHOBU SHOW CHAMPIONSHIP => the 360, $12
WED NOV 3
DRESDEN DOLLS, COUNT ZERO, DITTY BOPS => Mod Club, $12
CHICK COREA ELEKTRIC BAND => Massey Hall, $24.50-$84.50
SOUNDS OF THE SUPREMES, ANDY KIM, RICHARD STREET (Temptations) => Sheraton Centre
BAD RELIGION, RISE AGAINST, FROM FIRST TO LAST => Kool Haus, $25.50 (to celebrate or drown your electoral sorrows)
WARLOCKS, DEAD MEADOW => El Mocambo, $13.50
CHICK COREA => Massey Hall
GREEN DAY => Arrow Hall (Mississauga)
GUEST BEDROOM, THE MARAUDER, GALAXY, BOYFRIEND MATERIAL => Rancho Relaxo, 9 pm, $5
LILY FROST => Maple Lounge (upstairs @ Rivoli), 10 pm, free
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20, Nov. 2-6
BOB BROUGH/STAN FOMIN QUINTET => Rex
RON DAVIS => Top o’ the Senator, Nov. 2-7
HANK & LILY, GALAXY, GUEST BEDROOM, THE MARAUDER, BOYFRIEND MATERIAL => Rancho Relaxo
FLINT => Sneaky Dee’s
MARKUS CHAKRA, SINGLE THREAT, SPRAL, FENCEPOST BRUNO => Horseshoe, $4
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
DAVID AARON’S SHORT MEMORY => Tranzac, 9 pm
THU NOV 4
DAVID ESSIG => Hugh’s Room
RAPHAEL SAADIQ (“As Ray Ray”) => The Guvernment
EDGAR BREAU, J.P. Riemens => Mitzi’s Sister
BUNNY BROWN => Free Times Cafe, 8:30
THE MIGHTY GILL SHOW => Tranzac
JENNY WHITELEY, LUTHER WRIGHT & THE WRONGS, THE RANT => Rivoli
SOUNDPLAY (New Adventures in Sound Art) => Latvian House, 491 College (Nov 4-7)
AVRIL LAVIGNE => Air Canada Centre. $35.50-$42.50
ANDREW BIRD => Revival, 9 pm, $10
GWAR, DYING FETUS, ALL THAT REMAINS => Opera House, $24.50
urbanCONTACT w/ John Farah & Contact ensemble playing Arvo Part, John Cage, Aphex Twin => Church of the Holy Trinity
FEAR BEFORE THE MARCH OF THE FLAMES => Rockit
RAZORLIGHT => Lee's Palace. $12.50
CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN, KEY CONCEPTS, WINTER EQUINOX, THE AIRFIELDS => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex Cabaret, 9:30 pm, $5
BROWNMAN & THE ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20, Nov. 2-6
BOB BROUGH/STAN FOMIN QUINTET => Rex
RON DAVIS => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 2-7)
BEDOUIN SOUNDCLASH => Lula Lounge, $11
MINORITY, ROCKET FACE,UNDONE, THE HITCH => Horseshoe, $5
CHLORINE DREAM => Silver Dollar, pwyc
GRASSY KNOLL, THE MAGIC BULLET => El Mocambo (up)
THE LOST CAUSE, ANOTHER BLUE DOOR => EL Mocambo (down), $6
ART & SOUL SHOW w/ ROYAL WOOD, others => Havana Lounge, 236 Adelaide W., 9 pm, $10
FRI NOV 5
DAVY ROTHBART of FOUND MAGAZINE => Drake
SINGING SAW SHADOW SHOW, LENIN I SHUMOV, GALAXY => Xspace, 303 Augusta, 8 pm (show 10 pm), free
CLINIC, MIDNIGHT MOVIES, SONS & DAUGHTERS => Lee's Palace. $15
SOUNDPLAY (New Adventures in Sound Art) => Latvian House, 491 College (Nov 4-7)
ERGO PROJECTS (Lithuanian-Canadian exchange) => Music Gallery, 8 pm (Nov 5-6)
BLACKIE & THE RODEO KINGS, LIAM TITCOMB => Horseshoe
TOM PAXTON, CHRISTINE LAVIN => Hugh’s Room (Nov 5-6), $32
FEEDBACK MONITOR CIUT FUNDRAISER w/ SOLVENT/BLACK TURTLENECK, VITAMINSFORYOU, ORPHX, BLEEP, NYBBL => Feedback monitor fundaraiser, Gladstone, 9 pm, $10
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20, Nov. 2-6
JANE FAIR, ROSEMARY GALLOWAY, LINA ALLEMANO, NANCY WALKER, TERRY CLARKE => The Rex
DARRYL SILVER FUNDRAISER w/ PAMPLEMOUSSE => Drake, $5
RON DAVIS => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 2-7)
THE MAHONES => 360, $12
RAJASI, BENT HEFNER, YUGOFISH => Sneaky Dee’s
BOYS NIGHT OUT => Opera House, $13.50
SAT NOV 6
THE BLOW, Y.A.C.H.T., BARCELONA PAVILION => Cinecycle
VENETIAN SNARES, C64, BELLADONNAKILLZ, SKEETER, UNITUS, LAF-O => El Mocambo, 9 pm, $10
“YOU’RE WORTH MORE TO ME THAN A THOUSAND WORDS” w/ BURN ROME IN A DREAM, THREE-RING CIRCUITS, OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RADAR => Poor Alex, 9 pm, $6
SOUNDPLAY (New Adventures in Sound Art) => Latvian House, 491 College (Nov 4-7)
ALVIN YOUNGBLOOD HART’S “MUSCLE THEORY” => Healey’s
TOM PAXTON, CHRISTINE LAVIN => Hugh’s Room (Nov 5-6), $32
DEL THA FUNKY HOMOSAPIEN, ACEYALONE, ABSTRACT RUDE, MIKAH 9, BUKUE ONE, ZION I => Phoenix, doors at 5 p.m.(!), $26.50
SAVOY BROWN WITH KIM SIMMONDS => Silver Dollar, 10 pm, $18
HOT WATER MUSIC => Opera House
GaPa (GANESH ANANDAN/PATRICK GRAHAM) => Royal Conservatory (90 Croatia), $15
NUBA TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20, Nov. 2-6
PAT LaBARBERA QUARTET w/PHIL WILSON (Boston trombonist) => The Rex
RON DAVIS => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 2-7)
GOB => Docks, $20
EXCHANGES, POPULARS, MINGUE, DAVE MATTHEW (no relation) => Lee’s Palace
ROBIN BLACK, THE DOWNBELOWS => Horseshoe, $7
AUTUMN PASSING (Lithuanian-Canadian Exchange) => Music Gallery, $20
THE NEW BLACK => Rivoli
RIZDALES => Cameron House, $7
SUN NOV 7
LUNA (farewell show), WAYNE OMAHA => Lee’s Palace, $15
KING COBB STEELIE, NIFTY (Matt Smith of Les Mouches) => Sneaky Dee’s, Wavelength, 238 pwyc
MONTH OF SUNDAYS TWO: Night 1 w/ MNEMOSYNE, WINTER EQUINOX, PRHIZZM => Tequila Lounge, 8 pm, $5
SOUNDPLAY (New Adventures in Sound Art) => Latvian House, 491 College (Nov 4-7)
KOBENA AQUAA-HARRISON, guests => Trane Studio, 7 pm, $7
ZION I => Phoenix
BLACKIE & THE RODEO KINGS => Hugh’s Room
COWBOY JUNKIES => Trinity-St Paul's, $27.50
JIM MALCOLM (Scotland) => Tranzac, 8 pm, $14
RON DAVIS => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 2-7)
MON NOV 8
BEASTIE BOYS => Air Canada Centre, doors 6 pm, $36-$56
ANIMENTALS, ORIENTAL, MISTER NOBU + IAN McGETTIGAN, CEPHALOPOD => Rancho Relaxo, 9:30 pm, $3
HOT SNAKES, CPC GANGBANG => Lee’s, $14
LITTLE FEAT => Phoenix
JONATHAN RICHMAN, JESSE DE NATALE => Lula Lounge, $15, Nov 8-10.
MATTHEW SWEET, VELVET CRUSH => Mod Club, $25
RICHARD UNDERHILL (Shuffle Demons) => Montreal Bistro
NIGHT BREED, THEY THAT TRUST, SIMPLE => Horseshoe, free
TUE NOV 9
VENETIAN SNARES, C64, BELLADONNAKILLZ, SKEETER, URANUS, LAF-0 => El Mocambo, $10
DRUMS WITH MEN w/ FRITZ HAUSER (Switz.), BOB BECKER, RUSS HARTENBERGER => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $20
REM, JOSEPH ARTHUR => Hummingbird Centre $79.50-$49.50 (also Nov 10)
VELVET CRUSH => Mod Club
THE BLOKK SEXTET => Trane Studio, $5
THE BLUES EXPLOSION => Mod Club, $20
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), New Album 2067
EL VEZ “For Prez,” MARY McBRIDE => Horseshoe. $15 (also Nov 10)
JONATHAN RICHMAN, JESSE DE NATALE => Lula Lounge, $15, Nov 8-10.
AMBIENT PING w/SYLKEN => Gladstone, 9 pm, pwyc
WOMEN MASTERDRUMMERS OF GUINEA =>Hummingbird Centre. $49.50-$59.50 (>>?)
THE TWILIGHT SHOW w/BENEATH AUGUSTA, A NEW DECADE, short films, bingo =>Drake, 7 pm, $10
GENE DiNOVI TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 9-13)
LEW TABACKIN w/MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 9-13)
BROCK GEL w/ DOC PICKLES, JAMES SULLIVAN, PICNIC BOY, MARNIE LEE McCOURTY => Sneaky Dee’s, $5
ZEKE, BLACK HALOS, RAMMER => Lee’s, $12.50
BENEATH AUGUSTA => Drake, $10
MOE => Opera House, $20
BACK AGAINST THE WALL, ELECTRASHINE, SPANKDRIVEN => 360, $5
WED NOV 10
LAIBACH => Lee’s, $25
MADELINE PEYROUX => Phoenix, $20
416 FESTIVAL: OPEN HOUSE (Paul Newman, Dave Fish, Michael Herring) w. poet Ronna Bloom; ALDCROFT/NEWMAN DUO; KYLE BRENDERS TRIO (Brenders, reeds; Ilana Waniuk violin; Brandon Valdivia, percussion) => Tranzac, 9:30 pm, $5
R.E.M, JOSEPH ARTHUR => Hummingbird Centre, $79.50-$49.50
FATBOY SLIM => >b>venue change, The Docks, 9 pm, $37.50
EL VEZ “For Prez” => Horseshoe. $15 (also Nov 9)
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), New Album 2067
STRAWBS => Hugh’s Room
AGENT ORANGE, MISFITS, 3TARDS, REHAB FOR QUITTERS => Reverb
JONATHAN RICHMAN, JESSE DE NATALE => Lula Lounge, $15, Nov 8-10
HELMET, INSTRUCTION => Mod Club, $17.50
SKINNY PUPPY => Kool Haus. $27.50
VAN HALEN => Copps Coliseum, Hamilton. $69.50-$95
LILY FROST => Maple Lounge (upstairs @ Rivoli), 10 pm, free
KINGSLEY ETTIENNE TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
GENE DiNOVI TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 9-13)
LEW TABACKIN w/MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 9-13)
MICROBUNNY, LAL, THE EMPIRES => 360, $8
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
THU NOV 11
BLACK DICE, ANIMAL COLLECTIVE => Lee’s Palace. 9 pm, $14
416 FESTIVAL: JOUST (Scott Thomson trombone; John Oswald saxophone); JOE SORBARA TRIO (Joe Sorbara drums; Brodie West saxophone; Ken Aldcroft guitar); TRIO MUO (Glen Hall saxophones, flutes; Michael Morse bass; Joe Sorbara drums, percussion) => Tranzac, 9:30, $5
SAUL WILLIAMS => El Mocambo, $20
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” w/ BY DIVINE RIGHT => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), $16
GREAT BIG SEA, JIMMY RANKIN, LIAM TITCOMB => Kool Haus, $37
CHET BAKER TRIBUTE w/ LORNE LOFKSY, KEVIN TURCOTTE, ARTT FRANK, KIRK MACDONALD, NORM AMADIO, DANNY DEPOE, more, rare footage => Lula Lounge, 7 pm doors
THE RASMUS => Mod Club Theatre. $16.50
FULL WHITE DRAG, FOR THE MATHEMATICS, more => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30, $5
BOB KEMMIS => Holy Joe’s
CHET BAKER TRIBUTE, Lula Lounge, doors 7 pm, show 9 pm, $25
BROWNMAN & THE ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
GENE DiNOVI TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 9-13)
ARCHIE ALLEYNE’S KOLLAGE => Rex
LEW TABACKIN w/MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 9-13)
CHLORINE DREAM => Silver Dollar, pwyc
MOTHERLOAD, FUCK Y’ALL => Sneaky Dee’s
100% WOOL, LUNCHMEAT => El Mocambo, pwyc
FRI NOV 12
DEVENDRA BANHART, SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. => Music Gallery $15. 8 pm (sold out)
LEFTOVER DAYLIGHT w/ SORBARA-FRASER; BRODIE BAND (with Brodie West, Alex Luchachevsky, Tania Gill, Ryan Driver, David French, Doug Tielli); JOHN KAMEEL FARAH => Arraymusic (60 Atlantic Ave., Suite 218), $10/$6
416 FESTIVAL: OBRADEK (Jim Bailey spring metal plate, heat sink, wood scraps; Michelangelo Iaffaldano clarinet, zither, cookie tin, shelf guitar; Andy Yue- analog synthesizer, piano); HANSEN/KRAKOWIAK (Mike Hansen turntables, processing; Tomasz Krakowiak electronic circuitry, effects, minidiscs); 3XR (Geordie Haley guitar; Nick Fraser drums; Scott Thomson trombone) => Tranzac, 9:30, $5
GERI ALLEN => Glenn Gould Studio, $32.50
GREAT BIG SEA w/ Jimmy Rankin. => Massey Hall
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20)
BARNEY BENTALL => Hugh’s Room
LAMB OF GOD, FEAR FACTORY, CHILDREN OF BODOM, THROW DOWN => Kool Haus, $25
BIT-ROCK ALUMNAE SHOWCASE 3 w/ KUMA VS. YOOKLID, MINISYSTEM, SETZER, NYBBL, DJ OZAWA => Tequila Lounge, pwyc
GENE DiNOVI TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 9-13)
ARCHIE ALLEYNE’S KOLLAGE => Rex
LEW TABACKIN w/MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 9-13)
FORGOTTEN REBELS, BOBNOXIOUS => Lee’s Palace, $10
ILLUMINATI, SHIKASTA, WHITE VAN SPEAKER SCAM => Silver Dollar
THE BACKTHEFUCKUPS (“with Elvis Presley”), LULLABYE ARKESTRA, PRISCILLAS => Sneaky Dee’s
GARDENS FAITHFUL, TRUTHHORSE => Rivoli, $5
SHIKASTA => Silver Dollar, $6
CIRCO LOCO, MATADORS, THE GREAT ORBAX => Reverb, $10
SAT NOV 13
MORR MUSIC: LALI PUNA, DUO 505, STYROFOAM, THE GO FIND => Lee’s, $15
416 FESTIVAL: POETIKS (Nancy Bullis poetry; David Story keyboards; Michael Morse bass); MSG (Denis McNeil synthesizer, percussion; Steve Spears sythesizer, guitar, percussion; Alan Glicksman drums, percussion); CHRONIC D (Jason Hammer bass; Jean Martin drums; Colin Fisher- saxophone, guitar; Evan Shaw saxophone); POWERBUCH (Gordon Michael Allen trumpet; Dave Clark drums, percussion; John Kameel Farah piano, laptop, synthesizer; Glen Hall saxophones, flutes, bass clarinet, percussion) => Tranzac, 8:30 pm, $5
DEADLY SNAKES, HORSEY CRAZE => Comfort Zone (below the Silver Dollar), $9
ALTERED BEATS w/ SINCERE TRADE, RAZOR EDGE, B7, BELLADONNAKILLZ, 0=0, THE DEACON BOOMBASTARDIZER, THE RECKLESS YOUTH QUAKE FROM BINARY CODE, 9 pm-3 a.m., $5
MICHAEL KAESHAMMER, solo piano => Hugh's Room, $34
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” (Nov. 9-20) w/ HEBREW SCHOOL DROPOUTS => Horseshoe, 2:30 pm, $16
TAKING BACK SUNDAY, ATREYU, FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND, => Kool Haus (also Nov 14)
BURIED INSIDE => The 360
CARL DIXON => Hugh’s Room
SPITFIRES & MAYFLOWERS, DIABLEROS, FIVE BLANK PAGES => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
GENE DiNOVI TRIO => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 9-13)
DENNY CHRISTIANSON QUINTET => Rex
LEW TABACKIN w/MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 9-13)
BALLS DEEP w/ THE CHINESE STARS, RORY THEM FINEST, DJ MIKEY APPLES, guests => Xspace, 303 Augusta, $8
MY SOFT FREQUENCY, THE THREAT, DOF => Sneaky Dee’s
SPITFIRES & MAYFLOWERS, DIABLEROS, FIVE BLANK PAGES => Poor Alex, 9 pm, $5
SUN NOV 14
MICHIEL BRAAM (Netherlands) piano, FRANK GRATKOWSKI (Germany) reeds, plus screening of SYNTHWHEN dvd from VTO 2004 => Goethe Institut, 8 pm, $15
EROSONIC (DAVID MOTT, JOSEPH PETRIC) => Music Gallery, 3 pm, $5
GLAD TOES w/ TRIO_MUO, FEESY-DAVISON-HINZ-IAFFALDANO-MOSHER, M.S.G. (with guests RAE JOHNSON, CARL BRAUND, GARY SIMKINS) => Gladstone, 2 pm-6 pm, free!
AFRICAN RHYTHMS w/ NJACKO BACKO (Cameroon/Montreal) => Harbourfront, 1 pm, $8
UNCUT, THE SECRET (Hiroshima), DJ Polmo Polpo => Sneaky Dee’s, Wavelength 239, pwyc
TAKING BACK SUNDAY, ATREYU, FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND, => Kool Haus (also Nov 13)
MIDTOWN, MATCHBOOK ROMANCE (emo) => El Mocambo, 7 pm, $12.50
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20)
RUSSELL SIMMONS’ DEF POETRY JAM w/Black Ice, Georgia Me, Lemon, DJ Reborn => U of T Convocation Hall, $39.50-$49.50
MONTH OF SUNDAYS TWO: Night 2 w/ LENA, XINGU HILL, DISPLACER => Tequila Lounge, 8 pm, $5
WILLIE AUGUST PROJECT => Rex
DIANE ALCORN QUINTET => Top o’ the Senator
LENA, XINGU HILL, DISPLACER => Tequila Lounge, $5
MON NOV 15
TRAMPOLINE HALL => Sneaky Dee’s, $6
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), $12
CARPARK "New Pop Ideas" electronic night w/ ARIEL PINK, SIGNER, GREG DAVIS, I AM ROBOT & PROUD, CRAIG FRAID DUNSMUIR => Drake, $6
VADER, ARCHAEON => Rockit, $16.75
MARILYN MANSON => Massey Hall. $39.50-$59.50
MASON JENNINGS => 360, $10
TUE NOV 16
SUFJAN STEVENS, NICOLAI DUNGER, AWRY => Lee’s Palace, $14
EYEDEA & ABILITIES, ILLOGIC, DJ PRZM, LOS NATIVOS => Mod Club, $15
EVERGREEN CLUB CONTEMPORARY GAMELAN => Music Gallery, St. George the Martyr Church, $10
THE BLOKK SEXTET => Trane Studio, $5
HOT WATER MUSIC, SILVERSTEIN, PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS, MOMENTS IN GRACE => Opera House, $15
MEGADEATH, EARSHOT, 12 STONES => Kool Haus, $29.50
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), $12
AMBIENT PING w/ ANOMALOUS DISTURBANCES (MATTHEW POULAKAKIS/AIDAN BAKER) -=> Gladstone, 9 pm, pwyc
INDIE MUSIC VIDEO FESTIVAL => Reverb, 9 pm (part 1) and 11 pm (part 2)
MIKE MURLEY/REG SCHWAGER/ GUIDO BASSO/ STEVE WALLACE => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 16-20)
GENE SMITH w/PAT and JOE LaBARBERA => Top o’ the Senator, (Nov. 16-21)
LENNI JABOUR cd release => Drake
WED NOV 17
RYAN KAMSTRA cd launch “i wANT aN aRMY: THE NOVEMBER SHOW” w/ dancers Margaux Williamson, Dan Goldman, Tyler Clark Burke and many more => Vatikan
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), $12
EYEDEA & ABILITIES => Funhouse/haus
GOLD CHAINS => El Mocambo, $10
FINAL FANTASY, SOURKEYS, VERMICIOUS KNID, RIDE THEORY => Rivoli, 8:30 pm, $6
KYP HARNESS, DAVID CELIA => Gladstone, 9:30 pm
KINGSLEY ETTIENNE TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
LILY FROST => Maple Lounge (upstairs @ Rivoli), 10 pm, free
GENE SMITH w/PAT and JOE LaBARBERA => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 16-21)
ADAM LEGALLEE, THE STARS HERE, THE WELLS => Drake, $3
THE MADCAPS => 360, $7
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
MIKE MURLEY/REG SCHWAGER/ GUIDO BASSO/ STEVE WALLACE => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 16-20)
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
DOWNCHILD, JEFF HEALEY => Mod Club, $17.50
THU NOV 18
PSYCHIC TV => Fun Haus. $17.50
JOHN FOGERTY => Massey Hall, $67.50
HAYDEN, ELK LAKE SERENADERS, CUFF THE DUKE => Lee’s, $20
THE MIGHTY GILL SHOW => Tranzac
ARCANUM NONNOCK dance dept. grad studies show w/ ERIC CHENAUX & AIMEE DAWN ROBINSON => Burton Auditorium, York University, 7:30 pm, $8
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” => Horseshoe (Nov 9-21), $12
VALDY => Hugh’s Room
MIDTOWN, MATCHBOOK ROMANCE => El Mocambo, $12.50
THE JAZZ ROOM cd launch w/ ALEXIS BARO, WADE O. BROWN, DELIHLA, BRANDY CALLAHAN, DAVE AND MIKE SERENY => Drake, 7 pm, $15
THE TWO KOREAS, FEMME GENERATION, AIDS WOLF => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30, $5
BROWNMAN & THE ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
DAVE YOUNG QUINTET => Rex
GENE SMITH/PAT and JOE LaBARBERA => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 16-21)
MAYA AZUCENA => 360
CHLORINE DREAM => Silver Dollar
THE AIRFIELDS => Sneaky Dee’s
STINKING LIZAVETA, NICE CAT => Rockit
MIKE MURLEY/REG SCHWAGER/ GUIDO BASSO/ STEVE WALLACE => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 16-20)
LIKEWATER CD release => Rivoli, $12
SOFTKORE 5 => TODD'S LUNCH, REKTAL INSANITY, CRUSHKILL, SKEETER => Oasis, 9 pm, $2
FRI NOV 19
DIPLO => Mod Club
WHEN BROTHERS SPEAK w/ J. IVY, WILL DA REAL ONE, JIVE POETIC, NAZARETH, EDDY THE ORIGINAL ONE, DWAYNE MORGAN => St. Lawrence Centre, $30
ARCANUM NONNOCK dance dept. grad studies show w/ ERIC CHENAUX & AIMEE DAWN ROBINSON => Burton Auditorium, York University, 7:30 pm, $8
DUKE ROBILLARD => Silver Dollar Room, 10 pm, $18
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” with THE BUTTLESS CHAPS => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-21), $12
HAYDEN, ELK LAKE SERENADERS, CUFF THE DUKE => Lee’s, $20
FROM FICTION, UNCUT, THE FEVER => El Mocambo, $7
RYAN DRIVER “Jokes of Toronto” book launch w/ WET DREAMS sound-and-light show and "fake new age music" by RYAN DRIVER, JUSTIN HAYNES, SANDRO (Polmo Polpo) PERRI => Tranzac, 8 pm reception, 10 pm music, pwyc
ERIC ANDERSEN => Hugh’s Room
JIMMY EAT WORLD => Kool Haus, $22
DAVE YOUNG QUINTET => Rex
GENE SMITH/PAT and JOE LaBARBERA => Top o’ the Senator, (Nov. 16-21)
GRAND THEFT BUS, T. LECHE (of JeT pRoJeCt LaBs) => Rivoli, 9 pm
MORE PLASTIC cd release => Bovine Sex Club
DOROTHY SAID fundraiser w/ DANNY MICHEL, REID JAMESON, KYP HARNESS, CHRIS MURPHY (Sloan), KIM TEMPLE, TODD CLARKE (Pilate), MIKE PLUME => Drake, $10+
EXCHANGES, PATIENTS, SAN FRANCISCO TREAT => Rancho Relaxo
NAW cd release => Andy Poolhall
C’MON cd release, THE HEELWALKERS, BLACKNINES => Sneaky Dee’s
JEM, BLUE MERLE => Revival, 8:30 pm, $12
MIKE MURLEY/REG SCHWAGER/ GUIDO BASSO/ STEVE WALLACE => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 16-20)
THE LOLLIPOP PEOPLE, BOB WISEMAN, AIDAN BAKER => Cameron House
THE HELLZ KITCHEN SHOW => Reverb, 11 pm
JOSE FELICIANO => Centre for the Performing Arts
SAT NOV 20
THE SILVER HEARTS => Silver Dollar Room, 10 pm, $10
THE RHEOSTATICS “Fourth Annual Fall Nationals” w/THE BUTTLESS CHAPS => Horseshoe (Nov. 9-20), $12
SPIRIT OF THE WEST, TURN OFF THE STARS => Lee’s, $12
DAS MACHT SHOW => Birchcliff Bluffs United Church, Scarborough, $15
THE MUSICAL BOX => Massey Hall
SPARTA, COPELAND, FURTHER SEEMS FOREVER, SUNSHINE => Opera House, $17.50
BRIAN O’KANE QUINTET => Rex
GENE SMITH/PAT and JOE LaBARBERA => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 16-21)
NEIL YOUNG TRIBUTE benefit w/ SKYDIGGERS, MOUNTAINSIDE BAND, ASTRID YOUNG, DAVE CLARK, PRISCILLAS, KURT SWINGHAMMER => Drake, $10/pwyc
THE ATTIC, SLIT WRITING ELIZABETH => Sneaky Dee’s, $5
MIKE MURLEY/REG SCHWAGER/ GUIDO BASSO/ STEVE WALLACE => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 16-20)
SUN NOV 21
REPUBLIC OF SAFETY, SCANDALNAVIA, MN-L => Wavelength 240, Sneaky Dee’s
L’ENSEMBLE CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTREAL => Music Gallery, 8 pm
WILLIE & LOBO (Toronto Progressive Jazz) => Hugh's Room, $25. www.tojazzseries.com.
MONTH OF SUNDAYS TWO: Night 3 w/ NAW, ANDREW DUKE, AKUMU => Tequila Lounge, 8 pm, $5
GENE SMITH/PAT and JOE LaBARBERA => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 16-21)
MON NOV 22
SPITFIRES N MAYFLOWERS, BICYCLES, THE SECRET => Rancho Relaxo
VELVET REVOLVER => Air Canada Centre, $39.50-$55.50
TU (ex-King Crimson) w/Encore PROG JAM => Lee’s Palace, $15
CLASS ASSASSINS, FALLOUT => 360, admission by donation of non-perishable food
TUE NOV 23
CYRUS CHESTNUT, WYCLIFFE GORDON => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 23-27)
LIVE COUNTRY MUSIC band, DOUG TIELLI => Silver Dollar, 10:30, pwyc
AMBIENT PING w/ PLANET OF THE LOOPS => Gladstone, 9 pm, pwyc
THE BLOKK SEXTET => Trane Studio, $5
BILL MAYS w/TERRY CLARK, NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 23-27)
GULF PORT ISLAND TRIO => Tranzac, pwyc
WED NOV 24
TIN TIN TIN w/ Masia One, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. (Dr. Seuss) tribute, more => Drake Underground, pwyc
PIXIES, DATSUNS, MARBLE INDEX => Arrow Hall. $35 (Sold Out, see Thurs)
FRED EAGLESMITH => Hugh’s Room (Nov 24-Nov 27)
FIRST BORN UNICORN, more => Horseshoe
KINGSLEY ETTIENNE TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
LILY FROST => Maple Lounge (upstairs @ Rivoli), 10 pm, free
BILL MAYS w/TERRY CLARK, NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 23-27)
DAVID BRAID SEXTET => Rex
CYRUS CHESTNUT, WYCLIFFE GORDON => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 23-27)
PO’ GIRL, TJ & THE CLOUDS => 360, $10
CRAZY STRINGS => Silver Dollar
ART OF TIME ENSEMBLE w/ PEGGY BAKER, MARTIN TIELLI, AMANDA FORSYTH, ERIKA RAUM, SHALOM BARD, JONATHAN GOLDSMITH, ANDREW BURASHKO => Glenn Gould Studio, 8 pm, $35/$25
GRAND FESTIVAL OF AUTUMNAL HAPPINESS w/ ERIC CHENAUX, RUNCIBLE SPOON => New Work Studio, 319 Spadina, 9pm (thru Nov 27)
THU NOV 25
NICK DRAKE TRIBUTE w/ Oh Susanna, Kurt Swinghammer, Royal Wood, Dan Bryk, Jonathan Seet, Mia Sheard, Ray Montford, Jeremy Robinson, Red Suede Red, Chris Warren, Luke Jackson, more => Rivoli, $10, film @ 8 pm, show @ 9 pm
BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA => Oakville Centre
RON SEXSMITH, SARAH SLEAN => Danforth Music Hall, doors 7 pm, $25
PIXIES, DATSUNS, MARBLE INDEX => Arrow Hall. $35
GRAND FESTIVAL OF AUTUMNAL HAPPINESS w/ TIM POSGATE/BEN GROSSMAN, ATM+GUY => New Work Studio, 319 Spadina, 9pm (thru Nov 27)
ARTS & REC w/ LAL, ANIMALMONSTER, more (Gallery TPW event) => Drake, 6:30 pm till late, free
CYRUS CHESTNUT, WYCLIFFE GORDON => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 23-27)
JANICE JACKSON, SIMON DOCKING => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $20
FRED EAGLESMITH => Hugh’s Room (Nov 24-Nov 27)THE KILLS, BLANCHE => Lee’s Palace, $12
THE FEARLESS FREEP, ACTION MAKES, RIDE THEORY => Pitter Patter @ the Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
BROWNMAN & THE ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, $5
BILL MAYS w/TERRY CLARK, NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 23-27)
PETER VAN HUFFEL QUARTET (New York) => Rex
SLOWCOASTER = El Mocambo (up)
CLASSIC ALBUMS LIVE: APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION => Phoenix, $15
CKLN BENEFIT => Sneaky Dee’s
THE LUDES => Horseshoe, $6
NEW LOVE ARMY, SUGARKILL at Zaiden Photography exhibit => Gladstone Hotel, 8 pm, $14 door
TIN STAR BAND, THE GARDENS FAITHFUL, AUDIBLE => El Mocambo, 10 pm, pwyc
FRI NOV 26
METRO DESI Diwali Xmas Shakedown w/ LAL, selector Double AA => Gladstone, $10
REZ BLUEZ feat Jasmine & John, David West, The C-Weed Band, The Pappy Johns Band w/ Murray Porter (downstairs); Texas Meltdown, The Wolf Pack (upstairs) => El Mocambo. $15. 9 pm.
LEFTOVER DAYLIGHT SERIES feat Freedman, Haynes, Fraser; Nilan Perera's "kidnextdoor"; Aldcroft/Driver/Oelrichs/West => Arraymusic Studio, 60 Atlantic, ste 218. $10
CANADIAN ABORIGINAL MUSIC AWARDS => John Bassett Theatre, Metro Convention Centre, 255 Front W. $35 adv at TM/$40 doors. 7:30pm.
WAVELENGTH ZINE FUNDRAISER w/ FEMME GENERATION, JON-RAE FLETCHER & THE RIVER, FOX THE BOOMBOX, I CAN PUT MY ARM BACK ON YOU CAN’T => Sneaky Dee’s, $10
ELLEN ALLIEN => Mod Club, $15
GRAND FESTIVAL OF AUTUMNAL HAPPINESS w/ TIM POSGATE/BEN GROSSMAN, ATM+GUY => New Work Studio, 319 Spadina, 9pm (thru Nov 27)
FRED EAGLESMITH => Hugh’s Room (Nov 24-Nov 27)
BADLY DRAWN BOY, ADEM => Palais Royale, $25
CYRUS CHESTNUT, WYCLIFFE GORDON => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 23-27)
THE TRAGICALLY HIP, JOEL PLASKETT EMERGENCY => Air Canada Centre, $35.50-$49.50
BLEEP, MADRID, WINTARY => Drake, $5
WAX MANNEQUIN, HENRI FABERGE & THE ADORABLES, THE SUBURBAN POP PROJECT => Pitter Patter @ The Poor Alex, 9:30 pm, $5
CLOSET MONSTER, PROTEST THE HERO => Opera House, $7
THE WEBER BOTHERS => Club 279, Hard Rock Cafe
BILL MAYS w/TERRY CLARK, NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 23-27)
CANCER BATS, MARE, MAN MADE LINE, SMEAR CAMPAIGN (Conquistador Records Launch) => Rancho Relaxo, 8:30 pm, $6
MAGNETA LANE CD release, THE TWO KOREAS => Cinecycle
OLD SOUL, CRABGRASS, DINO BAFFITTI => Rivoli
THE WAKING EYES, MINIATURES, BROTHER JAMES, HONEYMOON MACHINE => Horseshoe, $6
THE RIZDALES, LOOMER => Cadillac Lounge
THE WEBER BROTHERS => Club 279, $10
LATEFALLEN, SPOKANE JUPITER, REASON DISAPPEARS, BREADFAN => Reverb
VONDELLS, ONE & ONLY WHAMMIES @ John & Jenny's Rock & Roll Party => Silver Dollar
SAT NOV 27
CANADIAN ABORIGINAL FESTIVAL AND POW WOW => SkyDome. $10/day adults, $5/day children, to Nov 28
FRED EAGLESMITH => Hugh’s Room (Nov 24-Nov 27)
CYRUS CHESTNUT, WYCLIFFE GORDON => Top o’ the Senator (Nov. 23-27)
CONSTANTINES, TWO KOREAS, WINTERSLEEP => Lee’s Palace, matinee, $12
CONSTANTINES, TWO KOREAS, PRISCILLAS => Lee’s Palace, evening, $12
THE CONSTANTLY RECORDING WINTERIZING BENEFIT w/ DIRTY HEARTS, LENIN I SHUMOV, PLASTIC SOUL REVIEW, CITY FOLK => Sneaky Dee’s
GRAND FESTIVAL OF AUTUMNAL HAPPINESS w/ BOB WISEMAN, JAZZSTORY => New Work Studio, 319 Spadina, 9pm (thru Nov 27)
AFTER THE DOME DANCE w/ THE BREEZE (Benefit for the Native Canadian Centre => Horseshoe, $15
LES GEORGES LENINGRAD, MADE IN MEXICO, DJ MIKEY APPLES in BALLS DEEP 2 => Queenshead Pub, 659 Queen West, 9 pm, $7
RITA CHIARELLI, SERENA RYDER, GARNET ROGERS, SUE FOLEY, DAWN TYLER in the Women's Blues Revue => Massey Hall
FUNCTION magazine benefit, DJ NANA, CAPTAIN EASYCHORD, CHRISTOPHER THINN, VIOLCA, FUNKY DIABETIC, BFD, FRITZ HELDER & THE PHANTOMS => Roxy Blue (12 Brant St.) 10 pm, $5
HERMAN’S HERMITS => Hershey Centre (Mississauga)
SHAYE => Nathan Phillips Square
AUTORICKSHAW => RCM Community School, $15
BILL MAYS w/TERRY CLARK, NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 23-27)
NANCY WALKER QUARTET (w/ Kirk MacDonald, Kieran Overs, Barry Romberg) CD launch => Rex
QUARTERTONES, MORE OR LES, FLORIDA EVANS => Rancho Relaxo, $5
DEREK MILLER, GEORGE LEACH => 360, $15
CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN, ANNEX RIVALS => Cameron House
18th ANNUAL WOMEN'S BLUES REVUE feat Jackie Richardson, Sue Foley, Rita Chiarelli, Dawn Tyler Watson, Serena Ryder. See This Week. Massey Hall. $35-$45 at 416-872-4255.
MAXIMO PARK => Mod Club
BYTHER SMITH => Silver Dollar. $18. 9:30pm.
COMFORTABLY NUMB ("Canada's Pink Floyd Show: the Complete Retrospective") => Opera House. $25
MIRACLES IN MUSIC stem-cell surgery benefit for 16-year-old Shawn Farrugia, Ricky Day & The Daredevils of Soul, Terry Logan, Joanne Mackell, Lisa Particelli & Norman Marshall Villeneuve, Magpies, Bill Colgate & The Urban Gureillas, Cool Trout Basement, Max Metrault, Ancient Chinese Secret => Cabbage Patch, 488 Parliament. $10. 4pm-2am.
SUN NOV 28
HOLLY GOLIGHTLY => Horseshoe, $10.50
THE GUEST BEDROOM, DIABLEROS => Wavelength 241 @ Sneaky Dee’s, pwyc
LEDERHOSEN LUCIL, RATSICULE => Gladstone, $7
MONTH OF SUNDAYS TWO: Night 4 w/ JOHN CHANTLER, BEEF TERMINAL, MN-L => Tequila Lounge, 8 pm, $5
ISIS, THESE ARMS ARE SNAKES, MARE => Lee’s Palace, $12
ESPRIT ORCHESTRA (Thomas Ades, Tristan Keuris, R Murray Schafer) => St. Lawrence, talk 7:15 pm, concert 8 pm
CHRONIC D (Jean Martin, Evan Shaw, Jason Hammer, Colin Fisher) => Fuse Room (418 College), 8 pm, free
KAREN SAVOCA and PETER HEITZMAN w/ Justin Rutledge => Hugh's Room. $20
FREEWORM w/ Manervous Beat, DJ Rollin' Cash, DJs DMS, Gabor, Violet, Katikata => Lexy Lounge, 325 King W. $15
MON NOV 29
JAMES BROWN => Massey Hall, $59.50-$79.50
URBANAIDS (First Annual Benefit Concert) w/ ALICIA KEYS, K-OS, KESHIA CHANTE, SWOLLEN MEMBERS => Ricoh Coliseum, $60-$150
TUE NOV 30
JONI MITCHELL TRIBUTE => Tranzac, pwyc
AMBIENT PING w/ NILAN PERERA, KIDNEXTDOOR => Gladstone, 9 pm, pwyc
AMY SKY => Capitol
TRANSSIBERIAN ORCHESTRA => Air Canada Centre, $49.50
THE BLOKK SEXTET => Trane Studio, $5
JOHN ABERCROMBIE, DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro, $10-$20 (Nov. 30-Dec. 4)
THE SHOBU SHOW w/ FROG PILOT => 360
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND => Drake
Sources: Thanks to 20hz, eye, NOW, Greg Clow, Toronto Life et al.
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 01 at 6:32 PM | Linking Posts
Real-Life Politics, Episode MMIV
North America's greatest near-unknown torch singer Kelly Hogan offered a different kind of celebrity intervention in the political debate this week when she sent this message out to her mailing list about her 59-year-old dad, a reservist who is being sent to Iraq.
I offer it without comment, while listening to Hogan kicking out the jams as backup vocalist on Neko Case's new live disc, The Tigers Have Spoken, a set of terrific performances (though perhaps not so terrifically recorded).
Hello friends and family -
First off, I apologize for this mass e-mail.
As many of y'all know, after being called up out of National Guard reserves two years ago, my dad (career policeman, age 59, flew helicopters in Viet Nam) is about to be shipped to Iraq in the next few weeks to lead convoys in the desert for Apache warbird "Flying Tigers" Aviation Regiment 8-229th.
It's very hard for me to talk about this issue, and I'm still figuring out how to deal with all the levels of bullshit involved. I also have other friends in Iraq already and I'm sure many of y'all do too.
I feel funny sharing this personal information, and my goal is certainly not sympathetic feedback of any kind - but rather to pass along a screwed-up fact to add to the pile - to increase awareness of the current situation.
I just finished reading an interview with Stan Goff (24-year military vet, Bring Them Home Now campaign, Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace) in the new issue of The Sun magazine - and I wanted to pass along [the] links for y'all.
I know there are many sides of the issue. These are just two more that I felt compelled to share.
Thanks for your time.
Hogan
News | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 01 at 3:24 PM | Linking Posts