Just So You Know
As part of the Performance Creation Canada festival-conference thingy in Toronto, I am taking part in the following fine event.
Panel: What Has Changed?
Time: Sat April 4, 2 pm - 3:30 pm
Location: Lower Ossington Theatre, 100-A Ossington Ave., Studio B
Moderator: Evan Webber
Panelists: Sarah Stanley (Theatre Director), John Kameel Farah (Musician), Carl Wilson (Author/Journalist), Ross Manson (Theatre Director, Artistic Director of Volcano Theatre)
Theme: What role does the artist play in relationship to major current events? Things are changing. In the past year, America has welcomed its first black president, Israel has invaded Gaza, and the world-wide economy has been thrust into a recession. Does the artist have a responsibility to address these issues, and, if so, how?
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, April 02 at 10:20 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
You Say You Want a 'Revolutions'?
I've posted more than once in the past about writer/director Jacob Zimmer's laboratory-theatre troupe Small Wooden Shoe and their series Dedicated to the Revolutions. In the past three years, they've done a set of seven shows about various "revolutions," most scientific (Copernican, Darwinian), some socio-technical (Industrial, Information), all derived from an unfinished school assignment from Zimmer's childhood. Tonight at Buddies in Bad Times theatre, they begin a two-week run of the final show in the series, which attempts to synthesize all seven previous performances into one, "demonstrating the difficulty of demonstrating the effects of progress on our lives."
It's an effort to think through paradigm shifts and how they affect our lives, an attempt to make the ghost of C.P. Snow just a little happier, and also a shot at having some serious-minded but light-hearted fun. Fans of Trampoline Hall, show-and-tell, Bad Bands and other hybrid performance events should feel at home. People who know a lot about science might possibly find themselves a bit impatient - as might some people who don't, but maybe not, I haven't seen the show yet.
I will very soon and report back to you. Meanwhile here are previews and interviews about it from The Globe & Mail, NOW, Eye, MaRS blog, Time & Space and One Big Umbrella.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, March 31 at 5:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Torn Between Two Music Lovers (or More):
V-Day Weekend, Evan Parker vs. Wavelength
(Also: WL Swan Song's First Note)
Eye weekly breaks the news that this weekend's Wavelength 450 anniversary shows mark the beginning of the end (or at least the beginning of a change) for the series at the heart of the Toronto scene. Stuart Berman reports that as of next February's Wavelength 500, there will be no more weekly pwyc Sunday-night shows at Sneaky Dee's. The Wavelength umbrella organization will shift its sights towards other kinds of projects.
Besides transforming the number that accompanies each edition of Wavelength from a mounting total to something of a countdown, the move reflects an overall mood and to some degree a puzzlement among those of us who were part of the upswing in DIY activity in Toronto music and other arts in the first few years of this decade. Stuart and his interviewees have smart reflections in the piece - here's my two cents:
The novelty and excitement of that "Torontopian" time led to an exploratory, anything-goes spirit not only in groups like Wavelength that drove it but in a wider circle of people, audience members who were inspired to become more participatory in their attitudes and often to make the leap to starting projects themselves. Now that the amount and diversity of work going on here is taken more as a given, people are more inclined to stick to their own areas of interest - and for a bordercrossing series like Wavelength (or, I'd add, an eclectic website like this one), the result is an apparent re-narrowing of our audiences and contacts. I applaud the Wavelength team for being willing to take risks and reinvent itself to respond - we're all called upon to think creatively about how to renew the culture adventurousness that we cherish, rather than just kvetch that things ain't like they used to be.
It's unfortunate, then, that this weekend's Wavelength birthday festivities - which have been an annual occasion to draw together the best of different scenes and styles - are happening at crosspurposes with a signal occasion in the improvised-music community, an AIMToronto "Interface" series welcoming the renowned British saxophonist Evan Parker to town to play in mixed ensembles with Toronto improvisers at Somewhere There.
Is it really a conflict, you ask? Well, notice how both downtown weeklies, full of WL anniversary coverage, neglected to highlight Parker's visit (same goes for the dailies, but that's less surprising). At least Now has a Q&A with another jazz giant, Randy Weston, who plays up at York tomorrow night. And it's partly that publicity is not AIMToronto's strong suit. But both papers have writers who should be well aware of Parker's stature.
Not to make more of this than it deserves, as conflicts inevitably arise between different concert organizers, but the missed opportunity for intersection - that is, to invite Parker and some AIMT'onians to play one of the WL gigs, for example - is symptomatic of the current, somewhat atomized state of affairs here in ErsTOpia. Not to mention how much trickier it makes my own calendar for the weekend (while trying to squeeze in a bit of proper V-Day hearts'n'flowersing at that).
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, February 12 at 5:01 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Happiness is a Project
Today in The Globe & Mail, I have a feature about Toronto musician Charles Spearin (Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene) and his new album of compositions based on interviews with his neighbours, The Happiness Project, released this week. Bonus material coming on Zoilus later this afternoon, er, Thursday.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, February 11 at 12:12 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Come 'n' Get It ... !
Max Tundra plays Toronto with the Junior Boys in March.
For the first time in a hound's years, the Zoilus Toronto Gig Guide is back up to two-month-long fightin' strength. Granted, pickings in March are slimmish, but we've got at least part of the Canadian Music Week schedule (Herman Dune! Jon-Rae Fletcher! Chad VanGaalen! Malajube!), plus a few other highlights - Charles Spearin's Happiness Project! Junior Boys with Max Tundra! Cut Copy! Stereo Total! Raphael Saddiq! Fleetwood Mac!? - and I'm sure you'll alert us to what's missing, pronto, right?
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, February 03 at 7:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Sophocles is potlucking
Toronto's own Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler win at Internet this week. (Not for the first time.)
"Mina Loy is my Industrial Park. Lorine Niedecker had a metted wet squirrel in her apartment yesterday and was amazed at what a cheeky little pre-stew rodent it was and how hard it was to get it out! Theophile Gautier is mechanical vacuum fixit genius guy. And it works so much better when you actually plug it in after you fix it. Erich Maria Remarque is regretting those chicken wings."
Brian Joseph Davis explains further.
NB: Bill Kennedy was Zoilus's designer & for several years its web-mechanic.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, January 19 at 3:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
News from Somewhere
Photo from Somewhere There by Girlchoochoo on Flickr.
Passing this along for interested local musician readers from my favourite Toronto music venue (even though I don't go there nearly often enough), a place, as its slogan currently claims, "where everyone looks like a clarinet."
Somewhere There is a venue for creative music in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. The programming features the diverse membership of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto (AIMToronto) as well as our creative-musician friends and colleagues from other places.
Key components of Somewhere There programming are the residencies, during which a musician or group has two months of weekly performance slots on Wednesdays (8 pm), Thursdays (8 pm), or Sundays (6 pm). If you would like to propose a residency for a two-month period between July 2009 and July 2010, then please send a proposal for consideration.
Please include: 1) A one-paragraph description of what you wish to do during the residency;
2) A one-paragraph biographical statement for you and/or your group(s);
3) Preferences for time of the year and for night of the week (alternate choices could be helpful).
Please send this information to sowehear AT gmail DOT com by Friday, 16 January, 2009.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, January 12 at 5:18 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Wavelength, Our Funny Valentine
Jessie Stein of The Luyas, playing Wavelength 450 on Feb. 14.
Wavelength 450: February 12-15, 2009.
It's always exciting when the lineup for the annual anniversary festival of Toronto's Wavelength music series is announced, and today turned out to be that day. This year Wavelength turns 9 with some lineups awesome enough to make me imagine I still like rock shows. All hype supplied by Wavelength, not me, but I would vouch for most of the descriptions.
Thursday Feb. 12, doors at 7 pm,
Music Gallery at St. George the Martyr Church, 197 John St.
Timber Timbre (Ontario Gothic murder ballads, cd release show), Ghost Bees (Halifax: telepathic twins' trip-folk transport), Dorit Chrysler (New York: world-renowned Theremin player and avant-pop vocalist).
Thursday Feb. 12, after-show at 11 pm,
Cameron House, 408 Queen W.
The Diableros (College Street: psych-rock steamrollers), Loitering Heroes (Trinity-Bellwoods: jazz-fueled, jangle-pop poetry).
Friday Feb. 13, doors 9 pm,
Wrongbar, 1279 Queen W.
Slim Twig (Toronto: Concrete rockabilly pop pleasure, T.O.'s Best Pop-Rock Act according to NOW magazine), Bonjay (Toronto: Dancehall electro-pop, check out that TV on the Radio cover!), Child Bite (Detroit, massively heavy no-wave soul quintet), The Magic (Guelph/Toronto: blue-eyed soul brothers and sister), DJ Benjamin Boles
Saturday Feb. 14, doors 8 pm
Polish Combatants Hall, 206 Beverley St.
$100 (Toronto: new urban folk heroes, recently sold out shows at the Silver Dollar & Dakota Tavern), Brides (Guelph/Toronto: noise-addicted no-wave warriors), Hooded Fang (The Annex: arch indie pop with a Can-lit fetish), The Luyas (Montreal: dreamy fireside pop featuring Jessie Stein with members of Bell Orchestre & Torngat), Element Choir (Parkdale: Christine Duncan's double-digit conducted-improv choir), DJs Greg Ipp & Ian Worang
Sunday Feb 15, doors 9 pm
Sneaky Dee's, 431 College St.
Foxfire (Toronto: disco-sleaze version of Broken Social Scene), I Am Robot and Proud (Beaconsfield Village: Shaw-Han Liem's mood-boosting electronic pop, now backed by a live band, big in Japan!), Thank You (Baltimore: Thrill Jockey Records, instrumental art-punk madness), Mi Ami (San Francisco: Quarterstick Records, fuzzed-out space-dub trio, members of Black Eyes), DJ Babylon Telecom.
With your host, Doc Pickles. Projections by General Chaos Visuals. Admission for each night is $10 (or pay what you can), at the door only. More info at the Wavelength website.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, December 23 at 3:06 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Tuesday's Choice: Hmm, Valentine or Blah Blah?
Fred Lonberg-Holm, in a photo borrowed from Peter Gannushkin.
In a case of very inconvenient timing, there are two strong contenders for can't-miss avant-jazz events in Toronto tonight.
At the Imperial Pub near Yonge-Dundas Square, from Chicago's fertile improv scene, the Valentine Trio led by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and trombonist Jeb Bishop's trio, both with Jason Roebke on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. Anyone familiar with Ken Vandermark's various groups or with Peter Brotzmann's Chicago Tentet will know Jeb and Fred's stupendous playing. 8 pm, twelve bucks.
Meanwhile at the Lula Lounge there's a triple-headed party with some of the city's very best improvisers to launch the Xmas-season bounty of cd's from local improv label Barnyard Records, including the debut of Blah Blah 666 (reviewed as "witty and playful" today in the Globe by my colleague Robert Everett-Green), Jean Martin and Justin Haynes' set of duets on ukelele and drummed-suitcase with tunes by Saint Dirt Elementary School composer Myk Freedman (reviewed by David Dacks as having "an intimacy reminiscent of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto's collaborations" in last week's Eye) and Kyle Brenders' Toronto Duets with Anthony Braxton, about which, well, need I say more than "Anthony Braxton"? (Though he won't be there tonight.) That's on Dundas between Lansdowne and Dufferin, at 9 pm, $10 (or $15 with a cd).
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, December 02 at 5:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
She Said, 'Johnny You Got Big Eyes'
In the NYT Magazine's "Screens" issue, coming this weekend, some prominent types name "Moments that Mattered" in their encounters with flat, candescent images of all sorts this year. Novelist Heather O'Neill picks the above YouTube video, titled "Dance Dance Revolutions Co.," and tells a touching story about it and her daughter. As she says, the song ("The End of Poverty") is by Toronto band Tomboyfriend (see the Zoilus entry about chief 'boyfriend Ryan Kamstra earlier this week). But she neglects to mention that the video itself was created by Toronto artist (and Zoilus comrade) Margaux Williamson using found YouTube footage of teenagers dancing in their basements (as she explains here); it was shown in an exhibit at Harbourfront in Toronto earlier this fall.
(Margaux was also inspired by YouTube in her full-length video, Teenager Hamlet 2006, previously mentioned here.)
But what O'Neill says of it is lovely and true: "Each time you watch it, you have a different favorite kid. They flail their arms around and gyrate their hips and completely, completely let themselves go. ... the side of them that just lives in the moment and laughs all afternoon and feels a rock song the way adults never can and spends all day looking for the most original way to shout out: I am here! I am me!."
Speaking of "I am here! I am me!" and of Harbourfront, try tonight or tomorrow to catch one of the last two performances of Hospitality 3: Individualism Was a Mistake, a performance by ex-Torontonian, now Montrealais, Jacob Wren and PME-ART's , in its world premiere. I'll be there tonight.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 21 at 3:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Ryan Kamstra's
Apocalypse Madge
(And Girl Talk Etc.)
Madonna underdeveloped, underperforming
underwater, untamed . . . deserted North America.
There are Post-it notes in each drawer. Either my regime's
been changed or else I colluded.
My ass is missing. I really don't recall.
Between hunger or adoring welter, another interior hunchbacking
to another interior.
The crucial updates only:
There are a series of outstanding waiting lounges into which
I'm now departed.
A turntable made of only more but ever smaller dreams.
Orange slums beyond metal cities.
Cities barnacle the empire.
No matter which floor, it's repeating like this.
Sarah Liss wrote a very sharp, insightful profile of poet and musician Ryan Kamstra in this week's Eye, in anticipation of his launch on Tuesday night at Mitzi's Sister for his new book iNTO tHE dROWNED wORL_D, an end-times phantasiac poetry cycle in which the world ended eight years ago, dedicated and addressed to Madonna, or at least to a tattered poster of her Drowned World Tour (which ended the week of 9/11).
As Liss's article mentions, I've created a Madonna trivia contest for the occasion, though unfortunately I can't be there in time to deliver it in person. Skill level: middlingish. In addition there is a Madonna-costume contest with actual prizes and two sets by Ryan's ever-more-excellent band Tomboyfriend (currently recording their first full-length, Don't Go to School). Doors at 7, readings & shenanigans at 8, music at 10, drinks throughout.
I have had a lot of other things to talk about but no time to talk about them - for instance the way that Eye has been mixing up filesharing and appropriation art in its discussion of Girl Talk (Girl Talk doesn't threaten the "economic engine" of the music business because he's just making collages, not giving away the original music, and indeed is probably making people more likely to seek out the original music); how the usually perspicacious Mike Barthel became oddly literalist in his discussion of the same subject on Idolator - if Girl Talk "is not fair use" in the current legal definition then that definition needs to be expanded, mainly because its fixation on parody as the primary legitimate use of appropriated material is out-of-date, as I think Idolator's lawyer understands; how this is really just the sampling debate of the 1990s all over again - in fact it makes me dizzy with a sense of proximal amnesia - and Girl Talk's use of the technology is not anywhere near as exciting as the Beastie Boys' was; how music writers as a broad group seem to be way behind the curve conceptually on this stuff; and how everyone should read The Gift by Lewis Hyde, or at least, as a starting point, the quite beautifully written NYT magazine feature about him this weekend.
(On a related subject, was I the only one who initially missed Suzanne Vega's charming NYT blog post [many weeks ago now] about how the infinite number of remixes of Tom's Diner came to be, and how she inadvertently helped invent the MP3? You can tell it's written by an artist because she's not afraid of what she doesn't know.)
I wish Ryan had incorporated lines from Madonna songs throughout Into the Drowned World and I could make all these points tie up neatly, but he didn't, but you get the general idea.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 17 at 1:47 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Darren O'Donnell:
Can he tell us how to get to Sesame Street?
I've got a piece about Toronto writer-artist-performer-impresario Darren O'Donnell, creator of Haircuts By Children along with much more, in the new issue of Toronto Life. It's a radically reduced version of my original but gets the job done as an introduction to O'Donnell and his take on participatory/relational/social art-theatre - which he charmingly reduces to an attempt to recapture the Sesame Street urban-community fantasies of his childhood in his real life in Toronto. Forget Allan Kaprow and the Internet, he hints - all this social-art stuff of the current generation might be traceable to the Children's Television Workshop.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, November 11 at 4:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Bienvenue Les Poules
What with all the Obamabanananess this week I've been remiss update-wise. So you're getting late notice that AIMToronto (the Association of Improvising Musicians) is doing another of its "Interface" series, in which locals improvise with visiting heavyweights. This time around the guests are Les Poules ("The Chicks"), the longstanding trio of Joane Hétu (sax & vox), Diane Labrosse (sampler) and Danielle Palardy Roger (percussion) from Montreal, who have been major contributors to the Quebec musique actuelle scene for some 28 years, not to mention a strong feminist presence in the improvimentalist thing internationally.
They'll be at Parkdale's own avant-living-room Somewhere There in various configurations with T-dot types tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm and Sunday afternoon at 3:30 pm. Tix are $15 ($10 for members, students, seniors, unemployed, "etc.") or $30 for all three shows. My particular recommendation goes to the Sunday matinee, which features a full Poules set as well as Labrosse and Roger playing with local accordionists Erin Crickett and the great Tiina Kiik, and Hétu with clarinetist Ronda Rindone and sax fella Jeremy Strachan (Feuermusik). Don't sleep.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 07 at 2:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Byrning Bright
Amazing time at the Songs of David Byrne & Brian Eno Toronto tour stop at Massey Hall last night. My review is up on The Globe & Mail website (bearing roughly the same headline as approximately one-third of all reviews of the tour thus far) (but at least it's accurate) (I wonder if he thought of the "Byrne/burn" pun when he was writing the song?).
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 30 at 8:55 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
November Gig Guide ...
... is in action! Check the gig-guide page and as always please notify us of errors and omissions. So far a quiet month compared to the past few, but I'm sure that won't last. Most notable so far perhaps are the Nov. 10 and 11 visit by Eugene Chadbourne to the Tranzac and Somewhere There, as well as The Bicycles' new CD launch, with a million friends as always, on Nov. 8.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 22 at 6:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Somethin' On My Mind: RIP Frankie Venom
I've been too swamped with other deadlines for le blogging this week although there's been tons to post about. (If you haven't caught the Take On Me, Literally video yet, give yourself a few minutes of happiness.)
But I wanted to drop in to share my sympathies to those who today are mourning Frank Kerr, aka Frankie Venom, of one of Canada's original and most indefatigable punk bands, Teenage Head. My favourite tribute so far is on The Last Pogo website: Frankie Venom talked the talk and he walked the walk. He also climbed staging, hung from rafters, rolled on broken glass, danced on tables and once, at the Colonial Underground in '76, either fell through the shoddy wooden stage (according to some) or crawled underneath and punched his way through.
(Forget it, Jake. It's Hammertown.)
That classic punk documentary is now finally out on DVD, by the way, and watching it would be one way to honour Frankie's memory. There'll also be a Last Pogo 30th-anniversary event at the scene of the original concert-crime, the Horseshoe Tavern, at the end of November.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 16 at 8:58 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Nadir's Big Chance (in Toronto)
I lost track of dates and overlooked telling you about tonight's Peter Hammill show in Toronto, at 8 pm at the Phoenix. Hammill's best known of course as the lead singer of British prog-proto-punk band Van Der Graaf Generator, in which capacity legend has it he was a prime influence on John Lydon's vocal style - more in the PiL era than in the Pistols - throw in a tincture of Berlin-period Bowie and lyric opera, and you've got a fair notion. My personal favourite Hammill period was when (like fellow prog veteran Peter Gabriel) he threw his lot in with the punk/post-punk/new-wave crowd and turned out a series of chilling monologic solo records, such as Nadir's Big Chance, A Black Box, The Future Now and Sitting Targets whose general mood is well summed up by the title, "The Institute of Mental Health, Burning."
Revisiting some of Hammill's stuff, I have a tad less appetite for all the drama than I did when I was 12, and his mellower, more measured and narrative writing of recent years, from what I've heard, gets a bit, well, English. But still, a heavyweight who continues to be as neglected as he was when Lydon was championing him, except by the more daring quarters of the prog constituency. I'm sure he'll have more to offer than the election returns do.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, October 14 at 10:35 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
ARTS GALA!
'No One Dances Like Michael Ondaatje'
I'm not sure the controversies during this election have been all that clarifying to Canadian artists about how we see our work, our role in society, the place of grant funding and our mode of relationship to the rest of the public. But Stephen Harper's sure making an entertaining foe - matching his belief that artists spend most of their time wearing gowns and going to glitzy galas with his impulse that the great thing about a global financial meltdown is that it's like a tag sale on stocks. It's not that Harper's an elitist or an anti-elitist - it's more that society as a whole is kind of a mystery to him. (I feel kind of sad for him.)
It's also produced quite a burst of agit-prop-making energy. As we go into the final weekend of the campaign, check out activist coalition Department of Culture's fundraisers across the country, as well as some of the quite impressive submissions to their Gone in 30 Seconds video contest. Meanwhile, I've just gotten this video from young Toronto band Hooded Fang (a reference of course to classic piece of Canadian literature - tho they're not the first musicians to drop that name). It gives Harper's gaffe a treatment that kinda reminds me of Electric Six's "Gay Bar" from a year, three ago. (Not that the arts are, like, gay or anything.) Ladies, gents and ordinary Canadians, let's go to an "Arts Gala."
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 09 at 2:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Can I Get an Ame ... Er, I Mean a 'Hail Satan'?
John Darnielle growls the praises of Toronto's "anti-war, but pro-horror" Blood Ceremony.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 29 at 3:52 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Inside Extermination Music Night
(In-Depth Version)
Zoilus amanuensis Chris Randle ran an interview with the organizers of Toronto fabled surreptitious-music-series Extermination Music Night in Eye weekly last month, but it was much truncated. This weekend, on the occasion of the latest in the EMN series (Sat at midnight; see the gig guide), we thought we'd run the full shebang. (Man, that's the dirtiest word.)
Chris: What inspired you to start doing the series?
Dan: I'd gone to these Wasteland events put on by Jubal Brown in the late 90s, that were done in factories...I started going to those when I was 17 or 18 and that had a pretty profound effect on me. Initially for me it was more of an aesthetic thing than a conceptual thing - maybe I thought about the conceptual aspects a bit later after the fact ...
Matt: I was living in Calgary for a while when I got out of school and I'd been interested in just going and looking at buildings like that, I did the same when I came here. I'd heard about the Wasteland parties that Jubal had done and I'd probably heard or read in magazines about people doing shows with generators...During certain years in Toronto people started putting on shows at alternate spaces so it kind of led off of that - why not do something where you rent the generator and then do it in an abandoned space?
[... continues ...]
What's the process for scouting out new locations? I know some of them are already used by skaters or rave kids...do you only use those established venues, or go looking for new ones?
Matt: We try to go and look for new ones. Dan does a lot of driving around looking at places. The thing is, most of the places that we've used are documented on the [urban] infiltration sites and stuff, just because they end up being the most reliable in a lot of ways.
Dan: Yeah. The last one I found out about from an urban exploration photoblog. A couple of friends had told us about the second one in the Buns Master factory. Our friend Ian had gone to a rave there a year previous or something. But yeah, mostly we'll find something on the internet and go check it out.
Matt: We sometimes come across places that we see and aren't sure if they're possible. There was one that...actually, that was the last one. I'd seen that site a while back and a friend had told me that...I don't know what it was, an assembly plant? And a friend of mine lives near there, he'd shown me that a couple years ago...I mentioned it to Dan but at that time it seemed really impossible. And it turned out to show up on one of those infiltration blogs. Then you realized "oh, okay, you can get in there."
Dan: They didn't have the location specified but they'd taken a photo from the tenth floor. And then I emailed Matt...
I know it's not a uniform thing, but what has the reaction from the cops been like? I remember there was one where they found you guys and then let it happen...
Matt: Yeah, there was one cop that came - we had just finished setting up when we could see their shadows wandering around the building. They opened up the door and they didn't come in, but they talked to Dan and asked us if we were allowed to be there. There was some hemming and hawing and then they said "In a word, no...You'll probably get a noise complaint, but good luck to you," and they left. It varies a lot depending on who it is.
Like, the last one, the cops were probably a bit more pissed off than they've been - although that's hard to say. They react depending on the situation. There's one that we did under the Lansdowne bridge and there was a fire lit under there, people chopping wood, and when they looked down on that and saw that it was on the train tracks they weren't too happy. But there've been other guys who almost... you look at them and you think they're kind of into it.
Dan: Yeah.
The last one was kind of insane - I don't know if you were out there for most of it but there was a Cockney bobby for some reason...
Dan: He came up to the eighth floor. He was pissed off. He was so pissed. Or he was acting pissed.
Yeah, they kept being like, "we're gonna let out the dogs..."
Matt: Did you see a dog?
I think they had - there was an ominous van, but...
Dan: Steve Kado's theory was that it was an mp3 dog. Just dog sounds.
Matt: I want to hear confirmation that somebody saw a dog. I heard a lot about hearing dogs, but nobody can claim to have seen a dog.
There were some pretty hilarious threats, like the whole "art party" thing ...
Matt: Yeah, that was pretty good. I enjoyed that.
It seems that they don't really care about it overall, though. They're not assigning a task force to it or anything.
Dan: No. Yeah, I guess ever since the rave scene died it's not really much of a concern.
Matt: And that could change on a dime, right? Any time these go off, we're just so happy because you know how those things can change. If something bad were to happen - if somebody were to do something stupid and hurt themselves or whatever...You know that they would make it Priority One. Stamp out illegal art parties!
Dan: There was one [urban-explorer] guy who died, a photographer. ... There wasn't much follow-up after that.
Matt: Yeah, I was worried. When I read about that happening just before the last one I thought, oh, this is going to make it into public consciousness and they're going to be all over this.
I think that sort of adds a sense of occasion, though, because not only is it something that only happens once in a site-specific sense, but it could also all end if some politician tries to crack down on it.
Dan: Yeah. I don't see how they'd be able to crack down on it, really. If they decided to charge us or something...
Matt: I think if they got really belligerent about it and were able to find out who was organizing it they would just slam those people really hard... Slamming them with the largest fines that they could. Not to say that I think this will happen.
There's that danger there, I guess. I think that's part of the appeal.
Matt: I'm sure that people either enjoy the sites or the architecture or just being in these places that they would never see ... the music, whatever goes on, the occasion of it, but on a fundamental level it's like when you're younger and the older kids come to your door and want to play a game of Fugitive or Manhunt or whatever... You're running around after dark with these kids ten years older than you -
It's play, not work...
Matt: I don't think that people really feel any fear going to this, but there's a certain level of -
Dan: There's a charge.
Matt: Yeah.
Dan: Just by the fact that there's no bureaucracy or mediating thing between the space and the event.
You're not actually risking your life, it's just this adrenaline -
Dan: Yeah.
Matt: I think - the analogy with the younger and older kids, and you know that it's a game but if they capture you they're gonna at least give you a really bad snakebite... it's the same with the cops. You could get a fine, they're going to be really nasty to you or whatever... It's that small amount of fear that gives it the charge.
Dan: Certainly for me, within the narrative of the series the authority factor doesn't figure in that prominently for me. For me it's not reactionary against the way music is normally performed, it's just an operation outside of that.
Matt: Yeah.
So it's not an oppositional thing.
Dan: No. That's not the intention, I don't understand how it could be read as that. The police don't factor into the narrative for me at all. Although, it's undeniable that when you put that many people in a space within that context, there will be a certain atmosphere that self-produces as a result of being unsanctioned.
Do you guys worry about it becoming too popular, just for logistical reasons? I know there was that one - not the last one, the one before - with 500 people or whatever...
Matt: I guess I would worry about it if it came to the point where this wasn't possible for some reason, but otherwise I don't give a shit about that. I'm not into saying "oh, this person should be here and this person shouldn't," or any of that shit. I don't care if 500 people show up or not, myself, other than that I want the thing to happen.
Dan: Fundamentally I don't care, but I have to admit that that one felt like it was too many people. Or not even too many people, but - I don't want to say the wrong type of people, but there were a lot of people there who didn't seem to get it, like it was just another party. I don't know.
Matt: I think that that's true, but at the same time I think if you say 50 people came simply because it was a party, and even 40 of them left just thinking "cool party!", there were probably at least ten people who were like, "weird," who were like, "What is this about?" It's their choice how to interpret it, and maybe most of them will interpret it as just "party," but it's worth it if ten people come away thinking "oh, there's something interesting here." Maybe it does something to somebody.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. I think you have to consider relational aesthetics, how the audience is interacting with one another in the space. I don't know, I don't really give a shit.
Matt: [laughs]
Are you guys experimenting with the formula at all? I know that one had the record sale, and at this last one there was the art on each floor...Do you have any idea what you're going to do with that in the future?
Dan: This summer - excluding the one that's coming up, because there isn't much of an art component to that - with the first two, [we were] definitely ushering in another phase...EMN 3.0?
[laughs]
Dan: But yeah, that was done to create a more total environment, and to more palpably recontextualize the space rather than just set up music...
Matt: In a lot of ways, it doesn't matter that that last one was busted. It still happened, it was there for a couple hours, and a lot of people still got to see interesting things for a short time. But it's a shame in a way, because that one I really felt was the place to be very different. It really was going to be mostly about those performance artists on those ten floors for the majority of the night - most of the music, or at least half of it, was going to happen on the roof, almost like... "Celebration" is too much, but I looked forward to it as being "everything else happened, now go look at this view up on the roof."
I was looking forward to the fact that it was based so much on the artwork, and it would be nice to do another one like that. This thing started off as being a lot about music, but people have come to it for other reasons. I think there's a lot of room to do interesting things because of that.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, definitely the original motivation for me was presenting music in a context that wasn't a bar - and actually, that last one, I have to say that I think the police presence kind of figured into the narrative
It was pretty awesome how you guys kept playing up there -
Dan: Even though I said that this isn't a reactionary thing, that felt really reactionary and overtly anti-authoritarian, maybe even in a corny way? I thought it was great.
Matt: We can't really take credit for that. The band was up there and they came to me as everyone was getting busted downstairs and were like, "what should we do? Should we play?" The thought of them playing at that point hadn't even occurred to me, I just assumed that it would all wind down, people would get ushered out. I wasn't really thinking about what we should do next, more responding to what's going to happen next. And then I was just like, "yeah, why not?" And they went ahead and did it.
[crosstalk]
Matt: I would love if somebody had footage of what was going on down on the ground with the cops at that time, because what I've heard from people is that there was a real reaction from them at that moment. Definitely not from the standpoint of "fuck you, cops," but I'd like to see the reaction on their face. I heard that it was just surprise. They were like, "Are you kidding me? The band is actually starting up with all these cop cars down here?"
One of the cops actually knew one of the people at the show.
Dan: I heard about that.
Matt: Really?
Dan: Yeah, there was a girl in a gold-lame bathing suit and she was like, "Karen!?" And the cop was like, "Kimberly!?"
Matt: Seriously. Really. That was that woman cop?
Dan: The woman cop, yeah.
There was this hilarious mix of reactions. I was just there with my hands up thinking it would be kind of gangster if Sandro Perri got a Polaris nomination and arrested in the same month.
Matt: What happened after these two recognized each other?
They were, y'know, hugging and stuff, at this crime scene...
Matt: That right there is the reason that this should get busted from time to time. That needs to happen on some level, you know? A cop should see - "oh, a friend of mine is here?" It's not criminal activity.
Was it conscious on your part to have the series be so widespread geographically? You've done one in the east end, you've done stuff right up on the beach or on Leslie Spit...
Matt: Totally. Yeah. I think the moment that really took hold was when Dan suggested doing one at the Guild Inn in Scarborough, and at first my initial reaction was, "Oh, that's too far, no one will go." And then I was like, "yeah, of course they'll go!" You can do these anywhere. I've been driving around a bit, and it may not even be possible - I just don't know if anything's available - but I'd really love to do one in Mimico or something like that, go in the other direction.
Dan: Yeah, for sure. Mississauga?
Matt: Yeah, yeah. And I'd love to go back and do one in Scarborough. Secretly, I'd love to do the Guild Inn. I think that - being very different from the other locations was also -
- with the columns?
Matt: Yeah. I'm kind of obsessed. I think it would be very interesting.
A lot of writers now talk about how the notion of a local scene is dead, because of the internet, or whatever, and I think EMN is a good response to that. It's like you're representing the totality of the city, rather than just a few bars and a few streets downtown...
Dan: I don't think Extermination Night would be as interesting in a city like Detroit, because abandoned buildings are par for the course there. Whereas here, it's like stepping out of - not necessarily a comfort zone, but stepping outside of the norm a bit, as far as the venue is concerned, and also as far as the location of the venue is concerned. Because of course the trip to the location is important. And also, just on a purely practical note, most of the locations that we can use happen to be outside of town.
Matt: We should be doing this interview in that abandoned house around the corner.
Dan: I think it would be really funny to do an Extermination Night in the alley behind Sneaky Dee's.
[laughs]
Dan: You should think about that. Put that on the backburner.
Matt: For some reason I've been interested in doing one that's, like, outdoors but walled in. It's not an original idea, I've seen pictures of shows that happened in spaces like that, but there's something really interesting about it. I wish we could find a place that's between some abandoned buildings, where you're not in the building, but in these - a maze, or an alleyway. That'd be really awesome. Especially if it was daytime.
[crosstalk]
It's almost as if it changes the way you think about the landscape. If you go to a bunch of these, when you're walking along you might start thinking "hey, this would be a good place for a show," instead of "hey, this is a weird, creepy abandoned building."
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's what I always think about when I look at these. My interest in ruins is primarily event-based. And that ties into the fact that it's unsanctioned. You can use this space, you just have to do it. You just have to do it! That's it.
Matt: By the same token, I'm interested in a more traditional sense - tradition in that, yeah, there's a history, a subculture of people who do this infiltration. I'm happy to hear if somebody goes to one of these things and is like, "I never even thought of looking at these buildings," and even if they're not looking at these spaces as "an event can go there," that there's an appreciation. I'd be happy to hear that people are like, "Yeah, one weekend I didn't have anything to do so some friends of mine, we thought about these events and just wanted to go look at some of these buildings." That's cool too.
In a normal show the centre of the attention is obviously the band and you're sort of spreading that around. ... You emphasize the building and even the audience more than usual.
Matt: I think as time goes on that becomes more pronounced. I really believe that a lot of people who come to this - as time goes on they come back for reasons other than a band playing there. They're just really interested in seeing these sites.
Dan: I'd say the emphasis is more towards the space than the people because...so many local shows I find that the emphasis is on the people rather than the band....Increasingly I find that shows in regular venues are more of a social call.
Matt: There's been some pretty brutal examples of that recently. To a level that I've never seen in Toronto before, to the point where there's an alleyway full of 200 people and inside where the band is actually playing there's 10.
Are you talking about that Cinecycle show?
Matt: Yeah. I've never been more upset by a show, actually. I was really - I don't mean to be negative or a nanny or anything, but I was really disappointed in us. As a city. At that show.
Do you just look at local bands, or -
Matt: No, we think about out-of-town stuff all the time, we just haven't had much luck with it. Primarily because ... given all the ways that this can fail - not fail, it never fails. Given all the ways that this can go wrong, it's hard for people to get up the gumption... They're really putting themselves out on the line by even participating in something like that.
It sounds like a story some serial killer would lure people in with.
Matt: We can't offer money or any sort of guarantee about anything, that they'll even get to play. And so understandably, touring bands or people from outside the city, it's kinda hard to do. I mean, the most we've been able to muster is bringing in a band from Guelph at this point
[laughs].
Dan: I was talking to this guy in Buffalo...Who's the big minimalist violin player? He named the Velvet Underground?
Tony Conrad?
Dan: Yeah, I was talking to Tony Conrad. I actually talked to him on the phone and he was into the idea, and then I never heard back from him.
Matt: I've talked to some bands from out west in the States and some bands from Texas, friends of mine, and sent a lot of information about this thing and people are very excited about it, but it's just a matter of, does the actual date line up with them being on tour and halfway across their country? It's hard if you're trying to find someone close to where we are who's also willing to do this at a specific time.
Dan: We've definitely thought about people who are relatively close-by, like Wolf Eyes or even New York bands.
[banter]
Dan: That's pretty comprehensive.
Matt: A lot better than the CBC interview.
What'd they interview you guys for?
Matt: The Leslie Spit one.
Dan: The whole event sounded very quaint..."You know, we're just listening to some music on the beach here, whatever..."
Matt: And we sounded at the same time like pretentious hosers. I don't know how you managed to sound like a hoser.
Maybe they edited it down, so every third sentence you'd be like "So as Debord says..."
Dan: Kinda. I didn't quote anybody. Oh, there was one quote...there's an article in Spacing coming out, and I quoted Zizek. This was the quote. The quote was this. Let me tell you what the quote was. A true act...a true act, uh...creates the, um...oh, fuck.
Matt: What, did you bring the book along? Was it an email interview?
Dan: It wasn't an email interview! It was an interview in person...The quote is something like "a true act creates the conditions for its own possibility." There it is.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 19 at 4:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Horsetail Feathers!
Final Fantasy meets Alex Lukashevsky
(and Nico Muhly and many others)
At the request of longtime Zoilus favourite Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett), I'm very happy to offer you this preview of the opening track from Owen's new EP, Final Fantasy Plays to Please, which is a set of covers of songs by Alex Lukashevsky, a fellow Torontonian singer-songwriter and also of course leader of Deep Dark United, played with as many as 35 other musicians, dubbed the St. Kitts Orchestra (an expansion, then, on the St. Kitts String Quartet, who played on the last FF album He Poos Clouds), featuring members of the Hidden Cameras, Drumheller, Andrew Bird and others. The results are a jangling candybox of sound spilling from Pallett to aural palette, presenting Alex's songs in more accessible surrounds than usual, and perhaps introducing him to a host of other musicians who might begin to draw on his rich catalogue. Here then is a taste: Horsetail Feathers.
(This is the first time Zoilus has hosted an MP3 file, and it required a lot of tricky tech I've never used before, so if there's any trouble downloading the file, please drop me a note. Update: I think the problems people had should be fixed now.)
The EP is one of a pair being released at tomorrow's show at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto (the CD gods willing), the other being Spectrum, which features the members of Beirut and is the first installment of Owen's long-threatened imaginary-world conceptual suite, which will continue on the upcoming album, Heartland. (Exclaim! explains in detail.) A song from Spectrum and another from P2P were posted on Stereogum this morning.
Owen's show tomorrow is together with NYC compositional prodigy Nico Muhly, who in his mid-20s has collaborated with the likes of Bjork and Philip Glass and Bonnie Prince Billy but more importantly, as documented in this well-circulated New Yorker profile by Rebecca Mead, has a sensibility all his own, a classical version of the mashup and YouTube mind, and also a fresh-feeling kind of amodernism - neither post- nor anti-modernist, he seems unusually capable of bypassing not only the old 20th-C debates but also the conventional bypasses of said 20th-C debates. His new album Mothertongue blends the babble of digital information overload with the brouhaha of history, via his love of 16th-century English church music. (He's also a ridiculously entertaining blogger. If he weren't so charming I might want to kill him.)
Besides some evident sonic sympathies (the violin music, the use of looping figures, the unabashed embrace of prettiness, the knife-edge-thin layer of camp), Muhly shares with Owen a concern for communication and affinity and collectivity: Just as Owen has been stalwart to his compatriots in the Blocks Recording Club of Toronto, Muhly has made common cause with labelmates in a project called Bedroom Community, an Iceland-based label (not so local-aurist, then) that gathers "like-minded, yet diverse individuals from different corners of the globe who all creatively orbit around an inconspicuous building and its inhabitants on the outskirts of Reykjavik Iceland- Greenhouse Studios where the music is mostly created." (Another Bedroom Communitarian is Sam Avidon, a frequent Muhly cohort [/boyfriend?] who also appears in Toronto on Wednesday.)
I'd been planning to say more about Muhly but as the technical challenges of this post (yes, I'm a digi-wimp) have taken up too much time, I'll reserve further thoughts till after tomorrow's show. Meanwhile as a warmup, here's a video of Muhly's "It Goes Without Saying," from his previous album:
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 26 at 6:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
Teenager Hamlet 2006-2008:
Something Un-Rotten in the State of Toronto
I'm giddily happy and/or terribly frightened to tell you that the long-awaited movie Teenager Hamlet 2006 - created by Zoilusian friend and occasional collaborator Margaux Williamson and including deeply humiliating cameo appearances by, um, me - will be making its premiere next week in the Toronto International Film Festival, and screening daily throughout the week at the Katherine Mullherin gallery.
Musically, the soundtrack of the film was supervised by Steve Kado (aka The Blankket, former head of the Blocks Recording Club and member of the Barcelona Pavilion, Ninja High School, etc.) and it includes music by Kado as well as Toronto artists such as Tomboyfriend, Traditionm, Nifty (Matt Smith), Permafrown, Pony Da Look and Republic of Safety, plus some Diamanda Galas, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Beethoven and Shostakovich.
Above is the trailer, if you're the sort who likes to get sneak peeks, or (blatant solicitation) the sort who might program movies for exhibition in other cities or countries. Zoilus-skin-flick aspect aside, the film is truly beautiful and unassumingly smart. As it says in the synopsis: "A startling hybrid of make-believe and documentary, art and politics, Teenager Hamlet 2006 is an insightful and off-beat look at what it means to live and make art in the 21st century."
Don't miss out: Put it on your calendar if you're coming to the festival.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, August 26 at 5:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
'Do You Suffer from Post-Mortem Depression?'
The gold-medal record-release announcement of the month, reproduced below, including persistent misuse of semi-colon as colon.
"Wintage Records & Tapes proudly present; Disguises' highly anticipated debut lp, Post-Mortem Depression, launch party!!
9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ??????? 9/11/08 ?????
"Taking place @ 5 non-traditional venues all in secret locations ??? Incorporating a night of live musical performances,very unique non-traditional venues, guided walking tours, DJ set by King Greyskullz, live visuals, and interactive theatre/performance art that will culminate in attendees being "kidnapped" and driven off to the final secret location for the Disguises performance.
"Included with ticket purchase you get a map, w/times & locations (in case a ticket holder has to play catch up) & instructions. Guaranteed to be a once in a lifetime concert going experience!
"Making fans through the suggestive power of "Stockholm Syndrome" DISGUISES are proud to release their debut lp; Post-Mortem Depression featuring hit songs such as; Meathead, What Happened to Your Face, T.H.R.E.A.D.S., Dead Patterns, Flesh Bodies ... and more.
"With very special performances by; Lambsbread (Delaware, OH) Ecstatic Peace recording superstars are a three-peese mixed gender spazz/jazz punk aktion unit. There bio reads, Sabbath meets Coltrane. They have had nothing but ++ reviews, strong word of mouth, and in the words of Paris Hilton are "Hot" right now! WHERE:?????
"Bottom Feeder(Hamilton) Ex-Fossils duo consisting of minds eye
splintering Horn headwallop and Scum/Sic/Surge electrifiried pedal slomp! WHERE:?????
"R.O.M.I.N.S. Random jet blasts of confusion and wrestling
the dada bird are this duo's thrash palace. Molding mind matter into conscious thought, the tools they will be using for this night a secret..it is left up to our own psychic prowess to decipher the mysteries ... WHERE:??????
"WHERE:???????????
"Tickets available in very limited quantities (hand ##) 08/22/08 !!! @ Hits & Misses (on Bloor), Rotate This (on Queen), & Soundscapes (on College). Tix are $7 (only in advance!!!). Doors 8pm."
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, August 20 at 1:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Whoopsie!
I found out today that the ALL CAPS Dufferin Grove Park show I had listed for today is, in fact, next Saturday. I apologize if I led anyone astray. If it is any comfort, I led myself astray too. Sorry, then, also to me.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, August 02 at 5:30 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Matmos and Leprechaun Catering:
Their Minds Are Not For Rent/ To God or Government
Great set last night by Matmos at the Music Gallery, as always, though certainly less of a spectacle than their usual inanimate-(or animate)-object-sampling, cabinet-of-wonders performances, due to the "no microphones" constraint on their new synthesizer-celebrating album Supreme Balloon.
Drew Daniel & Martin ("MC") Schmidt of Matmos are aware that nobody wants to sit and watch someone play a laptop for two hours, so they had plenty of video and a few ritual physical acts and other shenanigans to keep the optic nerve sated while the ears drank in the sounds. For 'zample, I'm not all that aurally enamoured of the long mesmeric title track, with which they closed the show, but it perfectly suits the psych-out op-art film they showed along with it of expanding dots and planets and seas, and the other dancey, crunchy, noisy, spacey tunes and acts of telepathy and numerology all came off dreamily.
The encore was especially fun - I assume it was improvised, as Martin went off to the dormant piano in the back corner of the church, pounding out some classical riffs that Drew then sampled and turned into a noise symphony that toyed with our spatial perceptions of the sources of the sounds.
My only real complaint is that it was the wrong encore: How dare they play Toronto without playing the new disc's tribute to our own experimental-animation-and-direct-sound proto-homocore king Norman McLaren, Exciter Lamp & the Variable Band, which contains a round-the-bend cover of O Canada. (See video below.)
However, that was compensated by tourmates Leprechaun Catering from Baltimore (where Matmos now live, as Drew's become a professor at John Hopkins). The openers named each of the pieces in their noisy, mad-laboratory improvised set with titles that acronym to "Toronto" ("Tits on Reindeer Offer Nourishment to Offspring," for instance, but my favourite was "Therefore, Our Rap Operas Need Tighter Oratorios"; I couldn't help spending much of the set trying to come up with more - my best was, "Teach Old Rover One New Trick, Okay?").
And they topped that off by playing a Theremin-led cover of Rush's Tom Sawyer (with Drew acting as "human microphone stand" because a metal microphone stand will fuck up your Theremin's mojo) - I dearly hope someone will post it on YouTube (like maybe that guy sitting in front of me who spent the entire show watching it through the little screen on his digital camera, taking 30-second clips - why bother coming to the concert if you'd much prefer watching it on a four-inch TV?): As Gallery programmer/host Jonny Dovercourt put it, "We stand on guard for Lee."
Please read the very funny and informative Matmos interview transcript posted by Zoilusian protegé Chris Randle on his rival blog.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 22 at 6:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Two Jazz-Funk Great Happenings
Besides the Matmos show at the Music Gallery on Monday (celebrating their recent release, Supreme Balloon), the duo's younger half, the lovely and brilliant Drew Daniel, seen above getting groped by (who knows? but we'll guess) a drunken fan, will be appearing Monday afternoon at 1 pm at This Ain't the Rosedale Library in Kensington market to read from and discuss his very fine book in the 33 1/3 series (which also published my book) on Throbbing Gristle (whose logo is also above) and their album 20 Jazz Funk Greats (not to be confused with the very fine blog of the same name). Drew is as entertaining a talker as Matmos is a band, and if you can spare some sunny summer afternoon time, I bid you to hit up both events.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 16 at 5:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Woah, oh, oh, we're counting to four
This has been everywhere, of course, but why not here, too? The thing about the Sesame Street remake of Feist's hit is that it seems like a revelation of the real nature of the song - it's always been a counting song (a form found all over the world - music and math being a natural marriage). It was just disguised as a love song. So the self-parody is an improvement, as if the original version had just been an excuse to get to this point.
Of course, you can't go too wrong when you put Sesame Street, music and counting together:
That last was the Pointer Sisters. And that's not even getting into the oeuvre of the Count. Meanwhile, since we're at it: Philip Glass does Sesame Street (from either 1977 or 1979, depending who you ask):
Seventies Sesame Street is one of the few things capable of making me feel positively overcome with nostalgia - like, chloroformed with a nostalgia-soaked rag. Congratulations to Leslie for joining that great lineage.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 15 at 4:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
You Scream, I Scream,
and Then You Scream My Scream
I've neglected to mention up till now the action going on in the Scream festival, which culminates in Monday's Scream in High Park reading night. Partly in dishonor of the current blaze over Bill C-61, the fabulously flawed proposed copyright reform, the theme of this year's Scream is "Copyright, Collaboration, and Appropriation." So for instance tonight at the Gladstone local poet Kevin Connolly offers his poem "Plenty" up to re-inventions by playwright Conor Green, artist Olia Mischenko, filmmaker Tamara Romanchuk and musician NQ Arbuckle (followed by a set by the pleasantly gruff Mr. Arbuckle).
Then tomorrow at The Boat, Kenneth Goldsmith, Alexis Muirhead, Sonja Ahlers, M. NourbeSe Philip and Michael Maranda take part in a panel on Fair Use (chaired by York prof and sometime music writer Marcus Boon at 7 pm, followed by readings from various pirate-minded creative projects and finally a DJ set by local appropriation ace Brian Joseph-Davis. Friday night at Type Books Paul Petro Gallery (see explanation in the Comments), there's an 11 pm screening of fanfilm and machinima; Saturday there will be a theatrical performance using poet Jack Spicer's last lecture as a "script"; and Sunday night at Arraymusic there's an intriguing exploration of the space between text, voice and tune, as composer Paul Swoger-Ruston tries to "transl(oc)ate" three local poets' reading styles into music.
Finally on Monday at High Park, there's the marquee event, where I'm humbled to say I've been invited to read. (Reportedly I'm the first nonfiction writer to read in the Scream's 16-year history.) I'm planning to enact the theme, in part, by stealing material directly from readers of this blog - prepare to sue me!
PS: Before the Monday reading, there'll be a semi-surreptitious guided walk through the woods at High Park, which is actually an impressive natural conservancy beneath its guise of local dog-walking, picnic-having locale and Scream/Dream venue - a fact too many artsy attendees don't learn about. Get in touch if you want details.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 09 at 5:09 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
All the Young Dave Matthews Dudes
(Were Not at the Alejandro Escovedo Show)
(Plus: RIP Schroer; Polaris noms)
When Alejandro Escovedo asked the crowd at the Mod Club last night whether any of us had seen him opening on the last Dave Matthews Band tour, he seemed surprised (and a bit amused) to find that not a single soul in the club had. Clearly it's reasonable for a performer to hope and expect that a crossover experience like that will bring new fans to their own shows, but Dave Matthews isn't as big a deal in Canada as he is south of the border, and the people who go to DMB shows aren't that likely to come to the Mod Club - despite it being a larger venue than anywhere else Alejandro's played in Toronto (I used to see him at Ted's Wrecking Yard, and he reminisced from the stage about playing the Ultrasound, which predates me), the sizable crowd last night was just the accumulated result of a slow building love affair between Alejandro and Toronto.
I wonder what he'd have done differently if he'd known. The set list and style of the performance last night was very much in summer-rock, even jam-bandish mode, with a lot of emphasis on guitar solos. Lead guitarist David Pulkingham certainly has the chops for the job, but he's more of a stylistic chameleon - while he can switch from blues bruising to flamenco-ish classical guitar, he doesn't make his own stamp on the music. Whereas when Alejandro plays even the simplest lick, it rings with his soulfulness. You could almost feel him urging Pulkingham on to reach in deeper, but I think he's too gentle a guy to play the disciplinarian. The cost, for me, was a much less emotionally moving show than I've ever gotten from Alejandro, who usually leaves me buzzing with feelings. But I couldn't really complain about the closing round of covers, exuberant versions of All the Young Dudes, Beast of Burden and I Wanna Be Your Dog that sent us out glowing into the summer heat. And it did get me excited about his new record - Real Animal, which chronicles his musical life from his days in the Nuns in San Francisco (opening for the Sex Pistols) through twang-rock bands of the 80s to days living in the Chelsea Hotel and then the Austin scene of the 1990s, people loved and lost, and so on.
I'll look forward to the next time he returns on his own, or with a string trio, or one of his other many versatile combinations, rather than the showbizzed-up version we saw last night. Although that may be awhile, since his recent very conspicuous endorsement by Bruce Springsteen might keep him in the arena-rock, er, arena for a while yet. (It's got to be a lot less painful than his last high-profile media appearance - getting the nod from George W Bush for his song "Castanets," which Alejandro said last night kept him from playing the song for a while.)
Much else to talk about - the death of Oliver Schroer. Owen (Final Fantasy) Pallett dropped me a line over the weekend to say how sad he was about his fellow violinist's death, and lamenting that Schroer's explorations weren't the kind that tend to attract Internet-music-fan attention; read the lovely final-days interview with Diane Flacks from the Toronto Star last week. And then of course there are the Polaris nominations - I'm half-tempted to rage against the outcome, but I'm afraid the leaning towards broadly appealing, smart youth rock (as opposed to non-rock genres, as well as pricklier rock sounds) is a product of the process that's involved in the Polaris, which I'm beginning to think is, well, perhaps too democratic for the award's good (imho).
The winner will depend on the makeup of the final 11-judge panel, of course, but if I were to bet now? I'd say Caribou.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 08 at 1:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
My Weekend & Open-Source Cobra!
After a busy three-legged stool of a sort-of long weekend, I'm back. Went to see Lee Scratch Perry on the waterfront on Monday night along with, it seemed, every single other citizen of Toronto between 20 and 50. Now that he's in his 70s, Perry's rantings sometimes seem a little bit less like mystic communiques and more like the distracted brain-emissions of your grandma, but he commanded the stage and the crowd (and the smoke machine that seemed to be stowed inside his hat) and his young band (he told us it was new, and seemed to imply the players were Canadian, but it was difficult to be sure) summoned up the Black Ark vibe nicely - though after about 40 minutes, I hit what I call the "reggae wall," aka the limit of how long someone who doesn't use THC (allergic) can listen to the same rhythm and relatively similar melodies, standing on pavement out in the sun, without starting to nod off.
Also hit up the latest in the clandestine Extermination Music Night series, which this time was held in a disused office tower and was intended to be part art show as well as concert. But most of the intended action was cut short by the unusually swift arrival and harsh attitude of the police, some of whom were slow to realize that what they were busting was pretty much the most geeky, mild-mannered bunch of art-nerd criminals imaginable. Hearing the newish local band Brides defiantly playing their set up in the tower while the rest of us were sitting in the grass getting ID'd by the cops will certainly be a music memory for '08. In the end nobody was in serious trouble, and you can't blame the cops for shutting down an event founded on breaking into somewhat dangerous, beautifully derelict places (the lead cop got into amusingly befuddled arguments with audience members, like, "You can't call it art - it's trespassing!" as if being illegal and being art were somehow mutually exclusive terms). It was just disappointing not to see more of the art and performances - in the final moments we were rushing from floor to floor to see the sights like tourists who realized they hadn't yet looked at the Mona Lisa, just as their bus was about to leave.
Finally, please direct your attention to this page, where you can learn about an exciting upcoming set of classes, taught by Misha Glouberman (of Trampoline Hall, Room 101 Games, and Nuit Blanche 2007's "Terrible Noises for Beautiful People" fame), in which you can learn to "play" John Zorn's crazy-quilt game/composition Cobra - an opportunity to growl, howl, spit and buzz with a bunch of other people while pointing at your nose, taking your hat on and off and forming guerrilla squads. And, along the way, drop some inhibitions, meet new people and learn something about the art of improvisation. Plus, you get to become part of an underground society, as Zorn originally intended the rules of Cobra to be kept secret. If all that intrigues you (or scares you in a good way), go read that page, or just drop a line to improvise@mglouberman.com. You won't regret it - Misha is a gifted and amusing teacher, and I know that the people who took his last Cobra class (he also teaches other classes in vocal and physical improv) were thrilled with the results. Prices and scheduling are still up in the air (probably eight classes, once a week), but they'll start soon, so act fast.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 02 at 5:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Suoni Per il Toronto:
Evan Parker Trio, Feuermusik, Neptune
I was disappointed to see so little coverage in the downtown weeklies in Toronto yesterday of the Suoni per il Toronto mini-festival at the Music Gallery this weekend, a spinoff of the Suoni per il Popolo festival in Montreal (a month-long celebration of adventurous and oppositional music). In particular, it's a shame that the rare visit from British saxophone improvising giant Evan Parker (and his likewise-eminent trio partners Barry Guy, bass, and Paul Lytton, percussion) got no coverage. For the uninitiated the video above should give you an idea (it's the same trio but with the addition of pianist Agusti Fernandez at the Mulhouse jazz festival in Alsace, 2007). I'm too short on time today to detail Parker and company's extensive history, but here are a few testimonials. The show tonight begins at 7 pm (with solo bass by Aaron Lumley), doors at 6 pm, Parker Trio at 8 pm; show up early for the Gallery's summer BBQ.
Also, tomorrow afternoon Parker & Lytton present a free workshop for local improvisers (plus us looky-loos and listeny-lees) at 2 pm. Musicians would be foolish to miss it!
"UK saxophonist Evan Parker is one of the true pioneers of European free improvisation. He is recognized as the creator of a new solo saxophone language, extending the techniques and experiments started by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, but taking them away from the rhythmically jazz-related areas and into the realm of abstraction. In particular, his use of circular breathing techniques to create extended, complex and overlapping soundscapes is generally seen as the apex of saxophone virtuosity." - bio on Music Gallery website
"Parker: speed, dexterity, instantaneous interplay, refinement, razor sharpness, almost scientific technical achievement (especially on the soprano saxophone, which he has virtually reinvented), and a graciousness and cooperative spirit in collective settings that he has labelled the 'agree to agree' approach." - John Corbett
"Evan Parker breathes like Tiger Woods swings a driver: smooth, seamless, a complete motion that converts potential energy to kinetic with the inevitability of an apple dropped from a tree. And both artists work with the bold precision that comes with having endlessly refined their technique. Parker ... might be the most important European jazz improviser alive." - Joe Gross, Austin AmericanStatesman
Eye weekly did, fortunately, give some ink to tomorrow night's cd release show for the new No Contest by Feuermusik, the sax-and-buckets duo of Jeremy Strachan and Gus Weinkauf that's been making some of the most exciting, direct jazz-improv music in Canada in recent years. Read Helen Spitzer's fine interview with the guys.
On the bill with Feuermusik (who will be bringing their "big band" incarnation for the occasion) is intriguing Boston-area band Neptune, who build all their instruments themselves - baritone guitars, basses, "lamellophones," pipe xylophones, even synthesizers - out of "circular saw blades, gas tanks, oil drums, bike parts, VCR casings, and miscellany from the trash." The video below provides a pretty compelling depiction of the results.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, June 27 at 10:17 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
I, I, I, I Am Gonna Play Sun City ... Girls!
(Plus: Laurie Anderson, Parkdale Public, and RIP The Silt)
Laurie Anderson in Homeland.
I was out of town much of the weekend so I missed all manner of North By Northeasterly, Luminatic and other action; however you can read my review of Friday night's Luminato show by Laurie Anderson in yesterday's Globe and Mail. ("When reality catches up to an avant-garde icon.")
Tonight I am going to try to run between the Parkdale Public School vs. Queen West's seventh round, "Parkdale Strings vs. Blocks Recording Club" (featuring child musicians of the Senior Strings class working with Kids on TV, The Phonemes and Bob Wiseman) at 7 pm at the Gladstone, and the great Alan and Sir Richard Bishop of the now-defunct Sun City Girls paying tribute to their fallen comrade Charlie Gocher, at the WhipperSnapper Gallery. Full report to follow.
And I might even try to run from there to the Tranzac to catch some of what I'm sorry to hear (rather suddenly) will be the final show by The Silt, one of the most beloved configurations (Ryan Driver, Marcus Quin and Doug Tielli) of the core personnel of the Rat-Drifting label. In tribute, I'll post the very first piece I (or, I think, anybody else) ever wrote about the Silt, from 2000. Hard to believe it's been eight damn years. Thanks for all the weird pretty and pretty weird music, boys. Read all about it on the jump.
Silting up a cacophonic comfort zone
SCENE
CARL WILSON
17 August 2000
The Globe and Mail
"We think we know almost exactly what some of our songs sound like," proclaims Ryan Driver, who plays guitar, drums, synthesizers, flute and duck calls with Toronto group the Silt. The trio also features multi-instrumentalists Doug Tielli (a trombone specialist) and Marcus Quin (clarinet).
Having attended four or five Silt shows in recent months, I think I know almost exactly what some of their songs sound like, too. But I'm not sure how to put it into words, to persuade you to go hear them in this Sunday's edition of the weekly Wavelength series at Ted's Wrecking Yard. Driver's statement, with all its double-take syntax and self-sabotaging qualifiers, is probably your best clue. Take it as a mini-manifesto.
The Silt is turning out to be one of Toronto's natural resources, alongside the likes of Hawksley Workman, with whom they share hummability, flamboyance, classicism, and a willingness to be fey and vulnerable that, at its best, makes audiences giddily nervous.
All three members of the Silt, though no strangers to song (Tielli's last band was the semi-popular People From Earth, and if his last name reminds you of the Rheostatics, so be it), are fixtures on the youthful improvised-music scene in Toronto. That means they're used to wielding their axes to clearcut across musical expectations, sever melodic lines and splinter steady beats. They are comfortable with cacophony.
Maybe too comfortable. And that's what gives this group its special frisson: Having learned to play without rules, they have reinstituted them, to render themselves neophytes all over again.
Any given Silt song sounds like it might break down and lapse into improv. But it never happens. Instead, they might pause, suspend a note or a silence in the air, as if considering the potential for chaos . . . and then sing the next verse. They're on probation for breaking the laws of music, and the Silt is their halfway house.
Combine this with the perverted-Beach-Boys falsetto harmonies, delicate repetitive riffs, slow pace, false endings, unlikely instrument pairings, and archly exaggerated poetry (A Song About a Red Whistle is a typical Silt title) and you get something at once rather haunting and beautiful, and absurdly funny.
They achieve that rich and rare thing, sincere sarcasm. "I know this is stupid, and unsophisticated, with all these heartfelt, childish lyrics and old-fashioned tonality," a Silt song tells you, "but I really mean it. I can't help it. I think life is like this."
This is a very difficult effect to get. It's what people such as Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and McSweeney's magazine), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), and George Saunders (Civilwarland in Bad Decline) have been trying to do in literature.
It demands not only deft manipulation of materials, but an audience willing to entertain contradictory thoughts and feelings simultaneously. It requires an agreement on both sides that it's just too easy to give in to cynicism and disdain. Sometimes those much-hyped young writers manage it; often they just seem excessively pleased with themselves.
The Silt are so low-key that they avoid that pitfall. What they risk is being misunderstood, looking as if they don't know what they're up to. But they do. It took me a couple of hearings to realize how funny they were, and another couple to decide that the awkward bits were the prettiest parts.
As with Pavement, or Palace, or poet David Berman's Silver Jews, the Silt's humour is bone-dry, the sentiments slippery. They truck in the kind of truth that wriggles out of your hand, only to sliver its way under your skin. Like a tape that plays in your sleep and suggests that when you wake you'll quit smoking, or fighting, or giving up on yourself.
That's what they sound like. Almost exactly. I think.
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, June 17 at 12:57 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (10)
Love Don't Change
Tonight marks the release of Eric Chenaux's latest album, Sloppy Ground, a lovely term for its main subject matter, which Eric describes as not the beginning or the ending but the middle of love - the main part, that is, but the most overlooked, the part for which we need much more music: the "ever after" that follows the closing clinch of the courtship dance. There's a nice interview with Eric in Eye today too. Meanwhile Eric's frequent collaborator Ryan Driver (of Deep Dark United, Silt, Reveries, etc) has his first solo album, enticingly titled Feeler of Pure Joy, coming out on home-base label Rat-drifting. (Both releases are celebrated tonight with a show at Wrongbar in Toronto.)
Additional Thursday reading: David Dacks has a perspicacious survey of the new generation of Toronto soul on AOL Canada of all places.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 29 at 2:01 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
The Sadies' Most Wanted
Toronto's pride The Sadies exercise a light-hearted version of YouTubin' vigilante justice by posting this security-cam footage of some asshole breaking into their van and grabbing their GPS unit, and the group's discovery of the theft, all given a Dukes of Hazzard-esque rollicking soundtrack. If only cameras were on the spot more often when bands' instruments and gear get ripped off, but that's usually from the back alley behind some club. The video's very funny-sad - them Sadies never met a lemon they couldn't turn into a bourbon sour. If you do recognize the perp in these pics, let their management know.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, May 26 at 1:56 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Concrete Tonight!
Just a reminder of the show at the Polish Combatants' Hall at 206 Beverley St. (a block south of College at Cecil St), 8 pm. Door price has been reduced to $15 (same as the advance price)! Think concretely - wear grey! (See details in sidebar.)
If you can't make it tonight, remember that it's also happening next Sunday at the Science Centre in the afternoon.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, May 25 at 2:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Speaking Concretely
Here's the email interview Sarah Liss did with me about Concrete Toronto Music, the show Jonny Dovercourt of the Music Gallery curated with me, happening tomorrow (Sunday) at the Polish Combatants' Hall downtown and the following Sunday at the Ontario Science Centre (we've got a bus chartered to take people there).
Can you guys both give me a bit of a backgrounder on the genesis of this project and your involvement in it? How much were architectural and acoustic concerns on your mind(s) before taking this on? Was the book your key source of inspiration, or were either of you already thinking about a project that would encourage musicians to interact with some of the city's not-typically-musical spaces?
The idea was born at the Coach House launch party this winter where the Concrete Toronto book was being launched - at the same time as the bpNichol anthology, which got me thinking about the concrete buildings/concrete poetry parallel in '60s and early '70s culture. And then of course the "musique concrete" connection occurred to us too.
Jonny and I were both saying how much we liked the book and then one of us - I think me but I'm not sure - said we ought to do a site-specific show in honour of it.
I think we've both been interested in site-specific shows (such as the Extermination Music Night series or a couple of the shows Jonny's old band Republic of Safety played) for a long time, and in particular Toronto-celebrating and Toronto-exploring culture. So it wasn't a huge leap.
Concrete Toronto: just a clever play on musique concrete, or a name with deep connotative meaning - discuss.
Most of the music in the show won't, I don't think, have much relationship to musique concrete, though some of it will. The name of the show is just taken directly from the book, but I like the phrase too - that what we're paying tribute to here is the "concrete" Toronto - the tangible, physical Toronto - rather than an abstract idea of the city, like the one sometimes evoked (by me and Jonny among others) the past few years by the phrase "Torontopia."
[... continued...]
I'm not familiar with the Concrete Toronto book -- would you mind setting it up for me and talking about why it's so interesting?
The main thing I love about the book is that it takes a long look at exactly the structures that a lot of people in this city might consider the ugly ones - all the 1960s university buildings, Robarts, the Science Centre, New City Hall (ok, most people like that one), the Gardiner Expressway - and considers them as our architectural heritage, with their own kind of beauty and meaning. It makes the case that at least some of that heritage should be preserved just as much as our Victorian and Edwardian buildings are.
Preservationists discuss how the real danger period for losing heritage buildings is in the 30-to-40-year period after they were built, because that's when they seem just deeply unfashionable but not yet part of official History. So Concrete Toronto comes along just at that moment of danger as a low-key kind of intervention.
And because I was a child when these buildings were new, I have a strong emotional reaction there, too - I feel like, ugly or beautiful, that's the Toronto that partly made me. I was born here but didn't live here as a kid - I was in not-so-concrete-filled Brantford, Ont. But Toronto was still the big city over the horizon, and I found it all so exciting when we would visit - there'd be big bus trips to the Science Centre every few years and it was pretty much the most fantastic place a kid could visit, for example. Especially since I wasn't a nature-loving kid, these concrete Toronto buildings lie somewhere near the core of my urban-space-loving heart. I think that must be somewhat true for a good chunk of this generation, but it's not something that has a public acknowledgment, unlike other parts of our relationship to the built and natural environment around us.
How (and why) did you choose the roster of contributing artists for this project? What concerns did you have to keep in mind that don't necessarily come up when you're programming, say, an event at the Music Gallery? Were you more interested in finding musicians who'd already proven themselves in space-navigating ways, or did you have a sense that you wanted to challenge folks like Tony (whose singer/songwriter background seems much more traditionally pop-oriented than many of the other artists on the bill) in order to see what they'd come up with?
Jonny and I just kicked names around and then saw who was available. There were people we couldn't get - our first pick was the now-defunct Barcelona Pavilion, since they sang and thought a lot about architecture, but some of the ex-members were out of town. But we thought about people whose work evoked the themes. In CCMC's case, they were a band founded in the era these structures were built, and through Paul Dutton very strongly connected with the concrete-poetry/sound-poetry nexus that bp Nichol represented. In Tony's case, I thought that he sang a lot about the body and the environment but not about its harder surfaces, so it would be neat to put him together with Sandro, whose electronic side as Polmo Polpo connected with the musique-concrete aspect. And so on.
How did you settle on the Polish Hall and the Science Centre? What's so special about them?
They're buildings that are represented in the book. The Science Centre was our first thought. Jonny did some digging on other possibilities, and then it was a question of what was available. The Polish Combatants' Hall is a great combination of old-world and new-world, and the Eastern European connection calls up for me the Soviet-era expanses of concrete architecture that were built as workers' housing. It's a very poetic, out-of-time kind of space, both quaint and muscular, as people who attend that show will see.
Carl, can you talk a bit about the text you've composed for the show? Is it a straight collabo with Darren [O'Donnell, the other librettist], or are you guys working independently? What was your process -- i.e. were you working alongside Erik [Ross, the composer] or did he provide the framework before you started writing?
Darren and I worked independently and just gave Erik some text he could work with. Jonny mediated the contact with Erik - he left the parameters very wide open. I wrote a much bigger piece that included some pop-song-style lyrics -- about Toronto concrete buildings, kind of modeled on The Modern Lovers' bursts of enthusiasm (in songs like Government Center) -- as well as a more concrete-poetry minded section that worked with anagrams to generate language about music and buildings.
Erik edited the text as he saw fit. I was just pouring in the raw materials, you could say. I'm not sure what his process with Darren was like. It was fun to write song lyrics again - I haven't done that in a long time.
Why is this festival [SoundaXis] important? What do you think it brings to/what purpose does it serve for the local music community?
There are two sides to this: First, in its connection with Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (its initial focus) but with a site-specific, out-in-the-city feel, it helps to make the more formal side of contemporary composition feel relevant to this time and place, which is always a challenge. And then there's the way that it showcases the fact that sound is something that unfolds within space - that musical ideas are generated out of our lived environment, but also that through acoustics and other aspects, the way those ideas sound when they're realized is also determined by environment. It's a nice mix of the abstract and the (watch out) concrete, a reminder that music that seems really heady is in many ways just as physical, as corporeal, as dance music is.
Has working on the Concrete Toronto project inspired new ways of looking at music-slash-buildings? (god, I keep wanting to make a pun on that tired "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" line.) Is this something that you think will spark similar undertakings in the future?
For me it's just been a chance to bring out that connection, to experiment with what I already thought and felt - I feel like it'll be when we get to hear the music (which I haven't at all yet) that the changes in perspective might happen. I can't wait to get out on the floor and start dancing about architecture.
It's hardly a paradox anyway, is it - dancing is architectural, all shifting planes and angles. And architecture is deeply concerned about how arrangements in space affect the body. Aside from sex, what's a more natural thing to dance about?
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 23 at 2:18 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Rocks On!
(Concrete Toronto Music)
"We wanted to encourage the musicians to explore the true meaning of musique concrete, which is to make music using non-traditional musical sounds," says Bunce. "You don't have to have studied Pierre Schaeffer at university to do that. ... That's one of the reasons why we wanted to approach minimal techno and noise artists. There is a sense of 'ugly beauty' to those styles of music, which corresponds to the way a lot of people feel about brutalist architecture. ... In terms of a real concrete experiment, [noise artist] Knurl will be [using contact mics on] actual concrete and cement! I'm really curious to see how that will go over with the family crowd at the Science Centre."
That's a quote from Sarah Liss's piece today in Eye weekly about the Concrete Toronto Music shows this Sunday and next, co-curated by Zoilus and the Music Gallery. (And tomorrow, I'll post my answers to Sarah's questions, which came too late for her to use.)
Plus: For those who missed this year's FIMAV festival in Victoriaville, John Kelman at All About Jazz catches us up. (Below, the semi-reunited Art Bears.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 22 at 4:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
June Listings...
... are up on the gig guide, in rough form. As always, send along additions and corrections!
A few highlights include Leonard Cohen's three-night stand at the Sony Centre; Martha Wainwright at the Mod Club on June 6; the Art of Jazz fest in the Distillery District with Randy Weston, Sheila Jordan and Egberto Gismonti among others; SoundaXis's "Cage-Fest" historical-recreation performances of John Cage's "Bird Cage" and "HPSCHD" on June 11 with Eve Egoyan, Robert Wheeler of Pere Ubu, and many more; the Better Reasons youth-art program benefit series at the Tranzac June 12-14 with the likes of The Bicycles, The Phonemes, Nif-D and Forest City Lovers; The Bad Plus at Glenn Gould Studio on June 13; and Luminato shows by the likes of Laurie Anderson and Mikel Rouse.
In the second half of the month, ex-Sun City Girls(!) brother-duo Alan & Richard Bishop materialize on the local plane of existence on June 17; the same day, unfortunately, as Darren O'Donnell's "Parkdale Vs Queen West" concert with Kids on TV, Bob Wiseman and others facing the kids of the Parkdale Public School Band; there's Al Green kicking off the jazz festival on June 19, followed by other jazz-fest heavies such as Oliver Jones, Ahmad Jamal, Ken Vandermark, etc; BC's superb Frog Eyes playing the Horseshoe with the Evangelicals on June 23; another damnable double-booking with Gilberto Gil at Massey Hall the same night UK improv titan Evan Parker plays the Music Gallery (June 27); local free-jazz firebrands Feuermusik launching their fantastic second album the next night at the Music Gallery; and to round the month out, legendary reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perry playing free at Harbourfront on June 30.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 20 at 9:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
May 25 & June 1: Zoilus presents
Concrete Toronto Music!
The month is flying by and I've neglected to tell you that a week from Sunday (May 25) as well as the Sunday after (June 1), Zoilus and the Music Gallery are presenting two versions of a special show called Concrete Toronto, first at the Polish Combatants' Hall and then at the Ontario Science Centre (with a bus going up from downtown).
This extravaganza is part of the Soundaxis festival and performers include CCMC (Michael Snow, Paul Dutton and John Oswald) (May 25 only), Sandro (Polmo Polpo) Perri with Tony (Great Lakes Swimmers) Dekker, Greg J Smith & Neil Wiernik (aka "naw"), Knurl, and composer Erik Ross presenting a new work (with some text by yours truly) with performers Carla Huhtanen (voice) and Wallace Halladay (sax). There will be visual projections and the like too.
As the writeup sez: "Concrete Toronto Music is a concert of original new music, created by Toronto composers and musicians, in response to Toronto's Concrete Architecture, as catalogued in the 2007 book Concrete Toronto (ERA Architects/Coach House Books). Many iconic buildings, such as City Hall and the Ontario Science Centre, used concrete as their primary material during the building frenzy that gave expression to the growth of Toronto in the decades of the 1950s to the 1970s. The Music Gallery has commissioned a significant handful of Toronto-based composers and musicians to create new works that pay tribute to Toronto's concrete legacy, experiment with concrete's mutability and explore these buildings' role in the city's psychogeography."
Complete details at the Music Gallery site.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 14 at 5:54 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Jive Talkin': Doing it live
We could be talking about Jody's defence of Mariah Carey or whether blogs really break bands or how it is finally really, really, really time to declare an all-out Ticketmaster boycott, at least until the governments get off they's asses and go full-on combines-investigation on them. But we're not because I have been too busy.
For two things, I've been preparing a talk that I'm giving on Saturday for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (Canada) conference - if you're in St. Catharines at Brock University around 2:15 pm, I'll be airing some not-fully-cooked proposals on the subject, "Can You Talk a Few Bars of That? Music Vs. Words in Pop Criticism."
Then there's Monday's edition of the Trampoline Hall Lecture Series in Toronto, when for the first time in (oh my god) six-and-a-half-years of working behind the scenes and at the door, I will be giving a lecture. The show is curated by the brilliant and hilarious Becky Johnson, and its theme is her family. I am going to be talking about her mom, with some digressions on radio love-doctor programs and compulsive hoarding syndrome. The other lectures will be about her dad and her brother. They all live in British Columbia. It's a family that could be your own, except that it's Becky's. The host, as ever, will be Misha Glouberman, whom I hope will be gentle with me. (Tickets are now on sale at Soundscapes.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 08 at 3:23 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
Heaven Knows I'm Miscellaneous Now
Harry Partch plays his "cloud chamber bowls" (see final item in this post).
The sight of people lined up down the block to buy copies of Grand Theft Auto IV made me wonder when the last time was that you saw such a line outside a record store. (I think it might have been for an Eminem album?) Granted, leaking means release dates don't matter anymore for music, unlike games and movies, but surely, the size of this phenomenon has to make one stop and think - video games seem a lot closer to the centre of that mythic "common conversation" in culture than music does now. And with GTA IV, it even seems that it answers that call for pop entertainment with "significance." Yet I still wonder whether gaming serves the identity-forming function that music does - is there a partisanship, are there fashions, looks, attitudes that go along with alliance to a particular kind of games? (Or does that really come only after the monoculture-making impact - is GTA IV more a kind of Beatles '65 phase?) These are random pre-framings of the questions, and your random speculations are welcome.
Speaking of identity and music, John Darnielle is blogging for Powell's about the five metal albums he might have written about for the 33 1/3 series if he hadn't chosen Black Sabbath's Master of Reality for his oughta-be-classic little young-adult novella.
In Toronto this weekend there is no shortage of diversion to be savoured, courtesy of the Over the Top music and film festival as well as the Jane's Walk sessions of collective flaneurie in honour of the late great Ms. Jacobs, with the obvious locations supplemented by strolls through the unappreciated inner suburbs and a tour of Parkdale "shortcuts and hangouts" conducted by schoolkids (the usual madness from Darren O'Donnell's Mammalian Diving Reflex).
Not to be overlooked, though, is also tomorrow night's show at the Music Gallery by the Harry Partch Ensemble from Montclair State University, the designated repository for the original instruments invented and built by the hobo-genius engineer and theorist of microtonal music - meaning this might be the one chance you get to see & hear the chromelodeon, harmonic canon, diamond marimba and other patented Partchian devices live. (They've never come to Canada before - way to go, Mr. Dovercourt et al at the MG.) For those who've never heard Partch's music - it was probably the single greatest influence (well, along with Brecht-Weill music) on Tom Waits's peak transitional music of the '80s, eg. Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. Imagine the more chiming, rhythmic, marimba-percussion tunes on those albums with Waits' voice subtracted and you have a rough idea of the timbral zone of Partch's work, though of course there's much more to it. I assume we'll see Iner Souster there!
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 02 at 1:23 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (18)
Now Read This: Gimme Liberty
or Gimme Indie Lazer Bass
Image by indie184.
Over at the ever-productive Moistworks facility, there's a terrific roundtable discussion about a subject Zoilus has revisited, oh, a few times - the surviving meaning, or lack thereof, of the word "indie". Contributors include Moistworks honcho Alex Abramovich (bringing in Franklin Bruno on an assist) and writers and musicians Jonathan Lethem, Douglas Wolk, Luc Sante, Andrew Phillips, Brian Howe, Christopher Sorrentino, Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), Blake Schwarzenbach, Ben Greenman and me. And more in the comments space. (And as a bonus, tracks by Sebadoh, the recently reunited Great Plains and Big Dipper!)
More, no doubt, to come.
(Later: Coincidentally I stumbled across this April 9 post in Natalia Yanchak from The Dears' blog, titled "Death to indie rock." She links to a National Post piece after the Junos that asked record-store clerks across Canada, "Is Feist still indie?". Several obnoxious answers later - only one, Chris from Zulu Records in Vancouver, addressed it as an economic-model question, by the way - you're left thinking they should add to the question, "... And why would she possibly care?")
Also this week in The New Yorker, Sasha Frere Jones introduces Montreal "lazer bass" to the smart set, in the form of Megasoid. More on that sometime soon too, I hope, but for now just a note that Megasoid is slated to be in Toronto on May 18 at the Drake (and less officially other locations), though their planned New York appearance this weekend was cancelled due to a loss in the family, for which we send our sympathies.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 30 at 4:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Destroyer in Toronto, April 19:
"A Nightmare," Three Witches Chant,
Confounding Nerds' Aim
Dan Bejar and Destroyer live at the Bowery Ballroom, a couple of days after the concert discussed below;
photo swiped from music journo Ryan Dombal's Flickr page;
I'm glad we don't have any kind of professional guild to spank me for it.
I've had the title for this one sitting on my computer all week, because I've noticed a lot lately doing cryptic crosswords (a recent adoption) that the clues often feel like Destroyer-ese. Unfortunately to mention puzzles suggests decoding, encrypted meanings, blah blah blah, which gets it exactly wrong (in Destroyer songs, the encryption is the message; the funeral is the biography). But I was too tickled by my cryptic clue to abandon it, so there it is.
Mainly, I just wanted to tell you that if you are anywhere in range of the current Destroyer tour (eg., in New York tonight, Philly tomorrow, DC the day after - etc), you should not miss it, because there's been something of a rip in the continuum and, suddenly, Destroyer is not just a band you enjoy live because there's something endearingly awkward and stiff and strange about it all - suddenly, they're a band you enjoy live because they kick ass. Dan's reluctant-prophet manner has gone up five levels on the fire and brimstone scale - there was a hilarious moment on Saturday night when he tried to make a joke, which flew over everyone's heads and fell in a puddle to the floor. After a second's pause he grimaced sheepishly: "Uh, sorry, I've never tried saying things to the audience before." His performance was more physical and stagey - John Barrymore-era theatricalism flashing out between shakes of a super-shaggy head, thoroughly through-composed guitar lines being peeled out as if they were just jammed - which is a long way round to rock'n'roll but it can get you there.
It's in keeping with the tone of Trouble in Dreams, which is in many ways the least hostile and aggressive Destroyer record yet - almost in inverse proportion to its noisiness (Fisher Rose drums way loud). It's more of a band album (a more focused This Night) than Destroyer's Rubies and more of a Your Blues-esque crooner and 1950s-musical album too - contrary to all the backlashy "just more of the same" reviews, which one might expect after nine albums, except that it's silly to hear it coming from reviewers who only actually heard one of those albums. The erratic semi-random nature of the ... Rubies mania of aught-six is thus confirmed. Anyone have a better theory?
(I should note that true to his backlash-courting ways, there was only, I think, one ... Rubies song on the set list the other night, which I'm sure frustrated some who haven't gotten well-acquainted with Trouble and don't know This Night, the other well the band was drawing on.)
Michael Barclay told me the other day that he felt like Dan had worked so hard to convince him of the ridiculousness of rock'n'roll that he found it hard to listen to him with the current band just playing rock'n'roll. I share some of those feelings; after Your Blues, not just my favourite Destroyer record but one of my favourite records of the decade, I did regret the return to rock on Rubies - but Dan's changes have never been linear, so the sequel to Your Blues, the all-clarinet-and-sitar album, could be right around the corner. I think the thing is that right now he has this band that, when it locks into formation the way it did on Saturday night, shoots the songs straight into orbit. That might not be true tomorrow, with the musicians of Dan's Vancouver generation (including Dan himself) gradually settling into businesses, family life, and so on. In some ways the notes of regret and anticipation that I scent between the lines of Trouble in Dreams seem like change-of-life vibrations, a goodbye and the breath right before "hello." (Perhaps that desire to hold on accounts for my one real complaint about it, which is that it's two or three songs too long.) The absurdity that Destroyer has always imputed to rock, after all, is by no means unique - the path from politics to poetry leads through understanding that the effort is always ridiculous and doing it anyway. So hit the drums hard.
(Oh, and speaking of [collector] nerds' aims...)
(Plus, later:: See Dan spar with Emusic readers. Note the John Cale/Syd Barrett discussion at the end - this is what you have to explain to the people who confuse matters with all their pointless Bowie comparisons.) (On the other hand, I just realized I've never heard The Apartments.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:33 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Rattle Your Keys in Parkdale Tonight
I'll be back with some thoughts on the Pop Conference and other matters later today, but first, quickly passing on this news about a show tonight that sounds worth attention:
"Keys To The Studio invites you to a concert of music you've never heard before! On Tuesday evening, April 15, 2008, starting at 6 pm, experience ground-breaking performances by the Keyholders, the originators of the music on the program, who also happen to be people diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities (such as autism, Tourettes, etc.). The Keyholders will be joined onstage at the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre (220 Cowan Ave. at Queen West between Dufferin & Lansdowne) by their colleagues at Keys To The Studio, well-known Toronto musicians Victor Bateman, Dave Clark, Dan Goldman, Justin Haynes, John Jowett, Teppei Kamei, Joe Kelly and Sandro Perri.
"Come to hear DJ scratching, improv, electronic beats, guitar distortion, rock'n'roll and 8-bit music, and to support Keys To The Studio's innovative venture to unlock the doors that have kept musicians from this community from their audience (see feature article at Keys to the Studio.com). Pay-what-you-can admission (suggested $5 and additional donations welcome) and wheelchair accessible. Tickets are available at the door, by calling 416-532-8480 or by email at info@keystothestudio.com."
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, April 15 at 1:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
No Ordinary Love:
"Double Bill #1"
Posting has been sparse lately, partly due to life and partly due to scrambling to get my paper done for the EMP Pop Conference, which will be the subject of upcoming posts this weekend. Before I get Seattle-bound, I want to tell you about a beautifully Toronto-bound event that opens tonight (Wednesday, Apr 9) and runs until Saturday.
"Double Bill #1" is the yield of a "mash-up"-style concept from Dancemakers artistic director Michael Trent: he wants to reach out to other artists to create works in dialogue. Having seen last year's wonderful "Dance/Songs" piece (subject of past Zoilusian praise), Trent chose to invite Ame Henderson of the Public Recordings company as his first collaborator. The parameters they agreed on were simple: They would each create pieces that used the same people, from dancers to music, which would mean each choreographer's process would be bumping and grinding up against the other's.
The results, which I previewed at a dress rehearsal on Saturday before they moved it to Harbourfront's Premiere Dance Theatre, are superlative. I have to single out Ame's "It Was a Nice Party," which, like "Dance/Songs" (which took the skeleton of a rock-club show and draped it in a dance piece, with equal measures of wit, irony and reverence) and her Nuit Blanche piece (which involved large crowds of dancers emerging in and out of the margins of a Kensington Market park, dancing to music from hand-cranked portable radios), is a playful exercise in slow-motion revelation: If you pay attention, a seemingly arbitrary and cryptic set of behaviours is slowly unveiled as a self-conscious game.
( ... continues ...)
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that what the dancers are doing is "sampling" from the party scene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, in a series of algorithms that's almost an Oulipian set of themes-and-variations that you slowly decode. The byproduct, as Dancemakers dramaturge-in-residence Jacob Zimmer put it to me, is that out of the film scene, the company was able to generate quickly a fresh set of gestural vocabularies that are not at all "dance" vocabularies. (They also tried using a bank-robbing scene from The Thomas Crown Affair and a bird attack from The Birds but settled on the more cheerful-strange ambience of a party - which, bonus points, allowed some of them to pretend to be Marcello Mastrionni.)
Humour and energy spring out of this strategy, all the more so because Ame's preserved the unheimlich grammar of film in the choreography - the dancers keep suddenly dashing across the stage to keep pace with the cuts and crosscuts of film editing, too, so the typical dignity and smoothness (even in choreographed awkwardness) of dance is undercut by the frantic splicing and interruption to which reality is subjected by the camera.
In addition, the ensemble keeps the mood of the piece itself party-like - casual, companionable, conversational, giddy. At intervals, in personae somewhere between themselves and themselves-as-character, the dancers come to microphones at the corners of the stage, to explain what just happened and what's about to happen next: "We're going to do that again, only this time, Kate's going to be over there and I'm going to start here... okay?"
Both pieces are scored by The Reveries, a band I've toasted in the past as one of Toronto music's uncanniest combinations of silliness and sentiment, with their poker-faced techno-peasant routine of playing instruments that are amplified through cellphone speakers lodged in each other's mouths, while they slobberingly deliver the lyrics of love-song standards. The group features local improv luminaries Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli (plus, more recently, percussionist Jean Martin).
For "Double Bill" they presented the company with several CDs featuring dozens of songs they'd be capable of covering, ranging from jazz standards to Willie Nelson to Sade, and let the dancers choose over the course of rehearsal which songs to use. Then they provided recordings of covers of the selected songs as the final soundtrack, which gets played by the dancers from an on-stage boombox.
In both dances, but Ame's in particular, there's some aleatory space left after that, too, as the dancers can choose which Reveries selections to play during the show, which reinforces the party theme ("hey, what should I put on?" "no more Willie, I'm tired of Willie") but also severs dance from music and allows for recombinant effects - they might end up dancing frenetically to a slow ballad, or the song might end before the segment does and leave them dancing to silence. It all helps to free the dancers from what can in dance sometimes seem a slavish relationship between music and choreography - while the movies scene is dictating the motions, moments might fall anywhere on the beat, so it's a new dance every time.
The mood is also struck by the frantic effort that goes into following the movie's kinetic "score" - the dancers are constantly checking video monitors to see what action they should be imitating, so they have a split focus, which mirrors the audience's own effort to watch what's happening at the same time as puzzling out the embedded structure. Viewing it in the smaller rehearsal space, I was particularly conscious that I kept wanting to watch the movie on the monitors (even craning my head around to do it) instead of the real people in front of me - the same trouble one has, for example, carrying on a conversation in a bar while a TV is running in the corner over your friend's shoulder, or the way people you know in real life take on a kind of extra-reality in the microcelebrity of their Facebook pages and YouTube videos. In a way the dancers cannot compete with the film's aura, but their physical presence catches the viewer out in that guilty attraction, and reminds us of the satisfaction and complication the person-to-person encounter can offer. For instance, the dancers use their real names to refer to one another in dialogue, except that there are two Kates, so the second insists on being called "Magenta," after the colour of her dress, which is both an assertion ("I'm the girl in the magenta dress") and a surrender of identity.
Michael Trent's second half, "And the Rest," is a bit jarring after the revelation of the first, in that he turns the company back to a modern-dance physical vocabulary, and there's much less narrative drive. But on the other hand it's here that you get to see these dancers dance, again to the Reveries' wobbly ebbs and flows of song, and things get sexy in a much less ironic and more realistic (and thus more disturbing) way, as themes of dominance, submission and Bartleby-like abstention come into play.
My favourite section was one that went head-on at the sadomasochism of choreography itself, in which one dancer started giving instructions for moves to another and then got caught in a kind of deranged loop demonstrating the ridiculously strenuous motions that were required to fulfill her own orders, while the rest of the ensemble lazily ignored her. The orders she's barking ("put your wrists on your thighs, half-twist, sink to your knees, thrust three times, flutter your elbows twice") are of course exactly the kind that the choreographer must have used to make the whole piece - our pleasure rests on the mnemonic and physical labour of the artist-interpreters, our admiration of their seeming freedom resting on their terpsicordian bondage. The dress-rehearsal crowd laughed familiarly, but for those of us who aren't dance insiders, it was more of a moment in which the emperor stripped off his clothes to reveal that underneath, he was stitched up in a tight, rough corset. The work of the dancer, in those interludes, became its own subject, and its own reward.
In the program, Michael and (in his program notes) Jacob tell us that the piece is about tyranny and change: I wish only that they'd followed Ame's example and put more of those cards on the table in the piece itself. But that might just be that I'm a relatively inexperienced watcher of dance, and its pure physical abstraction (and perhaps its voyeurism) always make me crave more intellectual semaphore, more clues to the content within the form.
A real dance lover might find Ame's piece more frustrating because its whole mechanism stymies the flow of dance, blocking and undermining the performers' skills at each turn. I find that both funnier and more moving, seeming closer to daily life, but since I'd probably be unsympathetic to a similar argument about highly abstract music or painting, I'll offer that reaction with a grain of suspicious-tasting salt.
In any case, the pairing left me with plenty to smile over and think about and I wholeheartedly urge you to get down to Harbourfront to drink it in with your own eyes and ears. Also, check out The Reveries' new CD of Willie Nelson tunes, which was released this week.
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, April 09 at 3:24 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Survey: Hello, Turrronnto!
(Goodbye, Gig Guide?)
I have a question: How much do local readers use the Zoilus "gig guide" nowadays? I ask because, as you might have noticed, it's gotten tougher for me and my little team of helpers to keep up with the listings the past few months, as we've all been extra-busy. Would you be just as happy with just a list of upcoming highlights (perhaps an expanded version of the "top shows" list in the sidebar to your left?) or is the comprehensive list still important to you? Please advise in the comments - thanks!
(PS: The first draft of the April calendar is now up and there are tons of exciting things coming our way. Send in your additions and amendments too.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, March 25 at 2:03 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (27)
Conduction Junction, What's Your Funktion?
Greg Tate conducts Burnt Sugar at the Bowery Poetry Club in September. Photo by Peter Gannushkin.
Prior to next Thursday's gig by New York's Bitches' Brew-wrestles-Sun Ra-on-Funkadelic's-trampoline ensemble Burnt Sugar at the Lula Lounge, there's going to be a workshop in which leader Greg Tate (perhaps the writer most responsible for making me want to do music criticism - get this book back in print!) and members of his "mojosexual cotillion" will school Torontonians in the fine art of "conduction," the alphabet of hand and baton gestures developed by Butch Morris to turn conducting into a method of improvised composition. It's a participatory workshop (bring your instruments), starts at 6:30 pm on March 26, and entry is $20 (or $30 with a ticket to the show, which otherwise would run $20 on its own) and spaces are limited: To register, holler at synaptic_circus at yahoo dot com.
Which reminds me that I haven't gotten around to touting Dave Clark's recent book, How to Conduct ... Yourself!, a more laid-back rundown of creative conducting techniques by the drummer and leader of Toronto's own Woodchoppers' Association, the anarchic improvising orchestra. It's an entertaining intro (with bright full-colour photographs of Clark cheerfully demonstrating his moves) to conducting for the baton-shy, and does a great job illustrating what creative guidance can add to ensemble playing. It makes you want to start conducting everyone you know - do the dishes more sweetly!, bring the conversation to a crescendo now!.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, March 18 at 4:49 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Istvan Kantor's Transmission Machine:
Message (Redundantly) Received
Istvan Kantor was formerly known as Monty Cantsin, although of course he wasn't the only artist to use that Neoist multiple identity, just the only one who angrily claimed to be the "real" Monty Cantsin, which is a fine showcase of Kantor's persistent deafness to his own contradictions. I went to see his latest work, a showcase called Transmission Machine last night at the Theatre Centre in Toronto as part of the Free Fall performance-art festival, and I think my arm candy (as she likes me to call her) put it best when she said afterwards, "Why does the theatre of the oppressed always have to be so oppressive?"
[ continued after the jump ... ]
Kantor's got a reactor's worth of energy - constantly on the move except when doing a headstand on a long stainless-steel sink, burning off excess calories by trashing furniture seemingly at random. By any means necessary he'll make sure you can't ignore him, which explains why he's forever splattering his blood on valuable paintings in museums and galleries and, everywhere else, setting shit on fire. (His bio for Free Fall points out that he is probably the sole person ever simultaneously banned from the AGO and Sneaky Dee's.) As he must be in his mid-50s or so, the vigour is impressive, but all that drive is directed down the "shock art" dead end of masculinist modernism, with self-glorifying-martyr crap fully intact.
My favourite section of the show was the opening monologue, in which Kantor narrated his life story - that he came from Budapest, but before that he was a "monolith that was really a filing cabinet" (using a black cabinet on stage to illustrate this creation myth) as well as Wilhelm Reich and other historical figures - and reached the point of describing the past 60 years as an era of "mental gentrification" in which "broadcast imperialism" has forced all other elements of life to the margins in favour of the "shiny" - the remaking of reality on the model of the television screen, for example in the AGO's current renovation with a new titanium facade courtesy of Frank Gehry and Damien Hirst's $100-million diamond-encrusted skull.
And then Kantor went on a spree of very shiny fire-setting and giant-video-screen projections (okay, he does throw paint on the video screens at the end), with a crew of videographers and photographers following him around the stage documenting the performance and not inserting "broadcast imperialism" between us and him. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that this was intentional, which is generous considering what followed.
What followed was sound and fury and the fumes of burning gas, giving us three kinds of headaches, as Kantor tried to analogize broadcast imperialism and neighbourhood gentrification in Toronto, in speech and video (a hokey bunch of actors playing "developers" stalking Kantor's neighbourhood) and song (a ditty called "I love the stench"). He set himself up as a paragon of "the poor," falling into the usual but nevertheless irksome pattern of blithely equating the voluntary poverty of the artist with the unchosen poverty of poor people. And what's to be done? Well, "revolution," though by the time he's tangled his red flag (literally) around his head three or four times, you get that he knows the non-ness of this answer, but he sticks to it because it sounds exciting despite its void credibility (which you'd think someone from Budapest might have realized quicker). Along the way he elaborately, through video images, compared gentrification both to torture with electrification and, here it comes, to Nazi genocide. (Good ol' reductio ad Hitler, or Hitler ex machima if you prefer.)
The show ended with Kantor inviting members of the audience to come up on stage with him as "revolutionaries" and the others to make a "ratatat-tat" machine-gun sound, "executing" them. It was kinda fun, as goofy group-participation exercises are, even when they're a dispiriting wallow in futility.
That moment at least had some gentle conviviality to it, as opposed to the ego-on-performance-art-cliche-amphetamines of the previous hour. More than the shallow analysis, what's maddening is, given the anti-sociality of the problem he's addressing, the unexamined way in which he tries to attack it with more anti-sociality. Cute as the "stench" song was, praising the noise, pollution and violence poor people are forced to live with "because it keeps the developers away" is revolting, and it only keeps the developers away till there's a buck to be made - as is the case currently in Kantor's nabe of "dirty Bloor West," which is where the art galleries fleeing high rent on Queen West are about to relocate.
The real-estate regime - which Kantor, with 1980s-punk-zine panache, dubbed "the Rentagon" - goes unchecked because there's no public will to develop neighbourhoods any other way. Private interests are quite willing to bulldoze their way through social and architectural dysfunction, since that all makes land and buildings cheap enough to turn a tidy profit. Meanwhile government and political formations aggressively neglect those areas. The Rentagon would be undermined by efforts to bring healthy development to people and places that need it while preserving affordable housing (ideally owned by the residents) and services - efforts not sexy and politically profitable enough to be worth the bother.
By mirroring the black-and-white view that places and cultures must by nature be either unlivable shitholes or yuppie palisades in the rhetoric and symbolism of his show - it's either Hitler or revolution, it's either quiescence or red flags and fire and furniture-smashing - Kantor is just re-enacting the logic of gentrification, not to mention repeating 20th-century avant-gardism as farce.
That's always been my reaction to his stuff, but last night I at least appreciated some of his countervailing eccentric charm. It was much better when he was dancing around and singing a kooky, Cabaret-style song about the cities he lived in before "a beautiful prophetess" lured him to Toronto and the subsequent birth of his kids, or showing off his admirable upper-body strength and balancing skills doing headstands. Because when he tries out the acrobatics of thinking, Kantor just crashes jarringly onto the audience's last nerve.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, March 15 at 8:44 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (14)
'Hoof Has Seen the Wind:
On Deerhoof and Silences
I haven't had time/energy to see many live shows so far in '08, and wasn't especially regretting it. Aside from the head-detonating Veda Hille/The Fits/Tomboyfriend concert at the Gladstone a couple of weeks ago, and that Baby Dee snowstorm-night jamboree a couple of weeks before that, there hasn't been much to motivate me to drag my sorry ass out into this sorry, ass-dragging winter when I could be having lambchops and wine and reading or whatevering in my apartment. Thus I was millimetres away from skipping tonight's Deerhoof spectacle at the Phoenix, as part of the opening-night showcase of Canadian Music Week, even though I deeply love the band and had never (shocking admission) seen them, no doubt due to similarly short-sighted past decisions. That mistake was averted thanks to Jonny Dovercourt staring at me in disbelief earlier this evening when I mentioned that I was feeling too tired to go. Ah, good old shame!
You already know this, no doubt, but Deerhoof is the kind of band that makes you wonder how you ever felt going to see live music could be a chore. It's not just the three-rock-dudes-and-one-diminutive-pixie-singer dynamic; or bassist/vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki's theatricality (her stillness which explodes into thrashing, her secret semaphore-mime coded hand signals, the deadpan affect that makes her cooing, chirping voice seem to be piped in from Erewhon); or the extraordinary musicianship of the whole ensemble (especially the Keith Moon-meets-Han Bennink drumming of Greg Saunier); or the way that somehow '80s Tokyo noise-rock, jazz-exotica, prog, post-punk, mod 60s garage, no-wave, J-pop, Bartok, Zorn, Braxton and sugar-cereal commercial jingles all seem to soul-kiss in their music. It's not the catchiness of a music that plots in so many ways against catchiness. It's not even the light show, which consisted of a large light-emitting spinning propeller and a series of garbage-can-lids-on-light-stands that all together seemed (can this be right?) to be a sound visualizer, triggered by the peaks and valleys and frequencies of the music, like a multipart mechanical oscilloscope.
No, it's those peaks and valleys themselves, and most especially the deep valleys - that is, the silences, pauses, dead stops, 180-degree turns. It's the silences, I think, that account for the accessibility and memorability of a music so complicated as Deerhoof's, with its multiple time signatures, generic shifts, surprising dynamics and modal melodic meanderings. While stubbornly refusing to "add up" to a standard rock song, Deerhoof music respects the fact that the ear is apt to be overloaded and overcrowded by what they do, and so they build in rest stops that almost magically boost the listener's capacity to take all the content in. And at the same time of course all the stops and silences act as a tease, building anticipation so that when the music comes, it seems to gush back in a rush, a sexual release (albeit an animated-cartoon sexual release in Deerhoof's case). It's not just a gimmick they use here and there - Deerhoof plays silences all the friggin' time, as much a building block of their sound as Saunier's bruising kick drum or Matsuzaki's trilling coo. It's the simplest answer (though of course there is no simple answer) to the question that hearing this group inevitably raises: Why can't more bands do this? Why can't live music always be this transporting? Because too few musicians realize that they are architects.
The live rock bands that have had a similar effect on me psycho-somatically, that feeling of out-of-body transport and transcendence, by the way, all share Deerhoof's propensity for stop-start dynamics: the Pixies way back in their first incarnation, 1980s and 1990s-era Pere Ubu (not, at least the last time I saw them, the current version), The Ex, the Dogfaced Hermans, God Is My Copilot, Fugazi and even Bruce Springsteen. (For an easy example, think about "Rosalita.") In other genres - because, for example, of syncopation - that stop-start space is effectively built into the rhythms and polyrhythms - what is funk but a stop-start beat layered over a stop-start? There's "the 1" and then there's not the 1. I'll stop speculating before my musicological limits become apparent, but I'll extend the question psychologically and philosophically: Why, in noisy music, do separations and silences become so important? There's the need I already raised for suspense and release, for contrast, for relief from outbursts of ecstasy, but in some ways loud-quiet-loud forms, way over-used since Nirvana, serve those purposes.
My guess is that the power of silence also has to do with the character of consciousness and experience. Consciousness is not a continuous process, but a chain of discrete moments forever vanishing before we can get hold of them - in a sense, of experiences slipping away before they are truly experienced. It's always now, and now and now and now, and as the bulk of Eastern thought and religion informs us, one of the basic dilemmas of life is that we seldom feel "in" that now: its elusiveness is its essence. It doesn't disappear by dwindling away, by cresting and falling, but always all of a sudden: This instant, this second, this hour, this day is "now" but in the time it takes to note that fact, the instant is now "then." As a survival mechanism, our minds create a continuity out of it, the way our optical processes narrate the discrete frames of cinema, stillness becoming an illusion of movement, but this is a constant, perhaps exhausting subconscious effort. Experience is as much made of total breaks, of gaps and aporias, as it is of content. Music, like (almost) all art, takes the chaos of experience and makes something more coherent of it because it has form - even the most abstract art has greater structure than the experience of consciousness. (Although it also might have more freedom than social experience, with its daily routines, etc. - a combination that helps account for its pleasure.) So perhaps this meta-genre of "stop-start" art feels especially elevating because it returns the fragmented experience of life to us, magnified and exaggerated, so that what feels day to day as a frustrating limitation of the mind can be transformed into a hosannah of glorious affirmation: "Praise be to the gap, to the disappearance and reappearance of the moment! What a miracle that time annihilates itself, because, behold, it also spontaneously regenerates in the very moment of its demise! What a happy universe in which a black hole becomes a big bang every instant! Let us observe it in slow-motion replay, and dance!"
And the delightful paradox is the way that the sudden stops and gaps superficially make everything feel more chaotic, but in fact are a rigid form of organization: You're hearing a song that consists of six different emotional tones, time-signatures and practically six whole different genres, and it seems like the silences are the knife-blade shredding them in an indifferent blender, but then you're flabbergasted to realize that these silences keep coming in the exact same place in the sequence, on the seventh beat of a thirteen-beat pattern, and this means that the musicians are marching in military discipline, their minds having to be synched to all these subtle patterns and kicking in formation like a can-can line, at the same time as the music is evoking the most interior experience of existential disjunct. As great music always does, they're taking privacy and making it social again.
So, er, way to go, Deerhoof.
By the time I got to the Phoenix (hey, mediocre venue, but aptly named!), I'd missed the first few bands (including intriguing locals Ten Kens, who've managed to elude most music writers' tracking systems till now, though they've been gaming world conquest in their lair awhile and their record, as Zoilus readers might like to know, was produced by Colin Stewart, who's helmed the board for among others Destroyer's This Night and Veda Hille). But I did see much-blogzzed-about (and, to be fair, New-Yorkerzzed about) L.A. duo No Age, who were affable kids with great energy and occasional songs. At their best, they're part of the current Jesus & Mary Chain revival but without the po'face, as if the Jesus & Mary Chain had been part of the Gilman Street punk scene in San Francisco - indeed, with youthy yelly exuberance such that I could almost imagine them as misplaced Torontopians, or more specifically drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt as Matt Collins from Ninja High School. I liked the way Spunt played riffs on his drums rather than just beats, and the way those riffs interacted with Randy Randall's tidier-than-they-seemed guitar figures, and the way they deploy electronics almost as a subversive stealth agent, and the way they sound even live like you're hearing them on a low-bandwith YouTube video, and the way occasionally that all added up, with the yelling, to an anthemic feeling. I like them best when they yell together so that what felt like bratty mischief suddenly seems like a conspiracy. But they'd go down a lot better at their home base at The Smell in L.A., or any cramped intimate room, with an audience of friends, than they did shouting "how are you feeling, Toronto?" on a slushy March night in the oversized pickup-joint that is the Phoenix with an audience of winter-weary Toronto Deerhoof fans and CMW takin'-care-of-businessers who spent their set wondering why they bother to come to see live music.
And No Age might sound a lot better if they found out that little secret about silence.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, March 06 at 2:08 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
Guitars Everywhere Weep: Jeff Healey, RIP
Very sad. Jeff Healey, who died yesterday, was, of course, a great contributor to the Canadian music scene on every level, making his name with electric-blues and soft-rock ballads but moving on later in life to a devotion to pre-war-style jazz. He was the proprieter of Healey's Roadhouse and by all accounts a total mensch; he was only 41; he fought cancer literally all of his life (it blinded him in infancy); and it really isn't fair.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, March 03 at 6:02 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Canadian Music Peek
Just so you know, complete CMW listings are now up on the Gig Guide, with Zoilusian recommendatinos. (That was a typo but I like it.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, February 28 at 11:34 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Encore un verre, une cigarette...
Jane Birkin played Toronto for the first time ever on Monday night and I reviewed it in today's paper. The headline makes it sound like I dislike Birkin's voice, which isn't true. I actually think it's very pretty, just not very strong.
Plenty of other things to get to soon.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, February 27 at 4:57 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Sympathy with Queen and Portland
Photo by JL1967 via Torontoist.
It's all been bad news the past couple of days: Zoilus wants to express sympathy and horror for all those affected by the enormous fire last night on Queen St. in Toronto, on the south side block east of Bathurst - including art-and-cult-film haven Suspect Video, music store Cosmos Records (often described as the best used vinyl shop in Toronto), stereo shop National Sound, clothing store Preloved, bike shop Duke's (which dated back to 1914!), and all the other businesses and the tenants who lived above them. Besides the losses of property, it's a blow to the character of Queen St., already pretty much erased further east on the strip by chain stores, etc. Whatever the cause (theories being thrown about range from "meth lab blew up" to "developers torched 'em" to plain old "firetraps will be firetraps"), the result seems inevitable, that the area - and thus, on some level, life in downtown Toronto - will never be the same. Best luck, neighbours.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, February 20 at 2:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Passages: Robbe-Grillet, Val Ross
The music has gradually faded and here and there a word can be heard emerging from a chance phrase, such as: ... "unbelievable" ... "murder" .... "actor" .... "lying" ... "had to" ..."you're not" ... "it was a long time ago"... "tomorrow."
- L'annee derniere a Marienbad
I've been so distracted by the Castro story that I forgot until mid-afternoon about seeing a note on the CNN crawl late last night that Alain Robbe-Grillet had died. Today, Robbe-Grillet is obituarized by a Guardian obituarist who is himself already dead. (Look at the note at the end.) This seems incredibly fitting; it lends an extra layer of distance, a sense of objectivity. Le nouvel roman est mort, vive le nouvel roman. (Later: Ugh, nouveau roman, I shoulda said.)
As well, I want to note the death over the weekend of my colleague at The Globe and Mail, Val Ross, best known as the paper's reporter on literature and publishing in the '80s and '90s, and generally as a culture writer. Val had an extraordinary vitality, sharpness and humour, and a deep commitment to Canadian culture that will be missed at the paper. More personally, I will remember her as the most encouraging and enthusiastic person I met when I arrived at The Globe, someone who never failed to comment on one's latest article, who radiated warm fellow-feeling and an appreciation not only for culture and thought but for plain existence. At 57, she leaves us much too soon, but even my small acquaintance with her assures me those were 57 years fully lived, and that is a lesson to remember.
General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, February 19 at 4:23 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Dis-concerted: Live Notes -
Keren Ann, Dean and Britta, Baby Dee
Ever mystified by the capricious ways of the Mod Club, I took the 7 pm door time as a signal that 8 would be an opportune time to arrive to catch the beginning of the music at tonight's Keren Ann/Dean and Britta show; further, I had the impression from publicity that Keren Ann was headlining, as counterintuitive as that seemed. Wrong on both counts, and as a result, I only caught the last 20 minutes or so of Keren Ann's set. I was taken with her first album Not Going Anywhere a few years ago (especially its gossamer title single) but time has thickened the delicate-wisp-strands into more mundanely conventional folk-pop. The bigger surprise was Dean and Britta - I've long responded to Dean Wareham's venerable indie-stitution Luna with a benign neglect, since Damon and Naomi got custody of me in the Galaxie 500 split, but it seems I've been missing out on the straightforward appeal of Wareham's songwriting, an understated channelling of VU-via-Yo La Tengo that results in a lot of catchy, atmospheric, memorable tunes. They're strong on texture, which explains the partisanship of shoegaze/Britpop fans to Luna's stuff - another reason I haven't paid attention, as that's pretty much the last descriptor you could affix to me, but the texture in this case is just ornamentation on solid frames, not gauzey camouflage. It's an uncomplicated pleasure, but the music hit the emotional spot. Britta Phillips is only a passable singer, or at least her voice isn't always flattered by the range in which Wareham's talk-sung verses are pitched, but she's quite a fine bass player, and, well, on stage she has other compensatory charms. So sue me, I'm a fan of watching good-looking married couples sing love songs together. It's sexy. It's romantic. It's better than watching brothers and sisters do the same. (In the ancient iconic struggle between Sonny & Cher and Donny & Marie, I've made my alliance, even though, ok, nothing involving Sonny Bono can be described as "sexy.") In any case, fine set and it seems I have some Luna/D&B to catch up on - anyone want to send me a mix?
On Wednesday, a much greater revelation hit Toronto, but not many showed up at the Drake Underground to receive it thanks to the avalanche of snow that was falling on the city at the time. I was sceptical of Baby Dee at first - the typical descriptors - "transgender," "performance artist," "cabaret" etc - suggested the '80s-bound "transgressive" cultural location that put me off about her friends Antony and the Johnsons (don't get me wrong, Antony's voice is miraculous, but I only like him when he's singing other people's songs) and the "Cleveland street artist" and "Coney Island freak show" and "produced by Will Oldham" and "with guest Andrew W.K." elements had me wondering if this was a case of "outsider-music" being half-consciously condescended to by its patrons. But praise from some Cleveland-area friends and a listen to the songs at her MySpace made me switch off my cynicism - she has a unique entrancing voice, and it's hard for me to resist a harp player - and by the end of her set at the Drake, I was a convert. The sound mix when she was on piano, as she was for much of the show, combined with her extremely capable band (John Contreras [Current 93] on cello, Alex Neilson on drums, guitarist Emmett Kelly [The Cairo Gang] and Palace brother Paul Oldham on bass), sometimes buried her voice, so my favourite moments were those on harp - she's completely competent but also the only harpist I've ever seen who treats it a bit like a punk rocker playing an acoustic guitar, frequently thumping the lower strings with the palm of her hand for a discordant thunder-rumble. (Which makes sense when you find out that her initial bond for the harp was based on falling in love with the harp-like guts of a smashed-up piano.) Her performance was ecstatic and generously embracing, an enormous affirmation of personality and comfortable eccentricity, middle-aged self-acceptance writ very physically and soulfully large, an utter rebuke to bitterness and reticence. Which would all be very self-helpish if the songs weren't so intelligent, tuneful and surprising, autobiographically daring ( a lot of family-unromance is present in a blunt tone that recalls Xiu Xiu's they-fuck-you-up-your-mom-and-dad gestures) - and anachronistic in a chosen, musically literate way that bespeaks unhesitatingly distinct personal curiosities and taste. And how can one not melt over a merch table where you can buy official Baby Dee bird calls (see picture), little wooden nubs with a steel screw inside that produces chirping out of adversity, and that come with a little capsule of rosin to keep them squeaking true?
General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, February 10 at 12:33 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Publicity Season Winds Down: February Gig Guide Up Now
Check out the finally up-to-date gig guide with your February show dates now in action. (Feel free to let me know of missing information, esp in the second half of the month.) A rough March calendar should go up soon too. And who knows, perhaps some of the other fallen-fallow features round here, like the Links page, may soon spring back into rude health.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, February 01 at 8:10 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
The Comeback Kid with a Last-Minute Motion
... well, in the sense that I came back. To town. And then, slowly, to the blog. I have various things to report (Republic of Safety final show! Marc Ribot and Laurie Anderson in New York! new Mountain Goats! new Destroyer! etcetera!) but for now just wanted to give very last-minute notice to those who stumble upon it or are ace RSS flyers that I am reading tonight in the neighbourhood-positive Free Speech series at Tinto, a cafe-bar on Roncesvalles in Toronto, hosted by Johan Hultqvist, lead singer of Afro-beat band Mr. Something Something.
The other readers tonight are writer-actor Amanda Hiebert and the terrific fictioneer Catherine Bush. There'll be music by Michael Holt (ex-Mommyheads, Mushroom, etc). I believe it's doors at 7 pm, and it's pwyc.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, January 29 at 4:17 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Jazz Bloggers at the IAJE:
There's No Arguing With Darcy James
Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North at the IAJE: Photo shoplifted from WBGO.
My busy week (see below) unfortunately coincided with the big IAJE jazz educators (and musicians and labels and critics and promoters - the name's deceptive) conference in Toronto, so I wasn't able to attend much of the proceedings, which included the likes of Courtney Pine curating a UK jazz night, an appearance by Francois Houle, a big Oscar Peterson tribute show this afternoon, etc. (You can catch up on some of it at Ear of the Mind.) But I was booked for one event, a panel on jazz blogging moderated by Chicago's Neil Tesser (Listen Here) and featuring Brooklyn's (but formerly Canada's) Darcy James Argue (Secret Society), Montreal's David Ryshpan (Settled in Shipping), New York's David Adler (Lerterland) and me. (Jason Crane (The Jazz Session) had to back out as he had been transferred rather suddenly from Rochester, NY, to Saratoga Springs, NY, by the union he works for, and he was moving.)
The tone of the panel was a little bumpy because Neil didn't know much about blogs and presented himself as a sceptic - going so far as to read a scoffing article from The Onion (gosh, The Onion... remember?) - and came at it rather heavily from a "don't blogs suck and does anybody actually read them?" pov. He said that he'd often been asked to start a blog and never understood why. However, this proved somewhat useful, because it seemed a fair guess that Neil's attitude was representative of what most middle-aged jazz guys feel about blogs, and so the rest of us built our case for the usefulness of blogs (and the Internet in general) as venues for the popularization, community-building, reconsideration and renewal of jazz. Jazz blogging now strikes me as very reminiscent of music blogs in general four or five years ago - tightly knit, very well informed, not beset with next-new-thing fever, and highly discursive. That's lovely, but there's tons more knowledgeable people out there who aren't making use of the medium - part of why jazz folks get so frustrated with their lack of press (and lack of quality press especially - see Ken Vandermark's many rants on the subject, for example) is that they are still focused on press, and we all know that's a smaller part of how information and ideas are circulated today. (Though I always say that with mixed feelings, as a lover of and creature of print.)
Darcy made the point that every local jazz scene could use at least one highly active blogger to help track, critique and spread the word about a sadly overlooked sphere. He also responded inspiringly to one audience member's question about how blogs can promote the "appreciation of jazz" - we should start, he said, by getting rid of the whole concept of appreciation, of treating jazz music like a series of monuments that need to be venerated and revered at a distance: "I don't 'appreciate' Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, man, I fucking love them!" And I made the point that it's this personal tone that bloggers are able to strike, and the intimacy of their relationships (and conversations) with readers, that give them some power to make readers find things accessible that they might otherwise keep at a distance. (Of course Destination Out came up as the shining example.) We won Neil over - he said at the end that he was convinced and that he'd think seriously about starting blogging.
Zoilus is by no means a "jazz blog," of course, but jazz and especially local improvised music are a fairly frequent topic here (though a bit less often lately). I was happy to be invited and to point out to the jazz cats that when this music can be discussed in the same forums and in the same tone someone uses to talk about pop and indie music, for instance, there's an opportunity to foster new audiences. I had a great conversation later in the day with Tatsuya Koeda from Now Forward (a promotions company in NYC) about the idea that for musicians and listeners alike, genres are less and less a barrier - not only because of the Internet but because of multiculturalism and much else, everyone's ears are getting bigger (debatably, shallower too, but that's another question).
Our conversation in itself demonstrated the point: With a couple of other people, we began from talking about the shifts in jazz venues in Toronto and a little while later I was being asked whether I ranked Spoon on my Top 10 last year and about Broken Social Scene playing at a NYC swimming pool last summer. Young jazz pianists are covering Bjork and Radiohead (in large numbers) and Black Sabbath (okay, that's only The Bad Plus) and picking up rhythms from hip-hop as Jason Moran and Matthew Shipp do. I know from many personal experiences that plenty of young rock musicians are venerating not only Ornette and Coltrane, as they've long done, but Gyorgy Ligeti and Steve Reich and Tinariwen and Konono No. 1, too. That's not the future. That's the present. Genre will never disappear, as it's a social epiphenomenon and a necessity for interpreting and interrelating musics and a way of keeping shit organized in our heads, but in the 21st century it's not going to be as dominant (and oppressive) as it was in the last.
As it turned out, the concert that night at the Tranzac by Darcy's Secret Society North band (the core of his 17? 18?-piece New York ensemble along with a pack of great Canadian players stepping in as, er, pitch hitters) was one of the most galvanizing illustrations of that development I've witnessed in a long time. While I've read and traded links with Darcy for a long while, I hadn't taken the time to listen to his music. So what I (and a substantial crowd of IAJE attendees and local musicians) got at the Tranzac came as a wonderful surprise. Fluidly and expressively conducting this "steam punk" big band (horns, reeds, drums, electric guitar and bass, Rhodes piano), Darcy rolled out one after another his incredibly smart, complicated, beautiful, firey and funky compositions. (In the lineage of, but distinct from, the writing and arranging of his teacher Bob Brookmeyer - see Ben Ratliff's profile in The New York Times.)
I told people afterwards that it was like hearing Duke Ellington and minimalism and Tortoise and Funkadelic and Elliott Carter and much else besides melding into one floating, shifting, dodging music, often with political themes (one piece was dedicated to Maher Arar), sometimes with Escher-like overlaps and spirals. I didn't take notes so I can't be more specific (though there were standout moments from saxophonists Christine Jensen and Chet Doxas [whose trio opened], trumpeters Ingrid Jensen and my mistake, sorry Jason Logue [who was subbing in for Lina Allemano, who unfortunately fell ill], trombonist Barb Hamilton, guitarist Sebastian Noelle, pianist Dave Restivo Gord Webster and drummer Jon Wikan, among others). But in short, this is music for people who fuckin' love music. This skinny, scruffy young Brooklyn dude's got it and he knows just what to do with it.
You can hear a sample of the band's other IAJE appearance at WBGO.
General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, January 13 at 12:56 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
X to The Power of Love
Me with "Celine" (Laura Landauer) and, right, Final Fantasy playing "The Power of Love" last night at the very-Gladstone in Toronto. Photos by Chris Reed and If You Want to Sing Out.
I can't begin to tell you how asskickingly last night's launch for the book went. Kay arr eh zee why!
There was a zillion jillion people there (sorry to everybody who got turned away!);
Laura Landauer took everybody to Celine-imitation college;
Laura Barrett made Celine's dancehall-reggae bumper "Treat Her Like a Lady" into a wistful folkie plea and also covered Weird Al;
Steve Kado aka The Blankket covered the history of anglo-Canadian colonialism and Quebec class structure and the complexity of Celine as cultural object, told us "talking is the new music - go home and post some talking on your blogs," used host Misha Glouberman as an exquisitely baffled foil, and then turned "This Time" (the domestic-abuse number on the new Celine disc Taking Chances) into a Bauhaus-worthy goth dirge, utterly polarizing the audience between those who did and those who didn't know the meaning of "awesome";
Owen Pallett aka Final Fantasy quoted Celine to the effect that when you perform you are naked and "when you are naked you suffer" then went on to prove that "The Power of Love" is a quantum-leap more beautiful song than even Celine fans ever realized and to generate more Vegas-sized metal-on-estrogen bombast with just voice and violin than has ever been accomplished in the history of sound;
and finally Mark Kingwell expertly conducted a conversation that made me sound a lot smarter than I really am.
Misha was the definitive host and Brian Joseph Davis (who is trying to cop Misha's steez) was dapper on the digital decks.
We sold a whole lot of books. (I know 'cuz I had to sign them all.) I wore the nicest suit I've ever worn and brand new shoes. And I think aside from the overheating the crowding caused, people had fun. Thanks to the Gladstone, Pages and all who attended.
It made my life.
Could I plead that anybody who made recordings, videos and pictures last night send me copies or links? (I already know there's an MP3 out there of Owen's performance, which I'll post tomorrow.)
By the way, there's an interview with me about the book today in British Columbia's The Tyee.
And tomorrow (Friday), I am actually going to talk about something other than Celine Dion for once, in a panel in the IAJE jazz conference - about jazz and blogging, at 3 pm at the in Room 206 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, with a bunch of smart jazz-blog cookies.
PS Clearly the revolution's not yet complete.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, January 10 at 8:03 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
Kiss My Lips & Twist My List
... Speaking of year-end, this may or may not be an actual new blog, rather than a randomly deployed blogspot page, but it's a place where you can read what a few T-dot notables were pouring into their earholes in ought-seven, among them the maker of my number-one record of the year, Sandro Perri, along with Wes Allen (Doing It To Death dj), Louis Calabro (Goin' Steady/End of the Internet), David Dacks (Abstract Index radioshow), Minesh Mandoda (Ghostlight), Andrew Zuckerman (Gastric Female Reflex), Craig Dunsmuir, Wolfgang Nessel (Blood Honey), etc.
(Since I haven't posted anything very Torontocentric for a bit...)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, January 02 at 7:20 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Christine Fellows:
'They're Just Letting in a Little Light'
Prelims: Today's me-interview on CBC's "Q" should land somewhere 'round here.
Yesterday, I had a feature profile of Christine Fellows in the Globe & Mail. (Transcript to come, Canuckistan-stylee.) Tonight, Christine plays a show at the Music Gallery, showcasing her lovely new album with a title that's one of the ear-ticklingest, bitterest-sweet words in English, Nevertheless. (Borrowed gently from a Marianne Moore poem.) Her voice, ukulele, piano and cetera will be supported by cellist Leanne Zacharias and hand-animated visual projections by the amazing Shary Boyle (who's also collaborated with Feist, Jens Lekman and others). Rather like this:
A songwriter gets intimate with solitude
12/13/07 The Globe and Mail
CARL WILSON
Intimacy is a slippery thing. When it begins it's so hard to be sure of, and when it goes -- worn out by routine, dispersed by separation, brought to a full stop by mortality -- only unreliable memory can vouch it existed, since its traces lie by definition in territory unreachable by any outsider. And the price this most precious human experience exacts is to invent a new kind of emptiness you know you'll plunge into when its tethers break. It's funny that more people don't simply opt out. The ones who do -- the reclusive eccentrics, confirmed bachelors and maiden aunts among us -- seem to be keeping another sort of secret.
The gregarious and thoughtful Winnipeg musician Christine Fellows is, by her own testimony, happily married to John K. Samson, her sounding board and sometime collaborator, as well as the lead singer of flagship 'Peg rock band the Weakerthans. On her superb 2005 album Paper Anniversary -- which led celebrated U.S. songwriter John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats to invite her on tour last year, proclaiming, "Christine Fellows is writing better songs than anybody else. Everybody else is actually quite pathetic next to her" -- partnership and family were conspicuous themes.
She is following up with a set of musical portraits of lives marked by intimacy's apparent banishment.
"At the end of the day you are alone with yourself," she said in a backstage interview when she opened for her husband's band at the Opera House in Toronto in early November. "Yourself is inescapable. Even with Paper Anniversary -- and I know this is kind of a bad way to be -- I had just gotten married but I was thinking, 'What do I do when he dies?' I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking," a wrenching chronicle of sudden widowhood, "and I felt like, 'Oh my god, I can't bear the thought.' So I wrote a little sketch of my family coming home after my grandmother's husband, my grandfather, had died." It became that album's gorgeous centrepiece, Vertebrae. "I had to go to that dark place even though I was totally jubilant."
The new album, Fellows' fourth, Nevertheless, began with a commission from Toronto-based dancer and choreographer Susie Burpee, who wanted music for a one-woman show about the concept of the spinster, the solitary woman. She asked not just for an instrumental score of the sort Fellows has composed for many dancers, filmmakers and other cross-disciplinary collaborators, but for a song cycle. Fellows quickly decided to base an album on the same material.
Though the spur may have been a standard feminist inquiry into a scorned stereotype, Fellows' research -- "because I have my own weird little way" -- led her to a "male spinster," American collage-box artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72): "It turned out he lived with his mother his entire life, and was really shy, and fascinated with ballerinas, these archetypes of the female. He's not a bachelor, right? He's a spinster." Next she discovered Cornell's correspondent Marianne Moore, in some ways his opposite number -- though apparently celibate, and renowned for her brainy and unsentimental nature poems, she was a flamboyant presence on the New York literary scene, often clad in a black cape, squiring Paris Review editor George Plimpton to baseball games and known to have a pet alligator in her bathtub.
"I fell in love instantly," Fellows said. "But I wanted to get inside the idea of why her life was that way. Did she ever have relationships? I spent a long time trying to figure out if she was gay, and so on. And why did I want to know? I wanted to know where her passion lay. And finally I realized that her passion was in poetry. It absolutely was her work, and her way of looking at the world. ... I started out trying to figure out why she was alone and then realized there was no need for that."
Much of Nevertheless was written in dialogue with Moore's verses of singularity and resilience (it takes its title from one). It also portrays Cornell-like figures as well as a retired boxer named Cruel Jim, an old lady keeping chickens in the country and a Winnipeg spinster named Betty (based loosely on a clipped-out obituary Fellows rediscovered in the pocket of her winter coat one day) whose pets are a mated pair of Parlour Roller pigeons, a bizarre evolutionary-dead-end breed of racing bird that cannot fly but wildly flaps its wings and turns backward somersaults along the ground. (It's worth a YouTube search for this uncanny and, as the bird-loving Fellows said, "heartbreaking" sight.)
Clearly, all this is not in the usual ambit of a confessional singer-songwriter.
"At a certain point, all your previous life seems to be very inward-focused, directed towards yourself. Then at some point the focus goes outward," said Fellows, a wide-eyed 39-year-old with dramatically white-blonde hair. "That's part of why this poet was so interesting, because her focus was always outward. ... I sneak little bits of myself in -- that's unavoidable, right? ... But it's also, 'What's the rest of the world up to?' "
The effect is far from impersonal, thanks to Fellows' intricate and sensitive writing, "pushed up against" the melodic energy of her piano lines and chamber-string settings, with a few bouncy rock refrains and the occasional choral interlude. Her singing voice skips nimbly over off-rhythms to convey complex thoughts in a disarmingly chatty tone, as if in a phone call with a close friend. Which only makes the poignant twists, when they come, more pulverizing.
Combining commissions, arts grants and the support of her small label, Toronto's Six Shooter Records, she has found a neatly Canadian niche that helps her bypass an entertainment industry "that really has nothing to do with what I do, most of it." Unlike many female singers who aren't famous by their late 30s, she's at no risk of feeling like a music-business spinster. She was so busy last year that at one point she literally broke out in hives.
"I didn't even know that I could sing until I was 24. I went to jazz school when I was younger, but I never sang, I just thought [being a musician] would be a kind of cool job -- my grandfather had played in a big band. So I feel like I'm still kind of young with it."
The scattering of the Winnipeg scene Fellows settled into with early bands Helen and Special Fancy in the 1990s (she grew up mainly in British Columbia) has given her another sort of experience of solitude. Yet while Paper Anniversary was painstakingly patched together alone in a home studio, her suite about loners was recorded very sociably, with one ensemble in a restored 1912 opera house in the small rural town of Manitou and another band assembling in Winnipeg. But to do it, she had to fly most of the players back to Manitoba. Usually Fellows has to leave home now to see musical friends, whether on tours like the one that brings her to Toronto's Music Gallery on Friday, or trips to collaborate with people such as visual artist Shary Boyle, whose magical hand-animated projections were used for the album artwork and will accompany Friday's show.
In Winnipeg, Fellows has a sense of living "a bit off the grid," as she and Samson spend their time mostly on their own, writing. "Both of us have really made an effort to stay there, because everyone leaves. For him it's family, and for me it's a place I chose. So I want to make it work even though technically it doesn't work."
For all the album's empathy for spinsterhood, the earthy Fellows, ever quick with a curious-fact digression or a joke at her own expense, seems unlikely ever to embrace such an ascetic choice. Her heart ultimately is with the pigeons -- awkward, perhaps ill-fated, but paired for life. In the final song, the bluegrass-tinged What Are Years?, she turns a famous Marianne Moore quote into a question: "Is solitude indeed the cure for loneliness?"
And she answers: "Oh, I don't think so: I'd miss you too much."
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, December 14 at 3:04 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Party!
A friend today pointed out that I've been remiss in not publicizing the launch party for that there book over there in the left margin yet.
The event takes place Wed., Jan. 9, at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, starting at 7:30 pm, as part of the This Is Not A Reading Series (TiNaRS for the cognoscenti).
It features performances of Celine Dion songs and other aesthetic curiosities by 2006 Polaris Prize winner Final Fantasy, Laura Barrett and The Blankket (with perhaps one more performer tba), and an excerpt from the one-woman show Celine Speaks by Laura Landauer aka Gypsy Miller. There will be a short onstage conversation between me and writer/Harper's contributing editor/U of T philosophy professor Mark Kingwell, and DJ'ing by Brian Joseph Davis. The price is nada.
If you're on Facebook, there's an event page here.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, December 04 at 11:12 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Sweet Sounds a-Comin' In
Also this weekend, tonight, tomorrow night and in conversation on Monday evening, we're lucky to have baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett from the St. Louis area (best known as a member of the World Saxophone Quartet) and percussionist Kahil El'Zabar from Chicago (leader of the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble) to play the Trane Studio. If you missed David Dacks' article on Bluiett in Eye this week, go check it out, and as a supplement, here's a piece (halfway down the post) that I wrote several years ago about El'Zabar.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, December 01 at 2:37 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Tinariwen @ the Mod Club and Ethnic Opacity
The Mod Club was packed. As far as I could tell there wasn't a big turnout of Toronto Tuaregs or Malians (that'd probably work better in Montreal), unless they were in the rows up close to the front across the sea of music journalists, "world music" fanciers, industry types drawn by Robert Plant's recommendation (ah, friends, you think that music bizzers just don't care about music, but they care very much what Classic Rock still has to tell them) and others who had come out to see Tinariwen, the international band-du-jour, this evening. As fellow crit-type Helen Spitzer put it, "So this is the crowd you get when Matt Galloway describes you as 'the Saharan Rolling Stones.' " But I don't mean this cynically: The band in large measure deserves the hype, and while it's not the blues-rock-exotica jam-fest that such a descriptor suggests (indeed, as one drunken guy nearby me slurred to his companions, "It sounds like country music! Nashville country music!" - and he was right, in as much as a bunch of songs in 15/8 rhythm can), the way that the electric and acoustic guitar can be treated like a smack fresh idea by this group of ex-expats who came together in a Libyan refugee/guerrilla camp in the 1980s does recall a moment when rock had a credible claim to liberatory power (as Helen's partner Michael Barclay says in his fine Eye profile of the group).
Lacking a vocabulary in Tuareg musical traditions or even much of a North African fluency aside from rudimentary Ali Farka Toure, most of us who've written about Tinariwen this year (do a quick search and you'll find tons: they're having a Moment) are short on interpretive strategies. There's the amazing backstory of their role as the voice of Tuareg rebellion, and then there are the voluptuous waves of the sound, the lightness of the touch: yes, there are guitar solos with some bluesy licks, but they're almost like Philip Glass rounds of hypnotic organ trills, fluttery birdcalls nothing like a Keef or Santana or Page phallic flange. They do in a reverse-retro way recall, for a western listener, some African-influenced guitar rock such as Television or Talking Heads, especially when rhythm-chord bursts overtake the primary backbeat of drum-and-drone. But even at their most assertive they seem gentle, as if their fingers hit the guitars more reverently than their western counterparts do. And then there are the vocals, which (aside from one apparently French-hip-hop-influenced, talk-sing number) remind me of African Arabic song, beautifully skewed to the hook-repeating guitar parts, hitting on the 3 and the 9 of the pattern and always communicative, conversational, until they descend to the final, sighing burnt-down conclusion of most every song.
We were missing the female component of the band tonight, a fundamental part of the call-and-response space of the music, reportedly because the main woman in the band recently had a baby (and another member, Barclay told me, is fighting malaria), and that made the group, despite its dramatic robe-and-turban-wrapped costume, seem a bit more mundane and boundaried than they do on record. But mainly it was the opacity of the content that nagged at me: Yes, music is a "universal language" in the sense that I joyfully danced and clapped and hummed along to these hypnotic tunes, but it is not, because I knew the lyrical and structural contents of the songs had much more challenging things to say, of which I knew nothing. The band clearly couldn't tell us much (the stage banter consisted, very charmingly, after they'd just kicked large quantities of musical ass, of asking, "It's okay?" and being greeted by ever-building screams of pleasure), but I wondered about the tourism we were indulging by listening to this band whose whole identity and mystique is wrapped up in the role they've played in their people's liberation struggle and walking away saying, "What a freaky ecstatic groove that was." (The country-music guy was also very excited by the purple lightshow that played out on the backdrop for a song or two, saying, "That's so psychedelic! They're kind of psychedelic, aren't they?" When of course the whole category of "psychedelic" was partly constructed by borrowings from Indian and Arabic and African rhythms - the signified becomes the signifier becomes the signified.)
But what would I ask? That Tinariwen provide surtitles? Pamphlets on Tuareg ethnic struggles mandatorily taken at the door? Perhaps it's more than enough that the next time a story about the Tuareg issue shows up in the papers, a Tinariwen fan will be twice as likely to read it, and if she's a newspaper editor be twice as likely to give it good play? In this way, beautiful music is perhaps greater propaganda than agit-prop: "I have good vibes for that oppressed people, man." But as I clapped on the 1 and the 4 and the 7 and the 10 and the 13 (or elsewhere at my best on the 2, 5, 8, 11, syncopating some), I longed to be thinking coherently about guns and camels and millet along with math and guitars. For that I probably needed less for Tinariwen to be coming to me and more to go to the Festival au Desert in Timbuktu, which I learned about in a pamphlet from the merch table. Or more realistically, to find ways to think of Timbuktu as a place and not a nursery rhyme. Maybe the uncertainty is the point.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, November 21 at 1:38 AM | Linking Posts | Comments (15)
Passing the Secret (Society) Along
Happy news from Darcy James Argue, who's not only a shakin'-and-bakin' young composer and band leader about town in NYC, but one of the most productive contributors to the non-pop/rock music blog world: In conjunction with the International Association of Jazz Educators conference in the T-dot in January, he's going to be presenting the very first Canadian gigs of his Secret Society big band. However, since it's prohibitively expensive to tour an 18-person group, what DJA is presenting is "Secret Society North," a reconstituted version that combines core members of his NYC ensemble with Canadian musicians. (Darcy is Canadian himself, hailing from Vancouver and having done his musical undergradding at McGill.) The roster is impressive: on reeds, Erik Hove, Christine Jensen, Joel Miller, Chet Doxas and Carl Maraghi; a heavy-hitting horn section of Ingrid Jensen, Dave Smith, Lina Allemano, Kevin Turcotte and Jocelyn Couture on trumpets and Mike Fahie, Kelsley Grant, Barb Hamilton and Bob Ellis; and in the rhythm section, Sebastian Noelle, guitar, Dave Restivo, piano, Matt Clohesy, bass, and Jon Wikan, drums.
As Darcy puts it: "Our gig there is an important opportunity to present Secret Society tunes to a much wider audience, but more than that, it's a chance for us to perform fresh and forward-looking music for students and educators who too often let their focus on jazz's past obscure their view of what is happening right now." (Cf. Dave Douglas's interesting reflections on jazz education and the New.)
In Toronto, besides an official IAJE gig Jan 10, they'll be at the Tranzac on Jan 11, and before they get here they'll be making a stop off at La Sala Rossa on Jan 8.
General | Posted by zoilus on Monday, November 05 at 4:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
The Bodybuilder & Jim Guthrie & I
Just wanted to urge readers in Toronto to go see the local documentary The Bodybuilder & I in its opening weekend, playing at Canada Square. That's the trailer up above: A touching and funny look at a father-son relationship through the bulgy lens of late-middle-age competitive bodybuilding, it won first prize at the Hot Docs festival this year. I served as a music consultant on the film and we were lucky to get Jim Guthrie (of Royal City and Islands among other projects, though he's probably best known for that "Hands in My Pockets" TV commercial) to compose the soundtrack.
You know how the commercial runs of Canadian movies tend to go - in one week, gone the next - so don't snooze. The filmmaker and his dad will be there tonight for the 7 pm screening. The movie's also showing at the Granville in Vancouver and the Bytowne in Ottawa.
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, November 02 at 2:45 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Bizarre Love Triangle:
Skye Sweetnam Steals Joel Gibb's Boyfriend
I've been resisting complaining about this, but I've just seen the iPhone ad that uses Skye Sweetnam's new single, "Music Is My Boyfriend," as its soundtrack and perfectly unobjectionable as the song is, I got annoyed. Can it really be a coincidence that the title is the same as Toronto's own The Hidden Cameras' song "Music Is My Boyfriend" (that's a good quality but slightly distorted live recording), which was released on the album Mississauga Goddam in 2004, and the title of which has also been the band's semi-official slogan for years?
Given the eccentricity of the phrase, and the fact that Sweetnam (who co-wrote the song with the Matrix, I believe) is from Ontario herself, it's kind of hard to swallow this as a golden stream of pure coincidence. (Though it might have been unconscious pilfering.) Since my general stance on plagiarism is "yes," it's not like I want everyone to lawyer up, but it'd be great if Skye and Capitol Records handed Joel Gibb and crew some kind of acknowledgment. Although it could be that even the tide of missed-target Google searches this will generate will bring a few new ears to the Cameras.
But Skye, honey, I'm afraid music still loves Joel best.
(Later: I was mistaken - that iPhone ad is actually using CSS's "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex," not the Skye track - I mixed them up because CSS also uses the "music is my boyfriend" line in that song! Plots thicken, pots call kettles black, etc etc.)
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, November 01 at 11:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
Gig Guide Note
For those who've despaired of it of late - I've just spent all day getting the gig guide back up to scratch for November. It is now full of mood-lifting information. Indulge. December will go up soon as well. Tips, corrections, etc. of course continue to be forever welcome. (See links to yer left.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 26 at 5:35 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Prevost and Found: Interface It
I'd hoped, but haven't managed, what with all the hoohah, to write a more substantive post this week about Eddie Prevost, percussionist and longtime central figure in the British free-improvisation scene, who this week is taking part in an "Interface" series with musicians from AIMToronto, which began last night. Since I haven't had time you'll have to make do with the Wikipedia entry, which is a perfectly serviceable intro to Prevost's illustrious career, and with my wholehearted urging that you go out to Somewhere There and/or the Arraymusic studio tonight and tomorrow and catch him in action.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 25 at 3:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Guest Post: A Matador Regains Her Cape
By now you may have heard the happy news that the planned expropriation of the venerable Matador club site for a parking lot was defeated yesterday at a parking-authority meeting where community members came out pro and con. The news stories all quoted the pro-expropriation neighbour who kept repeating "it's a booze can!" but it won't be a booze can much longer, I suspect. Supporters were largely organized, it's worth noting, via multiple "Save the Matador" web and Facebook groups. Zoilus associate Erella Ganon, who worked on the Committee to Save the Matador, provides an inside view of a case when the city was forced to admit it was wrong. If only the Ontario Municipal Board were so responsive on issues like the Queen West West condo towers. - Carl W.
by Erella Ganon
As though we had planned it, my colleague Gayle Hermuses, my daughter Celeste and I arrived for the meeting at the city hall, dressed in red and black, just like Matador sign. Gayle said these were the "listen to me" colours to greet the Toronto parking authority. We shared the elevator with city councillor Adam Giambrone's new Executive Assistant, Pat Chastang. She introduced herself, saying the councillor had some good news for us. Not quite sure what that meant, we proceeded to the holding area for the meeting room. [...]
People started to assemble, at first only arriving in small groups. Familiar Facebook friends, music buddies, artists, YMCA members, musicians, people I know from the Dufferin Grove market, and a lot of neighbours cheerfully greeted one another. I was glad to see that Vicki (who lives above the Matador) made it there on her crutches. Michael Ondaatje greeted her, as did Kitty, who’s likely been the most consistent, long-time employee at the club. The numbers were swelling and the excitement level was intensifying. My thought that it would only be my colleague and my daughter there with me were disappearing as the room got more crowded.
Simon Wookey arrived with spectacular "Save the Matador" buttons that were quickly snapped up and pinned on. Marla Good, of the Hello Josephine blog arrived with her young daughter. The age range and variety of people was remarkable. We talked about the Matador, and how it has changed since Ann bought the place in the mid-1960s. She raised her five kids there while running the place all these years. A champion for Canadian music, she also made sure women had their voices heard on stage at a time when this was unusual.
A couple arrived. She was wearing a hand painted white T-shirt with "STOP the Matador" scrawled on and her husband had the similar one with "CLOSE the Booze Can" on it. I recognized them. George and Diane, they run a store on College Street that I have used in the past. They install super-loud audio systems into cars. They oppose the Matador and want a parking lot in its place? Go figure. I understand their anger about finding used condoms and needles behind their place. I feel the same way when I find similar debris. These things are found in back alleys all over the city. Their frustration is misdirected and unrelated to the issue at hand with the Matador.
We were ushered into the meeting room when they were ready for us. Kyle Rae asked for the matter to be reopened and it was. He then asked to take into consideration a letter that everyone had before them from Adam Giambrone stating that he no longer was asking for that property be appropriated. It was that simple, since the councillor changed his mind, everything changed. The TPA agreed not to pursue the property for parking and it was all over. We were thanked for our time. This all happened so quickly. After so much work, we got the result we wanted and now it was over.
We thanked the council. As we were ready to leave, George, the lone dissenter, addressed the council with questions about finding used condoms and needles. Passionate and out of order comments escalated until he was asked to leave. He started to perform for the many news cameras. Microphones in our faces as we left the meeting room, we were asked what we wanted for the space. I replied that it wasn't my business. This is a moment for the Matador's owners to dream. I was glad they have time to decide what is appropriate for their space. This is a right that all property and business owners take for granted. I was horrified that the city was taking this away from them and now it was rescinded. There is no question in my mind that the process is wrong in a situation like this. Expropriation is an extreme action that should only be undertaken when no other option exists. Of course, I want the space to be used for musical pursuits, but that isn't up to me. I was just happy that flexibility is possible and that the expropriation process was halted.
Johnny Dovercourt was walking beside me. I introduced him to several reporters as a person that I would like to see doing programming there. So much excitement, so many options ahead. I was very pleased for my part in this process and the huge number of supporters that took time to be there in solidarity in person, and on line, in letters as well as in spirit. There was a huge group that worked together despite differing socio-political backgrounds and we assembled, making it happen. I was so grateful for every person there in any form.
For this, I thank you.
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 17 at 12:29 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Guest Post: Brief Exquisite Encounters
Slow Dance with Teacher: Photo by Bytepusher.
Through my own fault, this is appearing a bit late, but please enjoy this lovely essay by friend-of-Zoilus Jane Wells, a teacher and actor (Number Eleven Theatre) and gem of a woman. Jane's reflections on her participation in Nuit Blanche Toronto open up into broader thoughts about art and intimacy and experience in general well worth reading whether you live here or not. Have a nice weekend, everyone. - Carl
by Jane Wells
Considerable grumbling has rolled around the city since Nuit Blanche, and not just in the media, or among the art crowd. Most of the teenagers and adolescents I know say "it sucked" and was "too hyped." I agreed, and was increasingly cranky as I biked around town in the few hours I had before midnight, when my own involvement in the thing was due to start. I did love the crowds, and the delight of bumping into so many people felt like Paris in the Thirties. Nonetheless much of the art work felt ill-considered, the waste of a rare and glorious 12-hour window of possibility, and waste is always galling.
My shindig was called Slow Dance with Teacher, an event conceived by Darren O'Donnell, for the Great Hall at Hart House at the University of Toronto. I had agreed to be, from midnight to 5 am, one of 12 teachers slow dancing with audience members; I thought the idea was funny, and curious, and posed a peculiar combination of stamina and intimacy that appealed to me.
We were separated from the audience by red velvet cordons, manned by security guards, and with each change of song we were to approach the audience clustered on the other side of the ropes and invite someone to dance. Darren's initial idea was for us to talk as little as possible while dancing, which I concurred with, but when our shift came on, in fact everyone in the first shift found the talking quite essential. [...]
My first partner was a lovely young musician from Peterborough, very relaxed and pleasant. My second partner was older, had a long goofy face, and carried a bright yellow satchel over his shoulder. He had a geeky look about him, almost clown-like, and his face lit up beautifully when I asked him to dance. We began to dance to Cyndi Lauper, "Time after Time," and suddenly he cut loose and began to spin me about, expertly. He was a fantastic dancer, and I was thrilled, beaming and laughing at all the spinning and dipping and jiving. He was too. We were the happiest couple in the world. When the song ended, he kissed my hand, and said thank you, and walked off. He was the only man all night with whom I had no conversation and did not exchange names. Maybe this dance set me up for joy, because the night became exquisitely joyful.
The majority of the other dances were the basic shambling waltz, my left hand on his shoulder, his right hand at my waist, our other hands holding together to the side. Most of the men apologized for not being good dancers, but I immediately assured them I was not either. We would begin our dance, I would initiate conversation, and chatting would ensue. But I began to feel distinctly a subtle pulse, a current running between our simple get-to-know-you conversation and our hands on each other's bodies. Even dancing with the men with the lightest, shyest touch, barely holding my waist, I felt the pulse. Maybe it was the pulse of possibility, but it changed something in the way we were speaking. People talk to you differently when they are touching you.
I was also trying to project a charming but authentic presence, something on the edge of flirtation, just enough to draw the men out but not overwhelm them, a little pull to step forward into a moment of mutual revelation. Revelation not of information, but the tacit awareness of the intimate possibility that we held between us. I danced with upwards of forty men, some clumsy in their mild discomfort, but receptive to warmth and curiosity, a couple saucy and raring to go, some just happy to dance, and in all of that jumble, I felt that I glimpsed each of them, once, utterly themselves.
Throughout the night these thoughts, and the effort to describe why it was so exhilirating, kept surfacing, and I wrote a bunch of things down before I went to sleep at 6:30 am. But I didn't actually identify until late the next day the one thing of which I was most manifestly aware - smell. As the night wore on, my sense of smell became a rising current beneath the waves of these encounters, the thing to which I was purely responsive - what this man had to drink, whether or not that one had smoked a little that evening, his sweat, mixed in with subtler smells. Amazingly, thankfully, none of it was unpleasant - all the smells were singular and of this person. How often do we smell a stranger so specifically?
The work I had seen earlier in the evening was more promotional than experiential, to do with bank logos, and signs, and cables and metal barriers and the inevitable trappings of the safe city. It had missed the opportunity to transform public space, to give people a unique memory of, a rare encounter with some piece of the city, which they will think of always when they pass through it.
Many years ago, in Winnipeg, I worked on a vast winter parade for First Night, the New Year's Eve celebration. For two months, with 150 volunteers, we built puppets, gargoyles, stilts, an enormous dragon; and on New Year's, in minus-30 C, we remade a portion of downtown, pulled it out of unrelieved concrete and brick. I like to think that every now and again a Winnipegger passes the Archives' parking garage and remembers the 15-foot, furred and golden dragon that emerged from its depths at midnight.
If there is one experience I want to offer, and be given, in art, it is the act of transformation. It is the key to political change, to personal change, it is the seditious and seductive whisper in your ear that another way is possible. Men asked me what was the point of this piece as we swayed back and forth, and I had little more than a light answer to offer. But in the three or four minutes of each dance, we were transformed from strangers into intimates, an intimacy unique to that moment.
In that night of the masses, of art as accessory, of crowds roaming in search of surprise, I lucked out, and found the inversion of what I had been seeking, found instead, in each tiny encounter, the transformation of private space.
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 12 at 5:03 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Nuit Blech: Call It a Sophomore Slump
Computer snafus have kept Zoilus at a lower boil than intended the past week, but tons of action is to come this week - concerts in Toronto with Pere Ubu and Veda Hille, and then off to Pop Montreal. But first, a brief word about the weekend past.
Nuit Blanche was a disappointment for me this year, mainly because of how much was overlooked in following up last year's quite successful debut: There seems to have been surprisingly little anticipation that the crowd numbers would grow from last year's already high figures, with the result that until about 2 a.m. it was frustratingly difficult to get near most of the more intriguing projects, or even just to get down the sidewalks without being crushed. The fact that streets were not closed for this event that brings hundreds of thousands of people out is ridiculous. But beyond that, there was a laxness to the curation: a lot of the art was half baked. There were very few works that dealt well with both the "public-space" and the "art" sides of the equation, and the level of ambition on display was often disappointingly low. My colleague Sarah Milroy makes a similar critique in today's Globe, making several suggestions for potential improvements (although also missing a few points I think - if Noboru Tsubaki didn't expect people to climb on his giant inflatable locust in the middle of a football field, for instance, it would have been very naive - although of course that's the art world for you, often. In any case its climbability was one of the few points in its favour).
A few highlights for me included Public Recordings' Open Field Study, which benefited by being outside the "zones" and having space to work with, in which the mysterious rites of the flocks of dancers with hand-cranked radios (beautiful score by Eric Craven of A Silver Mt Zion and other Constellation bands and Toronto sound artist Anna Friz) seemed like emergent patterns, like droplets condensing into human clouds and then dispersing again, and interacting with the denizens of the park (punk kids, drunken cyclists, etc) in amusing and curious ways. Also the Theatre of Ephemeral Music at the Music Gallery was wonderful - the benches in the church arranged in a rough circle that created an intimacy in the dimmed room, as many excellent Toronto musicians improvised in shifts along an atmospheric axis, with the sound processed into an enveloping blanket - you could even lie on the floor to listen. It was a real oasis in the madness of the night. (I wasn't particularly impressed with the visuals that were generated to accompany the music, which were like "a glorified screen saver," as one friend put it; they added to the overall effect but not as much as they could.)
Though I'm biased by friendship in this case, Misha Glouberman's 15-minute "Terrible Noises for Beautiful People" workshops were perfect, a particularly gentle, refreshing version of the sound work Misha's been doing with his "School of Learning," and it's thrilling to think that more than a thousand people got to experience that work in one night. I had a great time seeing Kids on TV in the Works & Emergency Services Building, although I always have a great time seeing Kids on TV. And I was sorry to miss Darren O'Donnell's "Night School," where teachers (real-life teachers) slow-danced with spectators to R&B jams and the like, as well as some of the pieces Milroy mentions in her review, such as Ann Hamilton's "listening choir" and "White Line Light" by Carsten Nicolai & Olaf Bender of the German Raster-Noton art-music nexus. But the effort involved in fighting one's way through to these gems was absurd. And there was entirely too much emphasis on Scotiabank branding experiences going on as well (the space in Trinity Bellwoods Park was mostly wasted on tacky bullcrap, as was the blocked-off street space in front of the ROM).
Nuit Blanche has a lot to work out if it's going to fulfill its promise; however, it also has a lot of resources to work with. Here's hoping. But as it was, as one friend put it afterwards, "I'm left longing for the days when art was for a small private elite."
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, October 01 at 12:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Things Will Shortly Get Completely Out of Hand
Mountain Goats lyrics consult at Lee's Palace on Sept. 25:
See note on "Tulsa Imperative." Photo swiped from Amber B.
There's nothing I can say about the Mountain Goats show last night that won't sound fawning and ridiculous, as became clear listening to everybody speak fawningly and ridiculously afterwards. I can only say that I kind of wish tMGs would never release another album so that all their tours could be non-album tours and we could get completely unpredictable setlists like last night's, which hit all sorts of out-of-the-way spots in 14 years worth of John Darnielle songs, including one he never recorded at all, two that have yet to be recorded, and so on. And his showmanship was in peak form as well.
(For an annotated set list, look after the jump.)
Check it out (this is not in order, I don't think):
Up the Wolves (2005) (included a false start - "I got overexcited." an audience member had to remind him of the first line)
Cheshire County (1995)
Wild Sage (2006) (terrific theatricalized performance)
In the Craters on the Moon (2007) (new song, which seems like an oblique Iraq protest song)
Store (aka Aisle) (2002) (JD gets one of the verses out of order for a moment, but catches and corrects himself)
Woke Up New (2006)
How to Embrace a Swamp Creature (2007) (another new song, with long, funny introduction explaining the scenario of going to visit your ex's apartment incredibly ill-advisably, in a state of total desperation, with the alibi that you're coming to get your Miles Davis albums)
Tollund Man (1995) (featuring apparently an entire new verse that JD sings away from the mic, just mostly to himself, including the words "this is my father's country" or possibly "this is my father's will" and "rejoice, rejoice": it's the secret happy ending)
Tulsa Imperative (1993ish?) (after a lengthy intro explaining how the song was written and then forgotten by John, doing a very funny imitation of his hyper-amped-up younger self - Peter interrupting to say the reason John forgot the song is that he couldn't get a good recording of it within a day of it being written, which by early tMG's insanely rigid rules meant the song was a discard, so Peter's then band Diskothi-Q played it - JD completely forgets lyrics halfway through, and he and Peter have an amazingly long side-conversation trying to remember them, and finally have to admit defeat)
Cobscook Bay (2000) (I was very happy to hear this tune from the Isopanisad Radio Hour 1-sided 12" EP; I might have squealed like a little girl; maybe)
Jenny (2002)
Dilaudid (2005)
Nine Black Poppies (1995) (fantastic performance of this one - burned the image of the "jet black postmark" into my brain)
Old College Try (2002)
encore 1
Snow Crush Killing Song (1995) (!!)
No Children (2002) ("please join me in singing this hateful little song")
encore 2
Tulsa Imperative (now with forgotten verses restored: "Between the time Peter and I left the stage and now ... we have to give thanks for wireless internet")
Dance Music (2005)
Houseguest (1994) ("I know you guys have seen this, but I just love singing this song" - another tour de force performance, highlighted by creepy-loser hip undulations perfectly in character for the stalkerish guy in the song, which is of course originally by Franklin Bruno)
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, September 26 at 5:18 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Twilight of the Matador?
The Toronto Star reports that the City of Toronto wants to turn Toronto's notorious country-and-western after-hours bar The Matador into parking. I wouldn't exactly call this "paving paradise," but it is a bit like the Disneyfication of Times Square, but with an infinitely duller result. Ann Dunn, the Matador's legendary madam-of-the-a.m., seems uninterested in keeping it going (which at 79 is understandable), but she won't go for the rip-off price, for both owners and taxpayers. $800,000 for a 20-spot lot? Come on. That's not an expropriation-justifying public good. As BlogTO rightly points out, "a parking lot in the city of Toronto exists for about as long as a free round of shots on the Matador's bar at 3 am. The space is destined to become a condo construction site (with inevitable underground parking), so this move ... reeks of a city desperately looking for ways of generating cash, historic businesses be damned."
I suspect that since the smoking ban, the Matador's business model (a hangout and music venue after the bars close, booze sold under the table or rather out of a trenchcoat, enough profit to pay off the local cops) has become untenable, especially with the city now regularly extending licenses to 4 a.m. for special occasions like the film festival, though of course only for special venues (read richy-rich ones). Harrison Ford doesn't need to go to the Mat anymore. Someday, perhaps, we'll have a closing time that reflects how late folks in a major cosmopolitan city go out, even when they're not Harrison Ford. But the Matador space is amazingly atmospheric, classic, and the sign is a cultural icon, and some creative entrepreneur could do something terrific with it in a booming 'hood. But no, the city wants to pave it over, because it has the foresight of a flea.
Besides a boozy afterparty following some friends' wedding years ago, my fondest Matador memory was probably seeing Neko Case in 2004 recording part of her live album, The Tigers Have Spoken. Up top is Leonard Cohen's Closing Time video, famously shot at the Matador. Big Sugar's Turn the Lights On vid was filmed there too. (Any others?)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 24 at 2:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
The Continuing Adventures of Me
(Plus: Polaris Non-Forecast)
Julie Doiron: Polaris-polarization consensual cure?
I've been meaning to mention that tomorrow (Tuesday) evening, I'm doing a discussion/workshop as part of the public library's "Toronto Tunes" series (which winds up with an Ohbijou/More or Les/Bicycles concert on Nov. 3). The event is at the North York Central Library called, "Writing & Blogging About Music," along with freelance journalist Tabassum Siddiqui and writer Hal Niedzviecki. The crowd'll mostly be in their teens and 20s, I suspect, but anyone interested in music writing, whether professionally or as an avocation, is welcome to come. It's from 6 to 8 pm, at 5120 Yonge St, which is just by the North York subway stop. To register, call 416-395-5674.
But first, tonight's the Polaris Prize. I can't for the life of me handicap the thing - I suspect I won't be raising my champagne to my faves, Junior Boys, by night's end, but who knows? The winner is decided in an hours-long discussion by the panel of 11 judges on the spot, during the actual gala, and from my experience last year, it very much depends upon the chemistry and convergences among that (what's the opposite of a baker's dozen? a shoplifter's dozen?) gang at that time. As a wild guess, strongly divided opinions might in the end default in favour of Julie Doiron, who inspires a kind of universal fondness and might be everybody's second pick. But I'm not a betting man. Others who are weigh in with their predictions.
Also on the agenda: Tomorrow night after the library workshop, it's The Mountain Goats! Peeks at recent setlists seem to indicate a lot of mixes of brand-new and very-old songs, which is exactly what I want out of a Mountain Goats show. I'm kind of hoping for The Recognition Scene and Raja Vocative and Family Happiness, just in case John D's reading, but I'm pretty happy to be surprised.
And on Sunday around 4 pm, I'm reading at Word on the Street in Queen's Park, along with other contributors to Coach House's uTOpia 2: The State of the Arts book. I might be a little bleary as I'm not planning to sleep the night before. With luck the audience will be in the same condition.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, September 24 at 12:26 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Rough October Listings Finally Up...
... in the gig guide. Apologies for the brief breakdown of the Zoilusian gig-guide update system. We'll add November soon, too. As always, corrections, announcements of shows, etc., more than welcome, by email or in the comments here.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, September 22 at 9:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Regular Programming Resumes
Hi, folks. I missed you. I missed a lot of things. But I got through it. And now we are reunited, and it feels so good.
Not tons to report at the mo', but a couple of exciting things quickly to mention: One, that the absolutely astounding, charming, beguiling, surprising, virtuosic, sui-generis, superlative-exhausting Czech violist and singer Iva Bittova is coming to the Music Gallery in Toronto on Tuesday, November 6. Watch the clip above and you'll see and hear what I mean. (There's quite a bit more Bittova on YouTube if you want to pass a wonderful hour or so.)
As well, two notable notes from friends in blogland: Prof. Drew LeDrew tugs our coatsleeve to say that Destination: Out, the free-est of jazz blogs, has a very special feature this week: Vijay Iyer, who's maybe the most exciting younger player in the music today, has compiled a superb "Solo Piano Mixtape" for D:O, with his own annotations, which are beautifully written and insightful. It includes tunes by Geri Allen, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Andrew Hill as well as two by Iyer himself. It's up for one week only, so hop on over there.
Also our old friend Rob Walker is, as mentioned in the past, doing fascinating work on the song "St. James Infirmary" on his No Notes blog, and last week he did a fascinating interview with microtonal composer Ezra Sims, who (a) explains microtonality for beginners; and (b) offers some observations on the Louis Armstrong version of "St. James Infirmary," explaining how it incorporates mirotones and how he, in turn, slipped a "St. James" section into his piece "Sextet" - which you can hear because Rob has found this awesome site, The Avant-Garde Project, with which I, for one, am going to be spending a whole lot more time.
More soon.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, September 20 at 1:11 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Somewhere There's Music
(How Sweet the Tune)
Exciting local news: Toronto trombonist and all-round swell fellow Scott Thomson writes to say that he is opening a new performance studio where improvising musicians and artists from other disciplines can rehearse and perform.
He's named it Somewhere There, I assume referring to Sun Ra's oft-quoted remark, "We came from nowhere here, why can't we go somewhere there?" In this case, "there" is 340 Dufferin Street, the corner building one block south of Queen or north of King (entrance from Melbourne Ave). With the recent decline in the numbers of jazz-and-related clubs in Toronto, this is particularly happy news. It may please the unintrepid who find it awkward to get to the Arraymusic space in Liberty Village (or who don't frequent the Tranzac due to ... NewZealandphobia, perhaps?). Having the Arrayspace and Some'there in shouting (or horn-blowing) distance from each other, one can envision series or festivals crisscrossing between the two spots, and fantasize about lower Parkdale developing into the Skronk District, a destination spot for musicians and lovers of outward-bound sounds. (You could think of Greenwich Village or something, but I prefer to compare it to going to Chinatown for dinner and deciding on a restaurant when you get there; or knowing that if you need cheap electronics you can stroll up Yonge and comparison shop.)
Says Thomson: "Programming will start in mid-September. I've already set up short- term residencies with CCMC and Geordie Haley, and have starting booking shows by special guests from out of town. A full September lineup will be announced very soon, and a web-calendar will be launched in short order."
Meanwhile, he's hosting two inaugural open houses to spank the baby and get it breathing, and let us all satisfy our curiosity and start dreaming up events that could happen there. Somewhere There will be open for lookyloos this Monday (Labour Day) from 7 to 10 pm, and again next Sunday, Sept. 9, again 7-10 pm. Thomson adds: "If you have folding or stacking chairs, coffee tables, floor and table lamps or useful miscellany that you are willing to loan or donate to the space, then by all means contact me." (The email is somewherethere at inorbit dot com.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, August 31 at 1:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Braxton in Session:
'Go to F as in 'fox' - but not as in Fox News'
I was privileged along with a dozen or so others this morning to attend a partial open rehearsal conducted by Anthony Braxton at the Arraymusic Studio on Atlantic Ave. in downtown Toronto, with a large ensemble of musicians from the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto, who will be performing with him a week from Friday (Sept 7) at the Guelph Jazz Festival. Braxton, of course, is the reed player, teacher, theorist and composer best known for pioneering the fusion of 20th-century modernist composition with jazz, beginning in the late 1960s. (And, more recently, punked-out noise.)
The "AIMToronto Orchestra" has been rehearsing with Braxton for just a couple of days now (though they worked on the scores on their own before he arrived), and the level of fluency, precision and musicality with which they were playing these spidery, unpredictable pieces was remarkable. I'm always struck by how the presence of an admired visitor - in this case, of course, something of a living legend - can galvanize Toronto musicians, shaking off some of the stiffness that can be our local curse and calling forth what they're truly capable of. The ever-affable Braxton seemed impressed, too - at one point he joked that he'd "already alerted Wesleyan University" (where he's a professor) that he was "never coming back."
Unfortunately, the fact that they were doing so well meant that we only got small glimpses of Braxton in directing-and-teaching mode - most of the time, he was animatedly conducting, his shirt drenched in sweat (the Arrayspace is a rather boxy, attic-like, un-airconditioned place, despite its other charms), rather than speaking. If we'd hoped (which I confess I kind of did) to find out what Braxton would be like chewing out Scott Thomson for blowing a trombone cue - well, I suppose that's why they went back into closed session after the first 90 minutes. Otherwise he didn't cater to the fact that there were auditors, so Braxton didn't provide any context or commentary on the compositional intentions and techniques involved in the pieces, as I'm sure he'd already done in their initial rehearsals.
Nevertheless, it was revealing to watch him in action. In particular, hearing his minimal directions to the ensemble, which partook somewhat of the arcane myth-science language for which Braxton is notorious, helped make more sense of that language for me - it feels more organic in a musician-to-musician conversation than when it's removed from that context. It was a bit odd to hear him say "I'm not hearing gravity radiance there" and then, after another runthrough of the section, "Very nice, I'm hearing good gravities." But in relation to the music you could guess what he meant much more than when you hear him speak that way in the abstract. Towards the end, he told the group, "I'm hearing some body time now - it's coming in, it's coming in," which seemed of a piece with his instruction that when they re-entered after pauses, they should not speed up but play as if they were speeding up - "to keep things on the upside of the pulse." Gradually it dawned on me that without coming out and saying it, he was telling them - in this clustery, spikey music in which even to detect a rhythmic tick is a challenge - to swing. And soon enough they were pulling it off.
The other main comments from Braxton were little politics-and-current-events jokes made off-the-cuff along the way, usually when telling the group what section of the piece to go to - "F as in 'fox' - but not as in Fox News!" he'd say, or, "Now let's try section V again - but we'll keep Michael Vick out of it." Or on the subject of that almost-swing - "I will not use the language of General Petraeus and say 'surge' - but bump it up a bit." Besides injecting a bit of levity, these one-liners served an artistic purpose (consciously or not), I think - helping to keep the real world in the room, to remind the players that for Braxton, these highly abstract compositions are still hooked into the social and political dynamics of the society and era in which they were created.
We heard the orchestra playing sections of Braxton's "Composition 91 for creative orchestra" (1979), a partly-notated and partly-improvised piece (available on the 1989 Black Saint release Eugene), and seemingly more through-composed pieces "Composition 305" (recorded on Braxton's 2002 Duets (Wesleyan) record with cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum; you can hear a sample here) (sorry, my notes were in error there - please see the comments) "Composition 306" and "Composition 307" (which he plays alone on the four-CD set Solo Live At Gasthof Heidelberg Loppem 2005, some of which you can hear if you scroll down to it in the Aquarius Records catalogue). Obviously the latter two pieces sounded quite different with an 18-person orchestra than on those recordings, though. I didn't get a chance to eyeball the scores to see what the notation was like, although from a few rows back it was evident that it was on a conventional musical staff rather than the completely graphic notation style that Braxton's known for (note: please see the comments, again, for a clarification of this) - but that doesn't mean that up close the staff wouldn't look like this. Comp. 306 (if I've got the title-to-piece order straight) was particularly entertaining, with the wonderful vocalist Christine Duncan (of Barnyard Drama) regularly breaking in to the music with quick melodic verbal interjections, such as, "The old gang got together last night, and we talked about you somewhat," "The IRS is killing me!" or simply, "Yes. No. Maybe. Maybe."
Chatting at the break with bassist Rob Clutton, he said of the work with Braxton, simply, "It's a gift, a real gift." I couldn't agree more, and the audience in Guelph next week will be counting its blessings too.
The AIMToronto Orchestra is: Anthony Braxton - woodwinds, direction; Ken Aldcroft- guitar; Parmela Attariwala - violin; Victor Bateman- double bass; Kyle Brenders- saxophones; Rob Clutton- double bass; Christine Duncan- voice; Colin Fisher- tenor saxophone; Nick Fraser- drums; Tania Gill- piano; Justin Haynes- guitar; Tilman Lewis- cello; Rob Piilonen- flute; Nicole Rampersaud - trumpet; Ronda Rindone- clarinets; Evan Shaw - alto sax; Joe Sorbara - drums, percussion; Scott Thomson- trombone; Brandon Valdivia - percussion.
PS: Most of the group, by the way, will be taking part in a "company"-style improv session at Arraymusic on Friday night in the Leftover Daylight series. There's been no hint that Braxton might sit in, but one might wonder....
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, August 29 at 12:37 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (12)
Knee Plays
A couple of weeks ago I told you about Cathy Gordon's public divorce-ritual project On My Knees, in which she is crawling across Toronto on hands and knees in her wedding dress to mark the end of her eight-year marriage. Well, it's happening today, right now. You can follow her progress via her website from now till the end of the afternoon, although I am finding that the Flickr photo stream is proving the most efficient live-update source. (Though don't let the photo #'ing confuse you; it's deceptive.) If you are in Toronto and want to greet, toast and console Cathy at the end of her journey, you can rendezvous with her either at the Jameson Pedestrian Bridge (at Jameson & Lakeshore) around 6:30 pm or at the final of the eight "stations" on the journey, the small beach by the Canadian Legion Boating & Sailing Club (the "Water Heals All Wounds" station) at 1391 Lake Shore W, around 7:30 pm.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, August 13 at 1:08 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Guest Post: Mind-Expansion in Meaford
Thereminist Dorit Chrysler appears this weekend at the Electric Eclectics festival.
In this post, Zoilus site helper and local bonne vivante Erella Ganon offers a suggestion for musical action this weekend. If you have access to the Globe and Mail archive site, you can see my article about last year's inaugural Electric Eclectics festival here. - Carl W.
Irritainment, oh yes. My 13-year-old roommate keeps on threatening to make a video of paint drying. She's serious about it, just as I am when I tell her it has already been done.
Let's Paint TV is a Public Access TV show hosted by artist John Kilduff. Many of the shows involve him running on a treadmill, painting a portrait while accomplishing some otherwise mundane activity. Catch him frying pickles while multitasking as he interviews a poet, discussing Ivor Cutler. It would have been fun to see Kilduff on America's Got Talent in June - imagine the comments about him from David Hasselhoff.
That this version of Art (note the capital letter) exists in the YouTube universe with a huge following is not remarkable, but that he's coming to small-town Ontario to perform at the Electric Eclectics sound art and media festival is something to notice. Meaford, a sweet town in the picturesque Owen Sound area will be blown asunder for the long weekend, Aug. 3-5. There are sound poetry displays, music and other unusual happenings throughout the region. Most of it culminates at the Funny Farm, a private expanse on a hill that will be transformed for this three-day event. The original Funny Farm was in nearby Markdale, Ontario. A former inn was made into part-gallery, part-installation, part-funhouse over years of meticulous kitch collecting by artist Laura Kikauka. She's very much involved with this festival - her husband is the creative director, composer Gordon Monahan.
The curatorial decisions for this festival have been made with an equal amount of imagination, sensitivity and enviable networking acumen. Most of these performers appear in public occasionally at best, such as theremin master Dorit Chrysler; filmmaker, composer and musician Tony Conrad; London, Ont., noise pioneers the Nihilist Spasm Band; Canadian cult songbird Mary Margaret O'Hara and many lesser-known artists.
Any part of the series is worth the price of admission, but the choice of staying over makes it more appealing since it is out of town. Camping is certainly not something that I think about often, but to be in the midst of like-minded folks who appreciate similar visual and aural art is a lure too hard to resist. No worry about drinking and driving - just stay in a tent; it doesn't cost much more. And it's certainly more entertaining than watching paint dry.
See the full lineup here. - Erella Ganon
THE FUNNY FARM PRESENTS
ELECTRIC ECLECTICS
AUGUST 3-5, 2007
MEAFORD, ONTARIO
FRIDAY, AUGUST 3rd from 7pm:
7:00 BLUBE (Montreal)
7:45 FOSSILS (Hamilton)
8:30 HALLICRAFTERS (ALGIS KIZYS/ERIC HUBEL) (NY)
9:15 LET'S PAINT AND EXERCISE TV! - JOHN KILDUFF
supported by MICHAEL EVANS (NY) & GROUP (Los Angeles)
10:00 TONY CONRAD (Buffalo)
10:45 dd/mm/yyyy (Toronto)
11:30 BARRY SCHWARTZ (San Francisco)
12:15 JAYMZ BEE'S COSMIC VISION (Toronto)
1:00 WHIPPOORWILL (Toronto)
DJs:
DJ FAILURE (Brooklyn)
RECORD PLAYER (Meaford)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 4th
(DJ @ 4pm, performers @ 5pm):
5:00 BITCHIN' (Toronto)
5:45 NILAN PERERA (Toronto)
6:30 ROZASIA (Toronto)
7:15 GASTRIC FEMALE REFLEX (Toronto)
8:00 DORIT CHRYSLER (NY/Vienna)
8:45 NIHILIST SPASM BAND (London ON)
9:30 MARY MARGARET O'HARA (Toronto)
10:15 ALEXANDER HACKE + DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO (Berlin)
11:00 LARY 7 (NY)
11:45 EDWIN VAN DER HEIDE (Rotterdam)
12:30 BRAINFUDGE (Toronto)
DJs:
SHELDON DRAKE (New York)
SIR SPINNER (Toronto)
Filmic Interludes provided by The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film
SUNDAY, AUGUST 5th from 4pm:
4:00 AS IS (Owen Sound)
4:45 CLOCKDIN (Grey County)
5:30 WOMEN IN TRAGEDY (Newmarket)
6:15 MR + MRS HYPNOTIST (Toronto)
7:00 LET'S PAINT AND EXERCISE TV! - JOHN KILDUFF
supported by MICHAEL EVANS (NY) & GROUP (Los Angeles)
7:45 DISGUISES (Toronto)
8:30 ANNE BOURNE (Toronto)
9:15 I/O MEDIA (Toronto)
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Monday, July 30 at 6:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Amigos Makin' Art;
Plus, Happy 80th, John Ashbery
P(re)-S. Thanks for all the limerickal steez. Keep 'em comin'. And now...
Zoilus has frequently spoken of dear pal Misha Glouberman and the curious classes he teaches at the Misha Glouberman School of Learning, in various forms of improvisation, especially vocal, for non-musicians. Better than any account I can offer is this new short documentary about his latest class, based on John Zorn's Cobra. The film is by Rose Bianchini:
Another friend, Cathy Gordon, has long been planning a project I find compelling/horrifying/beautiful: Five years after she separated from her husband of eight years, Steve, Cathy was finding herself continually avoiding finalizing the divorce. So she created a structure she felt would enable her to do it: On August 13, from 11:30 am to 7:30 pm, she is crawling across Toronto on her hands and knees, in her wedding dress, visiting a series of significant locations from her marriage, and at the final station, signing the divorce papers. She is documenting the whole process (including her current crawling training) on a new website that is more than worth a visit.
Finally, tomorrow, Sat. July 28, marks the 80th birthday of probably my favourite living writer, American poet John Ashbery. Mainly via Facebook, I've been organizing a "notional celebration," just to encourage people to think of Ashbery with gratitude tomorrow, but that has developed as well into an actual, modest-scale celebration: At 3:30 pm, a few people are going to gather at Clinton's bar in Toronto, pretend it's the Cedar Tavern, quaff a few cocktails and read a little Ashbery. If you're so inclined, join us. Or just raise a glass in that spirit tomorrow, wherever you are.
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.
- from "Just Walking Around," A Wave, 1984
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, July 27 at 1:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Guest Post: Compassionate Consumption
A message to the community from Matias Rozenberg of the Phonemes (Blocks Recording Club), Matias, and Consumption Records. Please help him out if you can! His email is matias890 at hotmail dot com - C.W.
1. WHAT IS CONSUMPTION RECORDS?
Consumption is a label that releases music on donated cassettes utilising hand-decorated, recycled packaging. The music is sold not for money, but in exchange for art challenges. No money changes hands. Consumption Records concentrates on music originally recorded for the creators and their friends, with no intention of ever finding an audience.
The art challenge for a particular cassette is dependent on the cassette in question. ( For example, the CoraMichael tape will cost you 2 pubic hairs and some toenail clippings; Great Grandma Cassie's tape cost a drawing of an eccentric relative; The Perfects tape cost a made-up-on-the-spot song which the band then re-recorded and released on their next album.) Consumption Records releases are only available in person, through unusual situations and over the mail.
Consumption Records is secretly celebrating its five-year anniversary.
2. WHAT IS THE DANGER CURRENTLY FACING CONSUMPTION RECORDS?
I am moving from my very big house to a very tiny house. There is a shelf of Consumption materials and releases that cannot fit into my new home. also, there are several boxes of tapes that need storage. The stuff must be gone from my old place by August 1.
When I started Consumption Records, I vowed to myself I would keep it going for the rest of my life, or at the very least, for a significant amount of time, like no less than 30 years. This situation puts that vow in jeopardy.
So I am hoping that there must be one, if not several, responsible people reading this who has some space and would be happy to store a few things for the label.
If you are that person (or those people) please contact Matias Rozenberg via matias890 at hotmail dot com. Thank you!
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 18 at 4:50 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Block Ice & Bloodlines
This Friday, New York's Erik Friedlander, perhaps the most prominent cellist in the improv-and-new-music world today, is playing a show on Toronto Island, and by some coincidence, today in The New York Times, there's a story about Friedlander - in particular his new album, Block Ice & Propane, which draws on memories of family camping trips with his mother, sister, and father Lee Friedlander, the famous photographer. I'd forgotten that Erik F. was the lensman's son, so I was curious to read this piece. It's disillusioning as you get older to find out that half the people exhibiting in galleries have trust funds and another third have artist parents (and a few have both), the ways that class, cultural capital and nepotism determine the shape and population of arts communities - not that the kids of artists should be excluded, of course, but it's another sense in which the tribe is kind of endogamously self-reproducing rather than having full intercourse with the rest of society and evolving out of that. However, I didn't feel that way about the Friedlander connection, I think in part because it's obvious how hard Erik works, with his quite prolific output of solo albums along with guest appearances in performances and recordings by everyone from the Mountain Goats to John Zorn and Ned Rothenberg to Courtney Love; but also because there's always been something a bit mysterious in his aesthetic to me, which somehow framing him as the child of a modernist-artist family helps to bring into clearer focus.
One point that the Times's Ben Sisario passes over that seems worthy of mention is that Lee Friedlander has quite a direct link to the music world, as he was the photographer for jazz and soul albums on Atlantic in the 1950s and 1960s, shooting the classic portraits on the covers of such albums as Miles' In a Silent Way, Coltrane's Giant Steps, discs by Aretha Franklin, Roland Kirk, Ray Charles, Mahalia Jackson, Mingus, Ornette and many more. Friedlander remarks in the story about the liberating effect of having grown up seeing that art is a matter of "just doing" the impossible. I'm sure that he also grew up hearing that lesson illustrated sonically by the subjects of his father's photographs, some who bent the rules and some who recognized no rule but their own, and his own work, which is so much about tension and timbre and the marginal limit points of music, is illuminated when I look at it as conditioned by and responsive to the swaggering, expansive music that surrounded him in childhood.
Whoever his daddy is, Friedlander is quite an intense performer and well worth catching live. See the gig guide for details. Also, on the "jump" to this post is a column I wrote about him three years ago when he was touring behind my favourite disc of his (I haven't heard the new one yet), Maldoror. [...]
Making ugly sounds on a beautiful instrument
CARL WILSON
April 15, 2004
The Globe and Mail
When I reach Erik Friedlander, he's rollerblading through the streets of New York, and asks me to wait as he passes through a tunnel.
It's the first time I've interviewed an internationally acclaimed musician in mid-skate. But for a jazz player on the outer rim of expression, and an unlikely instrument, "cellist on rollerblades" is as good an image as any.
I ask if he's heading to a studio job, maybe an avant-jazz session like those he's done with the likes of trumpeter Dave Douglas or saxophonist John Zorn, or a pop gig like those with Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love, or one of his own scores for film.
"Actually, no," he says, "Couples therapy." The 44-year-old laughingly adds, "Don't worry, it has nothing to do with Maldoror."
Maldoror is his first solo disc, after a half-dozen as leader of cross-cultural jazz ensembles Chimera and Topaz. It's based on the book Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautreamont, the pseudonym of Uruguayan immigrant Isidore Ducasse. He wrote it in Paris in 1868, at half Friedlander's age, and died two years later, unmourned till the surrealists rediscovered him a half-century on.
Friedlander came to it when the composer Michael Montes - after years of pushing for a solo disc - cornered him in a Berlin studio and surprised him with printed pages of Maldoror excerpts. Friedlander read them one by one and, with tape rolling, improvised musical responses, all in about an hour.
In the book, Lautreamont rhapsodizes over evil of every persuasion, from murder, pedophilia and the rape of Christ to erotic union with a shark. Its preface, which inspired Friedlander's first track, warns the reader may find "the deadly issues of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar." No wonder he fears I'll jump to conclusions about his private life.
Yet relationship counselling is another accidentally apt metaphor. Here more than ever, Friedlander is mediating between cultural odd couples: 19th and 21st centuries, classical and jazz, beauty and brutality, spontaneity and structure. As Lautreamont's notorious line goes, it's "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."
The idea of jazz cello sometimes feels that incongruous to the son of 1950s jazz photographer Lee Friedlander (who shot covers for Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus), despite praise like being a voted a "rising star" in last year's Downbeat poll.
Jazz cello can be traced from Oscar Pettiford in Duke Ellington's band through Abdul Wadud in the 1970s loft scene. Today it can even be found in the hands of Peggy Lee in Vancouver, or Kye Marshall and Matt Brubeck (son of Dave) in Toronto. Yet it remains a bit like a leggy, brandy-toned Bacall striding unexpectedly into a bar full of stubbled, scotch-soaked Bogarts.
"I think it's the timbre, the texture," says Friedlander. "I used to play Broadway shows, and the most basic player with a sax or clarinet could play five notes and sound more 'jazzy' than I would after slaving over a tune for five hours. The sustain of the cello - there's nothing cool about it, I mean in the Miles Davis sense. It's too intense."
Its strengths are nearly as tricky. "It has a warmth and resonance that's fantastic. Everyone responds: 'Oh, I love the cello.' But I need not to be so restricted by that preconceived notion of what the cello sounds like. It can be raucous, ugly, aggressive - and it needs to be.
"Although I've sometimes gone too far trying to be that way."
Wittingly or not, Montes may have struck close to that dilemma in choosing Maldoror - a beginning of the modernist inversion of morality and rejection of beauty that would define 20th-century art.
"Lautreamont was clearly trying to shock people," says Friedlander. "Which I found funny at times, living now. But I had to be aggressive and find something I could respond to, without bowing down to it too much. It's hard not to be impressed by the economy of it, what he crammed into a small space."
In turn, Friedlander coaxed from his strings his own pizzicato and bowed compressions of the poet's pranks and agonies, from the skittering madwoman to the swirling starlings, the pretty boy's heart torn from his chest and the "stern" elegance of mathematics. Yet like many artists who no longer identify with the old protest against pleasure, his vocabulary harbours harmony as much as dissonance, turning Ducasse's anarchy to elegy, maybe for modernism itself.
The exercise also broke down the compositionally-oriented Friedlander's resistance to free improvisation. "Complete freedom is nowhere," he says. "As an audience member I get frustrated and angry when players just lob one idea after another that has no connection, no tension that can then be released."
Yet with Maldoror the only structure is conceptual. "Once I start, I try to deal with what I have just played, not just cast it aside. I tell a story." How will he approach it in concert? "That's the crux of the problem. To recreate the same music or process would be a little deadening mentally. So I'm touring the spirit of the record, creating something in the moment."
For this first solo tour, including stops at Montreal's La Sala Rossa tomorrow and the Rivoli in Toronto on Sunday, he's rehearsed basic frameworks for Maldoror and other pieces by Zorn, banned Iranian pop star Googoosh, and even his teenage rock hero Carlos Santana.
But he got a surprise in a trial solo run at South by Southwest in Texas last month, for an audience waiting to hear rock band Mr. Bungle (whose singer, Mike Patton, has his own side group named Maldoror): "Without exception these kids were more interested in the improvising. I couldn't play 'out' enough for them. When I did something prepared, you could feel the energy drop immediately. . . .
"Maybe people are ready for something different."
Read More | General | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, July 17 at 1:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
August Gig Guide...
... is now up in quite sketchy & preliminary form. Send along those event announcements. Even the rest of July is looking thinner than usual - although check out the roster for the Global Hip Hop: The 4 Elements festival at Harbourfront starting July 27 with a 25th anniversary tribute to Wild Style that includes Grand Wizard Theodore, The Chief Rocker Busy Bee and The Fantastic Five! And the next night has the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble from Chicago, made up of Sun Ra alum and Artistic Heritage Ensemble leader Kelan Phil Cohran's kids. Thrillz! August so far has nothing to compete, but I'm sure news will roll in.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, July 13 at 3:27 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Geeks in Love
I linked to the Cat & Girl art-geek versus science-geek strip a couple of months back - it's good subcultural fun, but there's a lot of truth to it. I've long imagined a TV or radio show made up of those conversations that smart but scientifically subliterate arts types get into, arguing about some matter of scientific fact, often after a couple of beers, where nobody really knows the most basic terms of what they're talking about. Artists Talk About Science would be the lowest-rated program ever, but it would get big laughs at MIT. (The only function of this joke is to refer to it when these conversations happen: "Welcome to the latest episode of Artists Talk About Science.")
While I'm as guilty of scientific obtuseness as the next art geek, I'm excited whenever someone tries to bridge the two geekitudes. It's why Boing Boing is such a success, for example. It's part of why I love Matmos. Or Brian Eno. Or Blackalicious rapping about the periodic table in Chemical Calisthenics. And it's the driving impulse behind two performance events this week in Toronto: This year's Scream festival of poetry and literary performance has a scientific theme (I should have posted this in advance of last night's panel discussion on the subject, but ah well), and Small Wooden Shoe is presenting the latest installment of its "Dedicated to the Revolutions" series of theatrical explorations of scientific revolutions as part of this week's Fringe festival: I Keep Dropping Shit, a show about the Newtonian revolution. (The title's a gravity joke, obvs.) To show they're not just taking science as a cheap supplier of metaphor (though science is great for that), SWS is presenting the show at the MaRS Institute of research and innovation on the University of Toronto campus, which has showed its soft spot for art geeks in the past by serving as a venue for Nuit Blanche, not to mention somebody up there's obvious concern about architecture. The MaRS folk have an enjoyable interview with Dropping Shit director Jacob Zimmer up on their blog today. Let's increase the geek love.
I should also mention that I'm in a panel discussion at the Scream on Sunday afternoon which has nothing to do with science except in its title: "Under the Microscope: The State of Poetry Criticism." The writeup follows, but it's at 3 pm at Tinto coffeeshop at 89 Roncesvalles, and it's free. I am on the panel as the designated outsider - the organizers made the argument that they think music criticism gets right what poetry criticism gets wrong, and while I'm not sure I agree (I guess I have three days to decide!), it's fruitful ground for discussion. Come on out and get into it. I'm going to try to make sure there's plenty of time for audience contribution, in a scientific spirit of free and open inquiry.
Even with a microscope, it's (almost) too small to see: where's the discussion of poetry among non-poets? The media carries criticism of all kinds of arts, from architecture to audio installations, but no one seems to talk about poetry. We'll examine why. Panelists include David Orr, poetry critic for the The New York Times Book Review; Carl Wilson, music critic and proprietor of the website Zoilus.com; Damian Rogers, arts editor at eye weekly; and Elizabeth Bachinsky, a poet whose latest collection was nominated for a 2006 Governor General's Award. The lab director for this discussion will be Toronto writer Marianne Apostolides.
General | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, July 05 at 1:24 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
Guest Post: Afrofest & Toumani Diabaté
Zoilus aide-de-camp Erella Ganon writes:
Afrofest is one of the best ways Torontonians have to investigate a wide range of music from that continent. Most performances are available without an admission charge, and my advice is to wander to Queen's Park this weekend and just catch whoever is on the stage. Normally my faith in programmers is not as solid, but the line up with this incarnation of Afrofest is without low point from what I gather. Expect a huge selection of food and items recently brought over from yonder for sale. The weather is predicted to be cooperative. Don't try, however, to glean information from their website; it is one of the least useful I have seen. One might expect, a few days before the festival, that the site would give an approximation (or at least an idea) of which day a particular artist is playing. Two things I do know for sure: The popular Mahotella Queens won't be appearing at all; they've been replaced by Cape Verdian newcomer, Lura. Which day or time, is anyone's guess. And Malian kora player and griot Toumani Diabaté will play Harbourfront Centre's main concert stage Thursday night on the bill with Abdoulaye Diabaté (who also will be at Queen's Park at some point, this weekend).
The kora is a 21-stringed instrument with a gourd as a resonator. Sounding like a cross between a harp and flamenco guitar, the strings are plucked with both hands. Kora players have traditionally come from families of griots - historians, genealogists, musicians and storytellers who pass their skills on to their descendants. Toumani can trace his griot ancestry back at least 53 generations and Abdoulaye Diabaté can trace back 70 generations. Can you imagine? In my family we cannot even trace the countries of birth more than 3 generations. If you were from Mali or Guinea and felt a calling to be a musician, it likely would be discouraged unless it was in your lineage. Last time I saw Toumani Diabaté was years ago at the Phoenix club. He was touring with blues guitarist Taj Mahal. The interplay between these two very subtle musicians was a delight. This week he is appearing with his new group, the Symmetric Orchestra, incorporating his traditional song styles along with new ideas and arrangements. - Erella Ganon
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, July 04 at 5:15 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Going to the Source
SoundProof magazine, a previously unknown-to-me Toronto venture that apparently has big ambitions to expand across the continent, keeps it proudly local in their new feature, "The Top 20 Toronto Albums Ever," based partly on a very patchy survey of critics & bloggers including myself. Aside from the Barenaked Blegghies and some picks of dubious Torontosity (throwing Neil Young in at no. 2 is only the most obvious instance), I won't nitpick their choices: Some might quibble with putting both Final Fantasy albums in the list, but predictably not me. But I was most grateful to see that Main Source's Breaking Atoms was on the roster, because I'd never known about that terrific 1991 disc's T-dot hookup - I was living in New York when it came out and thought of it as an NYC product, unaware that the two members who weren't the Large Professor were Torontonians. (Further background here.) And here I'd thought the lovable but not exactly A-list Dream Warriors were Toronto's only semi-substantial contribution to golden-era hip-hop. Breaking Atoms is a stone classic.
Here, for the record(s), (sorry Michael), is the list I sent them. I ended up choosing not to rank them but to list them off in chronological order, which affected what ended up on my list. You'll note that the '90s are a bit of a dry patch - I'm not, for example, the Rheostatics fan that many people are, and Toronto was pretty heavily grungey through much of that period. One big oversight (aside from Main Source): I'm embarrassed to say that I overlooked Fifth Column, though I'm not sure which album I'd choose - and maybe it would be the JD's Homocore compilation instead. I also lament the lack of jazz, though it would be hard to settle on one or two particular albums there. Some improvisors are represented in other guises.
What would be your picks?
Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations (1955)
Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy, self-titled (1970, re-released 2004)
The Four Horsemen, Canadada (1971)
Gordon Lightfoot, Gord's Gold (1975)
Bruce Cockburn, Humans (1980)
Jane Siberry, The Walking (1987)
Mary Margaret O'Hara, Miss America (1988)
Handsome Ned, The Ballad of Handsome Ned (posthumous, 1989)
Bob Wiseman, Sings Wrench Tuttle: In Her Dream (semi-pseudonymous, 1989)
John Oswald, Plunderphonics (samizdat-autonomous, 1989)
Guh, self-titled (1996)
Michelle McAdorey, Whirl (1999)
Royal City, Alone at the Microphone (2001)
The Hidden Cameras, Ecce Homo (2002)
Blocks Toronto Compilation (aka Toronto is Great) (2002)
Barcelona Pavilion, It's the Barcelona Pavilion EP (2003)
Les Mouches, You're Worth More to Me than 1,000 Christians (2004)
Bad Bands Revolution compilation (2006)
Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds (2006)
Eric Chenaux, Dull Lights (2006)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, June 28 at 7:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (32)
Feel-Good Music For Fucked-Up People
A reminder that Eugene Chadbourne is doing a solo show tonight at the Tranzac. Here's a little clip for the uninitiated, but it's only a portion of what Dr. Eugene gets up to, which include sheer noise on the electric rake and stringed skull, twisted-roots country on the banjo and shreddin' on the homebuilt electric guitar...
Oh, and here's a little '80s Schockabilly for good measure:
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, June 27 at 2:59 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Live, Local and in Lo-Res
The Toronto Sun today has a candid and compelling profile of one of the local music scene's more colourful characters, impresario Dan Burke, as well as (even better) very nicely filmed video clips of the interview. Topics: Confessions, crack, and Canada's colonial complex.
As well, YouTube has clips from Tomboyfriend's performance at Pride festivities on the weekend (and some from earlier shows) on NoMediaKings' channel.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, June 26 at 5:40 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
So Ex-cited
The guitarist in Vampire Weekend, whoever he is, is really good and has listened very closely to African township jive. I like the violinist too. The rest, the New England Paul Simon-meets-David Byrne vocals, etc.? Not. Sorry, Ryan. But he's been championing some great stuff lately, as usual - I'm pretty taken with Kickball, and Moviola is known quality.
But random MySpace bands are not what we are here to talk about. We are here to talk about last night and The Ex - a band whose name I've never realized before this moment could denote "the ex," as in ex-boyfriend, ex-wife. I just took it as a generalized name of protest. But on the evidence of last night, no way are they my ex-band. Still my greatest love of live music in the world. Even without a bass player - an absence that makes a difference to the physical dynamics on stage but, strikingly, is not at all a problem for tonal balance, as Terrie and Andy just fill in the bottom end of their own sounds and Katrin's bass drum kicking is remarkably powerful enough to fill in the low end. As for the sound itself, I can hardly describe - at the end of the show, I said, "I wish I could do something in the world as well as they do that." Their sense of polyrhythm, of dynamics and drama, is simply nonpareil, and GW Sok remains the best white European rapper on Earth - he did a solo rally-speech/poem that sounded like a freestyle flight whose topic just happened to be international power relations. I was gratified to hear a couple of tunes from my favourite Ex-era, the Tom Cora years, with Katrin leading on Hidegen Fujnak a Szelek and Sok on the indelible State of Shock (one of the most linguistically sophisticated songs ever written, with an A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D rhyme scheme, a critique of post-Wall Berlin, and mid-section verses that condense the whole song down to an instant-replay recap by using the end-words of all the preceding verses as text: "Shock-said-blank-down/ Block-bad-tank-town..."). But even better than that was the following song that used a Fela Kuti-style groove on the verses and then broke into a chorus that was kinda straight out of the Clash playbook, then repeated the pattern again. As usual, Sok seemed like the most earnest man in the world, wringing his hands as he danced in a kind of worrywart-OCD ritual motion, and then pulling out the megaphone to shout his exhortations, and Terrie and Andy, while visibly quite a lot older than they looked when I last saw them five or six years ago, still joyfully jump around the stage and lock horns with the heads of their guitars like improvising rhinos. They really make most other bands in the world seem like they don't get the point.
Afterwards there was a rumour that the band was going to head over to one of Bloor Street's Ethiopian dance bars, and we tried to follow, but by the time we got there it was 2 a.m. and the doorman was very sternly firm about not allowing anyone else in. The music upstairs sounded like a shower of arcweld sparks. Or maybe we were just still in a heightened state.
General | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, June 24 at 1:00 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (9)
Just Flew in From Facebook...
... and boy, are my proprioceptive ego-self boundaries tired. That thing is a mindfuck. As you all know. I am late to the party, which I now realize is kind of like a whole second Internet. So that's what "2.0" means. My friend Lauren says Facebook is "a TV show about a town." Which is true, except that it is a town where all surfaces are wrapped in mirrors, which makes the TV show overwhelming to watch (and watch watching itself). (Btw, Lauren's three-day art show begins tonight. See the gig guide for details.)
As a result of all the distraction, many things to catch up with:
Fastest case of a Cat & Girl comic coming true in real world ever: Metal-addiction disability claims.
Next record you need to hear: Nicole Willis & the Soul Investigators. "The Soul Investigators" is the best backup-band name in neo-soul if not in soul of all time. It reminds me of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, as well as that Woody Allen joke about cheating on his metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the boy next to him.
Mike Watt interviews Tony Maimone (bassist for Pere Ubu and many other bands over the years).
Devo remain the smartest.
The Diodes reunion is documented on YouTube.
Brooklyn's Dirty Projectors are doing a Pierre-Menard-writes-Don-Quixote-stylee exercise with Black Flag's Damaged, under the title Rise Above - that is, to be clear, Dave Longstreth reproduced the album from memory, song by song, without reference to the source. All on acoustic guitar I think. (See comments.) Notable for all Oulipian-inclined rock fans.
Which makes me wonder: Has there ever been a rock/pop Oulipo subsection, official or not? There should be. Along with the DPs, I nominate Pyramid Culture as founding members - their constraints include all members being female and having three names, all stage costumes being primary colours, and, most importantly, all songs being non-fiction. On their upcoming album, titled 100% True, I hear that all songs will appear in alphabetical order. The disc will be launched together with Brian Joseph Davis's book/CD The Definitive Host in Toronto at Mercer Union on Aug. 3.
This weekend in Toronto, the big musical newses (for those of us for whom Pride is not the big news) are Extermination Night tonight and The Ex tomorrow, but I didn't want to leave unmentioned the remarkable-sounding tribute to Carole King's Tapestry that's taking place at the Boat on Sunday, with a different artist/group covering each song on the 1971 album, whose sheer number of classic tracks is kind of astounding to behold. Anticipated highlights include ZZ Sharrock doing I Feel the Earth Move, Sandro Perri perforing It's Too Late, Nif-D playing (the Gilmore Girls theme song) Where You Lead and Katie Stelmanis closing up with (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (which was a Goffin-King tune, though Aretha recorded it first). A waaaay better prospect than the actual released 1995 tribute album, although that one did have Aretha herself, and the Bee Gees - it's really hard to live down the one-two punch of Richard Marx and the Blessid Union of Souls. (Yes, I swear, they spell "Blessed" with an "i". I believe there's some law on the books that makes this grounds for being tied to a stake under a full moon and being torn apart by weasels, right?)
I was going to make a list of picks for the Toronto Jazz Festival, but you can look to the sidebar and the gig guide for that, for now. Also here are my Globe and Mail colleague JD Considine's choices, and some my friends at Eye.
Otherwise, though, I am pretty out of it. Any major controversies happening I should know?
General | Posted by zoilus on Friday, June 22 at 3:46 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (11)
Handsome Memories
A guest post from Team Zoilus stalwart Erella Ganon, about a vital figure in Toronto music history who will be honored with a honky-tonk hootenanny this weekend. You can hear some Handsome Ned music at his memorial MySpace page. - C.W.
Many years ago, starting in the early '80s, I had a regular radio show on Toronto campus-community station CKLN-FM. My dear friend, the musician Handsome Ned, was a frequent guest. We'd play all kinds of things and gossip on about alleged "borrowed" lyrics or melody lines, tracing them from one popular or obscure song to another. Since Ned always wore a cowboy hat and played country and western music at the Cameron House on Queen Street almost every day at the time, people assumed that is where his knowledge began and ended. But Ned was an army kid, who was born in Germany and travelled a lot, picking up excellent useless information en route.
One thing he and I shared was our love of a good story. Venturing into all kinds of unusual musical genres, we'd play Flipper, Violent Femmes, Bay City Rollers or Aka Pygmy singing songs about their love of honey and tell tales of the connections we'd imagine.
At the time, CKLN's "promise of performance" allowed us to have virtually every kind of music on the air - except country. It seems preposterous now. I cannot remember why it was, but the country station in Hamilton was powerful and unhappy about our audience. Eventually, because of some my carefully worded proposals, we managed to get our friend, David Barnard, the program director to look the other way and grant Ned his own radio show because he was so fond of the undeniably charismatic Ned. However, there was one caveat: He wasn't to play any country. This became a running joke between us. Ned played honkytonk, bluegrass, blues, rockabilly and everything in between: We weren't to call it country, so it was anything but.
The defining lines between one genre of music and another were far less flexible then than they are now, but Ned wooed us, seducing us and transforming us into ardent fans of whatever song struck his fancy. He was not someone to argue with (though I frequently tested that). His brother Jimmy, Ed Mowbray, Mark from Pages Bookstore and I had our birthdays in the same week, so we celebrated together. A few days ago, on my birthday, we raised a glass for Ned, as we've always done.
Ned was born on his older brother Jimmy's birthday. His parents said, "Son, for your birthday, you can choose a name for your new baby brother." Thrilled, Jimmy decided to name him after his hero, someone he thought about daily, someone who had a big impact on his life, motivating him to no end: The baby would be granted the name "Batman." Oops! Ned's parents hadn't considered that one. Telling him they knew too many other children named Batman, they decided to grant the next best thing: The boy would be christened Robin.
Robin "Ned" Masyk died Jan. 10, 1987. He was an important person on Queen Street. Kind of an unofficial ambassador, the peripatetic troubadour sparked an interest in country music that inspired many musicians that came after him. June 4, 2007, would have been Ned's 50th birthday. To celebrate his life and love of all things musical, his friends are gathering on Saturday night, June 16, at one of his favourite watering holes, the Horseshoe. Expect to see these fabulous former Ned collaborators: Mary Margaret O'Hara, Steve Koch, John Borra, Cleave Anderson, Teddy Fury, Lori Yates, Johnny Macleod, Jim Masyk, Steve Leckie (of the Viletones), Screamin' Sam, Tony Kenny (of the Razorbacks), Emily Weedon, Heather Morgan, Michael Brennon, Scott B, Joanne Mackell and others performing at the event. It also will feature the re-release of the The Name is Ned CD, as well as a preview of the upcoming Handsome Ned documentary film and a limited-edition line of Ned t-shirts.
Some of the money raised that night will pay for the design and installation of a memorial plaque on the side of the Cameron House. That's where I was on the night Ned died. Herb Tookey, one of the Cameron's owners, and I were the only people that knew Ned was dead at the time. A cop heard it on the police radio and came in to tell us unofficially. We had to keep it a secret until Ned's family was notified. As people asked us if we knew where Ned was, and whether he was going to play later that night or at a speakeasy, we kept our lips still, stealing moments to break into tears and resume composure until word was out at the end of the night. It was a series of impossibly difficult tasks.
- Erella Ganon
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, June 12 at 3:22 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Indie Kids Can't Jump?
An Eye weekly article today provocatively called "Torontopia's white-guy syndrome" includes an interview with me, among others, about the downtown arts/music/miscellania scene's difficult relationship with Toronto's vaunted multiculturalism. The headline is an indication of a degree of oversimplification (the word "Torontopia," for instance, was popularized by Steve Kado, who, as his last name suggests, is not a white guy) but the points made are valuable. It's disappointing to see that so far the Stillepost reaction, for instance (not counting Doc Pickles' opening salvo, and only including the first few "yawn" responses that have been posted as I write), partakes of exactly the sort of defensiveness that Jonny Dovercourt describes in the article. Sure, it would have been better if this article had been done when the Wavelength panel was happening, but what exactly makes it "too late"? Did the problem get solved sometime recently when I wasn't looking?
I'm open to an argument the problem is too trivial to make much on (though wouldn't this be a kind of "separate but equal" defence - or else an acknowledgment that the indie/arts downtown scene is too mediocre for accessibility to be worth anyone's while, which would be a weird, or at least sad argument for the people in it to make?). However I'm not convinced that a "big collective yawn" is actually, as Doc P. argues, a sign that all is well. Blase shrugging is in fact the indie scene's favourite form of self-protective deflection.
Final point: The first quote from me in that article, on the David Miller event at Trampoline Hall, is taken somewhat out of context and it was also a response to a leading question by the reporter: She essentially said, wasn't he there because this was a privileged group of people? And I said, sure, that was part of it. But I said he was also there because Trampoline Hall invited him, and because the event is a model of a different way of people in Toronto talking to each other that he apparently liked, and because he wanted to connect to the arts community. And I added that I was sure he spent much more time in the campaign going to community centres with diverse ethnic constituencies than he did talking to downtown white arts nerds - otherwise there's no way he would have won an election in this town. I understand what the reporter was getting at, but her use of that quote was far more insulting to both David Miller and Trampoline Hall than I can let pass.
Still, there's a lot of worthwhile stuff in the piece otherwise, including about the social and practical barriers to a more diverse scene that persist despite anyone's best intentions.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, June 07 at 3:45 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (31)
The Nights that Say NXNEEE...
Yo Majesty!
Like every other music hack in town, I've got yer red-hot North By Northeast festival picks right here (also on The Globe and Mail's website). Besides the ones to follow, there are a few obvious standout tickets, by the way: the 3 a.m. shows tonight and possibly tomorrow night with Blue Rodeo at Lee's Palace, each following a strong night of folk/twang/roots rock, especially Friday's sequence of Rock Plaza Central, the Sadies and John Doe (ex, of course, of Los Angeles country-punk heroes X); tonight's bill at the Boat with Mother Mother (Vancouver), Les Breastfeeders (Montreal), Pride Tiger (Vancouver), Abdominal (T-dot) and Champion (Montreal); Calgary's Woodpigeon tonight at the Drake at 11; the Pop Montreal showcase tomorrow night at the Comfort Zone featuring Montreal's Buzzcockian blasters the Nymphets, Handsome Furs (members of Wolf Parade), and local electro-magineers Woodhands; Junior Boys at the Mod Club tomorrow (although I'm not that wild about the rest of that bill); Jenn Grant at C'est What, Friday at 1 a.m.; and on Saturday, the d'Ubervilles and Germans at the Boat, as well as the funky lineup of Souljazz Orchestra (Ottawa afrobeat), Masia One (ace local MC), Tanya Morgan (New York group whose album was one of The Roots' ?uestlove's top picks last year) and Nouveau Riche (Philadelphia) at the Gladstone, the lineup of fine indie types at the Horseshoe that night (including Ohbijou and You Say Party! We Say Die!) and if you were so inclined, Urge Overkill at Lee's.
For those of you who are actually registered to the industry confab side of the event, I'm on a panel tomorrow (Friday) afternoon at 2 pm called "Meet the Press/What the Hell is Press?" with fellow writers in print and pixels Sarah Liss, James Keast, Chris Budd, James Booth. It's in Regency Room A. Peek in if you're not too enthralled by the Joe Boyd interview in Regency Room B at the same time. (Hmm, I wonder if I can sneak over.)
And now my top 5 NXNE picks:
Future Clouds & Radar. An alert to fans mourning high-school-noir TV show Veronica Mars: The tunes Paul Rudd performed in the role of a dissolute indie mastermind late this season were by FC&R leader Robert Harrison's 1990s cult Austin band Cotton Mather. His new group injects his impressive Beatles/XTC pop-craft with extra paisley and pastels. Later on the same bill, early-90s nearly-beens Buffalo Tom (quick - name their cult TV connection!) and locals The Old Soul. Thursday, 9 p.m., Horseshoe Tavern, 370 Queen St. W.
Jonathan Coulton. Though he was featured in The New York Times magazine as an Internet music market leader, and is a close cohort of Daily Show/"I'm a PC" personality John Hodgman, there's more to this Brooklynite than social networking - Coulton's acoustic ballads and wuss-rockers link humour and sweetness at fire-wire speed to the hearts of his "code monkey" fans. He's followed by local standouts Spiral Beach and Republic of Safety as well as Jesse Malin (ex-D Generation). Friday, 9 p.m., Reverb, 651 Queen St. W.
Yo Majesty. This Florida party-girl trio's attitude recall New York punk-funk founding mothers ESG, but the beats and lingo are pure 2007, and their anthem Club Action is a foul-mouthed contender for single of the year. They're on a banging bill with Montreal's Thunderheist and Lesbians on Ecstasy. Saturday, midnight, Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen St. W.
The Diodes. One of the first Toronto punk bands, whose classic Tired of Waking Up Tired still sounds freshly exasperated, reunites on its 30th anniversary to see if time to kill is still killing them. With half the members living in the U.K., chances to hear their lilt-and-lash, Crash & Burn Club sound live won't come again soon - if ever. Saturday, 3 p.m., Dundas Square, and midnight, Sneaky Dee's, 431 College St.
Track Dirtyaz. Rap and rock fusions have a grim record, but this Toronto band finds a new groove, with a Hendrix/Sabbath guitar brawl roiling under Wu Tang-damaged group vocals. On an action-packed card with locals No Dynamics, Nif-D, The Old Soul, The Bicycles and more. Saturday, midnight, Silver Dollar, 486 Spadina Ave.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, June 07 at 2:31 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
Max Poetics: Canada Gets Along With Everyone
But primarily poetry is supposed to have a pleasure principle. It's all about sensual reading, hearing song and echoes of songs - contaminated, of course, by adulthood. - Ken Babstock
Tonight's the annual Griffin Poetry Prize here in town, that apollonian bacchanal where the old ladies flirt with the young drunks (gender unimportant) and poets look lost in their suits. We're here to send out a what-what to our poemboy Ken-B, fresh off his Trillium score and now up for the domestic cheddar of the Griff's $50K payday - there's also a $50K international award. K-Babs says some sharp things in the paper today in an interview with my colleague James Adams. Good luck, drink slowly and don't forget when you was just Kenny from the block. Or, well, the Rock. And if you do win, be aware you will thenceforth be known as "Professor Griff." On the other hand, if Don McKay gets some payback for his outrageous '05 sonning by Roo Borson, we won't be boo-hooing either. (Meanwhile from points west, this fella grouses about awards and ethics; he's not entirely right or wrong but the caveat's always worth noting.)
Elsewhere in the versiverse - still in Toronto, but outside the horserace winners' circles - writer (and Eye arts ed.) Damian Rogers, who invented the "live magazine" Pontiac Quarterly, is now launching the "Tipsy International Poetry Series," with a visit from the Wave Books' posse's two Matts, Matthew Zapruder and Matthew Rohrer (who got an international Griffin nomination, but no pot o' gold, the year before last). Zoilus likes the cut of their writerly jibs, and if you missed them when the Poetry Bus rolled through town last summer, you've got two fresh baked opportunities: Thursday at 7 pm Damian and Brooklyn's diacritic duo (okay, that doesn't even make sense) will be reading at Type Books, 883 Queen W. The next night, though, Tipsy offers a much more shimmery, feather-boa sort of lit event at Buddies in Bad Times called ONWARD HO! (Which my brain immediately Beckettizes into "Worstward Ho" but ignore my brain), a "crazy circus of a night" that starts at 7, ends at a reasonable 9:30 pm and includes not only the Matthews but the aforementioned Ken Babstock (either buying the rounds or drowning his sorrows), RM Vaughan, Zoe Whittall and Lisa Foad, Kevin Connolly, Emily Schultz, a.rawlings, and toute la gang. Coach House will have a poetic-sound "listening booth", the Test series will in some sense represent, there will be visual projections, a "raunchy musical soundtrack" and a Reading Tent, where poets will read one poem to one person in cozy confidence. Resistance is, of course, futile.
Finally I want to mention that Toronto writer Kevin Courrier is beating me handily to the 33 1/3 punch with the launch this coming Tuesday of his own entry in the series. Kevin's previously the author of a fine volume called Randy Newman's American Dreams (the basic reason my 33 1/3 book isn't about Newman's Good Old Boys) and another about Frank Zappa though I won't read books about Frank Zappa. Now he's taking on a real Sasquatch of a subject, that Rosetta Stone(d) of art-rock, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. Courrier seems to be carving out a niche in early-'70s California Warner-Reprise acts, with Zappa probably the linchpin - who's next? Tim Buckley? Tom Waits? The launch is at This Ain't the Rosedale Library, 8 pm Tuesday, free.
And a poem from Matthew Zapruder's book The Pyjamist.
CANADA
By Canada I have always been fascinated.
All that snow and acquiescing.
All that emptiness, all those butterflies
marshalled into an army of peace.
Moving north away from me
Canada has no border, away
like the state its northern border
withers into the skydome. In a world
full of mistrust and self-medication
I have always hated Canada.
It makes me feel like I'm shouting
at a child for letting a handful
of pine needles run through his fist.
Canada gets along with everyone
while I hang, a dark cloud
above the schoolyard. I know
we need war, all the skirmishes
to keep our borders where
we have placed them, all
the migration, all the difference.
Just like Canada the Dalai Lama
is now in Canada, and everyone
is fascinated. When they come
to visit me, no one ever leaves me
saying, the most touching thing
about him is he's so human.
Or, I was really glad to hear
so many positive ideas regardless
of the consequences expressed.
Or I could drink a case of you.
No one has ever pedaled
every inch of thousands of roads
through me to raise awareness
for my struggle for autonomy.
I have pity but no respect for others,
which according to certain religious leaders
is not compassion, just ordinary
love based on attitudes towards myself.
I wonder how long I can endure.
In Canada the leaves are falling.
When they do each one rustles
maybe to the white tailed deer
of sadness, and it's clear
that whole country does not exist
to make me feel crappy
like a candelabra hanging
above the prison world,
condemned to freely glow.
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, June 06 at 2:46 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
At Long Last
The Zoilus gig guide calendar has been updated, with fairly detailed listings for June and even a start at July. And what will you find therein? Cecil Taylor! The Rob Brown Trio! CSS! The Spanish Harlem Orchestra! Ozomatli! Keren Ann! Joe Boyd! Junior Boys! Dirty Dozen Brass Band! Rufus Wainwright! Tim Hecker! Hidden Cameras! Harborfront tropical festivals! Manu Chao! The Ex! Rickie Lee Jones! Antibalas! Vijay Iyer! The Boredoms! Toumani Dibante! Slint! Fred Eaglesmith! De La Soul!
Sounds summery, doesn't it? Well, except for that Tim Hecker.
POSTSCRIPT (Monday June 4): North by Northeast and Luminato listings now added to the schedule. Apologies for any and all typos. They probably won't be fixed. I'll have a few NXNE picks in the Globe and Mail this week too (coming out on Thurs. I believe - I'll let you know). Sorry for the current reduction of Zoilus to a listings rag. Blah blah book blah book blah book. I'd be eager to have any readers' reviews of the shows that I currently can't attend, like the Cecil Taylor show, tonight's Rob Brown show, or any of the others over in the sidebar or given double-star ratings in the gig guide. Just email.
ALSO: Having just dealt with NXNE mostly on my own, and with the Jazz Festival coming up, I realize that the post of Zoilus Listings Jazz Helper really should be filled. If you're available and interested (probably best if you're interested in improv and experimental jazz, this site's main focus, but with enough interest in more traditional and fusion jazz to watch those listings too), the job comes with a very small honorarium and the satisfaction of helping the artists find audiences. Amazingly, email works for this function too.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 29 at 9:12 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
Amazing Tales: Davis's Blocks Bonanza,
Dixon's Girls Go Swing London
A portrait of the artist, BJD, as a young bad-ass.
Zoilus's mancrush on friend, neighbour, writer and conceptual artist Brian Joseph Davis has been evident for years now, with such wonders springing from his temples as the Theodore Adorno punk-rock single, the "Greatest Hit" mashups, the "Banned Records Burned and Played" project, the "Yesterduh" beyond-karaoke experiment, The Portable Altamont and (with partner Emily Schultz) the Centre for Culture & Leisure - I'm worn out just listing them, and that's just some of BJD's creative hijinks. Now, I'm excited to announce that for the first time, all his music-related projects will be gathered together and released thanks to some of Zoilus's obviously-favourite people, the co-op-operated folks at Blocks Recording Club.
Brian's album will be called The Definitive Host, it will be formatted as (Blocks's first) book/cd package and it's coming out July 29. Besides most of the above, it will include two new pieces. As Brian says:
"Eula is a choral piece with lyrics adapted from Sony/BMG's notorious End User License Agreement. This score for four vocalists was composed in collaboration with Dawn Lewis of Sub-static recording artists Repair." (If I'm not mistaken, though I may be, it was sung by a choir of lawyers.)
Plus: "5 Box Sets Played on Fast Forward, Then Edited Into Songs: I used a consumer grade Hitachi CD player to turn hours of music into skittering sonic mulch (16 thousand automatic edits); I then assembled the samples using cheesy DJ software."
The release party is Friday Aug. 3 at Mercer Union, featuring a short live laptop set and then "a very live performance of Greatest Hit," in which copies of The Carpenters: The Singles will be loaded into 12 CD players and played by members of the audience. Whitney Houston's Greatest Hits might get the same treatment, time permitting.
Some new MP3s are already up on Brian's site. Eula will be posted July 1.
♥ ♥ ♥
Sean Dixon plays a gas-can banjo (belonging incidentally to Michael Ondaatje)
at his "banjoree" book launch last month. Note the "HELIX" logo - roxx!
Other news that we can't let pass without a champagne toast: Zoilus's old friend Sean Dixon (possibly the only living person for whom I would sing in public) has just accepted a very generous offer from Harper Collins UK for the British rights to his new novel The Girls Who Saw Everything, just out from Coach House in Canada. I'll leave it to the literary gossip sheets to report how generous, but I'll say it's the kind of reward one always wishes but never dares hope would come to an artist who has persevered in pursuit of his distinctive voice and vision with great integrity for many years. I couldn't be happier to congratulate just about anyone for just about anything, with cheers, bravos and love.
| Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 25 at 2:25 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Guest Post: When Adult & Kid Worlds Collide
While Carl scrambles with deadlines, friends step in to keep Zoilus fresh. Today it's Helen Spitzer, broadcaster, writer, omni-rocker and mom, discussing an event this weekend that puts the "all" in all ages. - CW
Thrills abound in the T-dot this weekend, but perhaps the thrillingest ticket is an afternoon show at the El Mocambo this Sunday. Hotter than Feist tickets! More sold-out than Amy Winehouse! It's Rock Plaza Central and a band of 10-year-olds called The Bunnies!
I'm impressed by what the Bunch ladies (Rebecca Brown and Lisa Kaplan) have kicked into action. In a little over a year they've conjured up an entire scene in Toronto around the notion of rocking out with your kids - first with their Family Dance Parties, and then with the "Indie for Kiddies" events (they kicked it off last August with the always already kidfriendly Bicycles). And while at some all-ages events people still look at you funny if you bring your 8-year-old, these shows truly are kid-centred - they keep it under 85 dB and babies get in free. Crawling babies at the El Mocambo, ladies and gents. When did this all happen?
It should be a no-brainer (and I was dying for this kinda thing 10 years ago) but I think it's the confluence of indie kids breeding and feminist mamas who aren't apologetic about wanting to have lives. I'm thrilled about this long overdue shift into parenting culture - and I'm not talking about smug hipsters still fretting about their cred.
I was chatting about this with Bunch co-founder Rebecca Brown at their Family Dance Party a few weeks back for a piece I've been working on for CBC Radio 3. Kids were breakdancing downstairs and DJ Fase was spinning, but we were upstairs comparing notes on France, where kids go out on the town with their parents and Barney never rears his insipid head. "It's a North American phenomena - this idea that there's a grownup world and a kid world," she said. It's so true - and I wonder if it has roots in darker cultural manoeuvres. Further research may prove me wrong, but I can't help thinking that a children's culture that infantilizes the parents grew out of the whole 1950s move of shooing women out of the bigger world and back into more appropriate spheres.
Theorizing aside, I'm just glad that this is happening now. Rebecca and Lisa are fab for so many reasons, but what I enjoyed about them most was the frank way they speak of bridging the chasm between kid world and adult world. Lisa: "When I had my first kid, I kind of switched into 'mommy mode' - and I was actually a bit sad. Why am I suddenly just a mom? Why does it have to be that we have to do everything just for our kids and not ourselves anymore?" Rebecca: "Toronto's such a vibrant city and sometimes when you're a parent you can get a little pushed out of that. We just wanted to elbow our way back in."
Elbow away, mamas! If you're just learning about this show for the first time here - well, it's long sold out - so I'll leave you this little taste of the Bicycles from last year, and a quick hit from a lady who never seems to have a problem navigating the two worlds, Zoilus fave Mimi Smartypants, whose cheeky smartness kind of reminds me of Carolyn Mark. - Helen Spitzer
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, May 25 at 1:53 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
T-Dot Thrillz Runneth Over
What a weekend: Three nights of Kids on TV (read Chris Randle's xlnt Eye profile)! Frog Eyes tonight - with Jewish Legend and Himalayan Bear (whom I hear are terrif)! Steve Reich Percussion Ensemble tonight (in the Cool Drummings festival)! Friday night: Chicago AACMer Ernest Dawkins at the Trane, Joel Plaskett at the Opera House, Republic of Safety at Stone's Place, Richie Hawtin at Mod Club, Kids on TV again! Saturday night, more Kids, more Cool Drummings, more Joel Plaskett, and the latest Extermination Music Night, this time taking its space-invader ethic where it's really needed, the suburbs! (Plus Feist, if that's your thing, and I must say, after listening to the new album with high hopes, I still don't think it's mine.)
Will I see any of these shows? No, I'm-a-gonna be chained to my desk. But you go and come back and tell me about them, please?
The June gig guide will go up tomorrow (Friday), by the way. Sorry for the strange delay that's left just a week's worth of guide on the pages this week, but that's the way things are right now. As a commenter in yesterday's post pointed out, if you don't yet know that Cecil Taylor is playing the St. Lawrence Centre on June 1, know it. We want that mutha sold out. T-dot-ba-doo-bwish-flarfla-bang represent. I don't think categories like "greatest living jazz musician" really compute - the great ones are kind of mutually incomparable - but if somebody jumped me in a shopping complex, dragged me into the washroom and started dunking my head in a toilet over and over until I said who's the greatest, I think Cecil's would be the name I'd spit out.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, May 24 at 12:09 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (0)
Nobody Takes Manhattan First Anymore...
Bad news for Toronto, good news for Berlin: Stillepost chatter reveals that members of Kids on TV are moving to Berlin this summer, following in the allemanding footsteps of localz Joel Gibb (Hidden Cameras), Peaches, etc.: "these next shows were doing in may/june are going to be our last ones in Canada for a long time. We won't stop coming back but it will be a lot less frequently." The queer-dance-underwear-punx-party band has just put out its full-length debut Mixing Business with Pleasure on Blocks in Canada and Chicks On Speed Records on the rest of the planet Earth.
Read about the band here (how can you resist a profile that begins, "A pink plastic cock is pressed against Scott Kerr's cheek, blurring his black and white facepaint..."?) Zoilus Team Hunger Force action figure Chris Randle will also have a profile of the band in tomorrow's Eye. B(oot)log has a great set of tracks from KoTV's mashup set with Ohbijou on CBC Radio's Fuse (and B(oot)log's right, that show doesn't get enough credit - does it still exist?).
Below is the video for KoTV's Breakdance Hunx, but before you watch it, I must insist you go listen to Club Action by Yo Majesty from Tampa at their MySpace - I'm sure all the internetses were talking about this months ago or something but I've just heard it and it is the catchiest song released anywhere in the universe this year. Yep, more than anything under yer umber-ella-ella, and way more than Lip Gloss (which can, however, proudly claim to be the mostest so-dumb-it's-brilliant song of '07). CLUB ACTION. I officially declare summer open for gettin'-busyness.
And now back to the Hunks:
General | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, May 23 at 2:04 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Musique, Actuelley
Koenji Hyakkei.
As the annual Victoriaville International Festival of Musique Actuelle gears up in Quebec, those of us Toronto-bound have the consolation of the double-ought-seven edition of the VTO fest, put together by the indispensible Ron Gaskin of Rough Idea and the Music Gallery. My apologies that the Zoilus gig guide mistakenly listed the opening show with the Netherlands' Corkestra for tonight rather than last night, but there are still two shows that should command your attention: On Friday at the Music Gallery, there's the local Evergreen Club Gamelan Ensemble along with Vancouver's Fond of Tigers (featuring violinist and Drip Audio mastermind Jesse Zubot). And most excitingly, Sunday at the Horseshoe, from Japan comes KoenjiHyakkei, led by Yoshida Tatsuya, the percussionist from the monster bass/drum duo Ruins; this band is a theatrically baroque prog-rock unit with soprano vocalist Yamamoto Kyoko, singing in an invented language that draws on the Zeuhl tradition of the almost-literally cult French band Magma, a band still reverently spoken of in Europe but oft-overlooked in North America (poker pro Steve Davis testifies). Matching Yamamoto's vocal gymnastics will be Toronto's own polyglot improvimentalist Christine Duncan in a new configuration of Barnyard Drama, her duo with drummer Jean Martin, this weekend featuring Brandon Valdivia (percussion), Nick Storring (laptop, cello, keyboard), Colin Fisher (sax and guitar) and Justin Haynes (guitar).
Not officially part of the fest, noise group Magik Markers is at the Boat on Sunday, the day after their Victo set. No reports of any other off-fest events yet - if you get wind of a surprise Anthony Braxton, Acid Mothers Gong, Kevin Blechdom/Eugene Chadbourne or John Tilbury gig in town, be sure to send word, hm?
Meanwhile, also around town, check out my colleague Robert Everett-Green's lovely profile of Dark Blue World vocalist Elizabeth Fischer from Vancouver, who I recall from my favourite Canadian feminist funk-punk band of the '80s and '90s, Animal Slaves. Robert also spills some glowing ink on the debut album by PEI's Jenn Grant, whom I've had on my mental to-check-out list for a while now.
And finally, as the Gilmore Girls comes to a close tonight (I'm just about to watch the finale), read friend-of-Zoilus Helen Spitzer's heart-tugging personal essay about the effect the show had on her own unconventional family, from the Toronto Star.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 15 at 10:01 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (3)
A Little Off the Top
(Miscellany)
In the future, every child will be given a pair of scissors and invited to shape our destinies. In the future, every child will be granted full citizenship rights; encouraged to vote, run for office and drive streetcars. In the future, children will teach and adults will learn; a playground will be built on every battlefield; and candy will be free. In the future, children will be powerful creatures able to cross the street without looking both ways, and hold their breath underwater forever and ever and ever. Darren O'Donnell
Darren O'Donnell is bringing his little masterpiece of social performance, Haircuts by Children, to Birmingham, England, next week, May 19-20. Maybe my favourite thing anyone in Toronto has created in the past couple of years.
Give or take a few Final Fantasy songs, of course. New stuff keeps popping up: Flare Gun (part of a compilation inspired by spam email), plus this terrif Polaris-finalist-teamup with Cadence Weapon for the CBC (including Owen's beautiful version of John Cale's Paris 1919), a live show in Kingston, Ont., a Montag track featuring Owen, the Stars remix... And you know of course about the ridikulonk hootenanny in NYC last weekend.
I'd heard a rumour about this but didn't quite believe it until a press release arrived today: Toronto's Andre Ethier (of the defunct Deadly Snakes) has been invited to - wait for it - sing the national anthem at a Major League Baseball game. Those who are (unlike me) knowledgeable about baseball might already have guessed that it's going to be an L.A. Dodgers game - a move inspired by the fact that Andre shares his name with Dodgers right-fielder Andre Ethier. I'm told the Dodgers got wind of the coincidence, had a cute idea, asked to hear some of our Andre's music and dug it, so they're flying him down to L.A. to sing O Canada when the Jays play the Dodgers on June 9. It seems like a bit of a psych to have a singer with the name of one of your players sing the other team's anthem - but on the other hand, A.E. brings a bit of hometown, so I guess it balances. Still, if the Dodgers had really listened to Ethier's very Dylanesque, Americana-styled solo work, it might musically have been better to get him to do the Star-Spangled Banner.
T-dotters, the gig guide continues to be updated; watch it and the sidebar for news, like the fact that Marc Ribot is returning May 18 to play with Italian singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela. Second time this year! Second time I can't go! Is he dating somebody in Toronto all of a sudden, or is he just out to taunt me?
Tonight's Bitchin' improv session at the Gladstone Art Bar, including Eugene Martynec, Alan Bloor and other local improvimentalists, is going to be streamed live to the web via this site beginning at 8 pm.
Eye Daily reviewed the Arnold Dreyblatt show. (See interview below.) Just as I feared, since I couldn't go: "It was a big, joyful, almost overwhelming noise, maybe the greatest I'll hear all year."
Our pal Sean Michaels of Said the Gramophone has an interview with Will Sheff of Okkervil River in the new Believer. Hi'ly rec, natch.
Currently on TV: V.Mars has been watered down from noir to hot cocoa; Heroes and Sopranos are, in their different ways, ratcheting up the mind-fuckery; and Gilmore Girls is ending, simultaneously too soon and too late. The last half-season, from the splitup with Christopher on, has been, I think, the best sequence of episodes since... maybe, in fact, since Rory started college. But the story is ready to end. Too bad they didn't figure that out a year ago and plot it that way.
| Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, May 08 at 4:39 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (8)
T-Dot Thrillz: Cobra Cabana
Zoilus comrade-and-associate Misha Glouberman (best known as host of Trampoline Hall) is getting ready to do another of his sets of "classes," which are always fantastic intellectual exercise and delightful social blowouts all at the same time. In the past, I've studied group vocal-noise improv, "How to Get Really Good at Playing Charades," and the nature of happiness in Misha's series, which he teaches without ever seeming to be teaching.
The very best class I've ever done with Misha, though, was his one-night "Open Cobra" project, where somehow a huge room of mostly non-musicians learned to play John Zorn's 1980s "game piece" Cobra to a pretty decent level of competence, in a few hours. The whole thing unfolded like a little miracle. (Read an account of the night by Eye's Dave Morris.) The YouTube clip above shows Zorn and other NYC downtown '80s luminaries playing Cobra, from Derek Bailey's BBC series on improvisation.
Now, Misha is planning to do a longer (maybe six-part) version of that process. And though I can't take part (goddamn book deadlines), if you're in Toronto, I highly recommend you do. It's for performers and non-performers alike.
As Misha says, "I'm really interested in noise improv as a participatory activity that people can do for fun. You don't have to have done anything like this before, you just have to want to. The class will be entirely vocal - no instruments, just voice-noises. We'll spend some of the time working on general vocal-noise-improv, some working specifically on Cobra. I'm still finalizing the details of time (hope to start in the next few weeks), schedule (probably 6 or so consecutive Wednesdays or Tuesdays or something like that), price (some variation of PWYC), and place. If you might be interested in knowing more about the series, drop me a line. How/whether/when I can do this will depend on what I hear back from people, so if you might be interested, don't just wait to hear more news, email me and let me know."
So don't hesitate.
For another taste of Cobra's sting, you can check out Misha's "Open Cobra" collaborator Joe Sorbara's new monthly Cobra event with musician-participants from AIM Toronto, as part of the Now Lounge Sunday improv series, this Sunday, April 1 at 2 pm, pwyc.
Toronto turns out to be Grand Cobra Central. The Cobra Cabana. Who'd'a thunk?
| Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, March 28 at 12:18 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (4)
Now We Are 2
(Plus: Ornette!!!)
The day's almost over and nobody has wished Zoilus a Happy Blogday. Oh well. No cake for you then. No, seriously, gratitude to all the readers who've made Zoilus such a pleasure to do.
Gotta say how sick with excitement I am to be seeing Ornette Coleman tomorrow night at Massey Hall. Torontonians, there are still tickets available. I know they're pricey, but it would be a gross collective error to let that surplus stand. The man is 75, and he helped revolutionize jazz music. These figures don't come along often. That's why I was a little disappointed with my colleague Mark Miller's interview with Ornette in the paper yesterday - why would an experienced jazz journalist be so thrown off by a jazzer's jive? Still, there was one significant quote that has people talking:
But his performing and recording activities have been intermittent - especially of late and evidently not as a matter of choice. "In music, you're only hired when someone activates the phone or writes you a letter," he observes .... "Only my son and my cousin have given me help to get jobs."
It's scandalous, the idea that Ornette Coleman is sitting around by the phone hoping to be invited to perform somewhere. On the local "jazztalk" discussion list, guitarist Tim Posgate related the story of asking Steve Lacy, "not long before he died, if he had any plans to come to Toronto, and he replied, 'If someone invites me I would love to come'. How many great artists, that have the ability to enhance, inspire and maybe even change our world are sitting at home because no one is calling?"
A good question that I'm afraid will go sadly begging for an answer more often than not. (Whatever became of last year's Toronto Progressive Jazz series, which was such a good step in this direction?) It's great that Massey Hall's programmers asked Ornette here, and a sold-out hall is what's needed to convince them to bring in such artists more often instead of Jack Johnson or some other asshole.
(Yeah, yeah, I'm sure he's very nice.)
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, October 28 at 6:14 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
October, November, Novemberer
(Gig Guide!)
Left to right, top to bottom: Oct. 28, Nov. 8, Nov. 5, Nov. 11-12, Nov. 13-15.
The Halloween(ish)-to-American-Thanksgiving(ish) live Toronto show calendar is up now! Additions and corrections always welcome.
Corrections & additions welcome. Zoilus-approved shows are marked with a *star. Special picks are **double-starred. If it's not starred, it may mean I don't find it especially thrilling, or just that I don't know or am not sure enough to recommend it. Listings will be updated weekly. All info subject to change - this is a casual effort, please do call the venues. Sources include the Stillepost.ca Toronto board, Eye, Now, Greg Clow, ListMe.ca, Canoe.ca, Soundlist, The Whole Note, Toronto Life and, as the saying goes, you - email or post in the comments with show information and disinformation.
FRI NOV. 4
* Leftover Daylight w/ COLIN FISHER, ELLEN WATERMAN, EVAN SHAW, ERIC CHENAUX, GEORDIE HALEY, RONDA RINDONE, SCOTT THOMSON, MICHAEL KEITH, ROB CLUTTON, NILAN PERERA, KEN ALDCROFT, JOE SORBARA, various groupings, three sets => Arraymusic Studio, 60 Atlantic Ave., ste. 218, 9 pm, $6-$10
* WE ARE WOLVES, PEOPLE FOR AUDIO => Drake Hotel, $10
* That Crazy American Music w/ ART OF TIME ENSEMBLE => Harbourfront Centre Theatre (231 Queens Quay West), $25-$35 (Nov 4-5)
* HABANA SAX => Lula Lounge, $25-30 (NOV. 2-6)
DEE KAYE IBOMEKA => Hugh's Room, $20
THE ROYAL CROWNS, THE RIDE THEORY => Horseshoe, $10
SHELDON ROURKE & THE LOADED TOY GUN => The Vatican, $5
THE GARDENS FAITHFUL (farewell show), FIFTH BUSINESS, guests => Rancho Relaxo
THE MARK INSIDE, ACTION MAKES, 100% WoOL => The Boat, $5
PALETTE (live turntablist improv) w/ VISION, DJ STEPTONE, NV, THE VINYL KILLER, DJ VETERAN => Trane Studio, $10
MARK EISENMAN TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St. (Nov 3-4)
Mark de Clive-Lowe's Free Soul Sessions w/ BEMBÉ SEGUÉ => Supermarket, $10
SUE FOLEY => Healey's, $12/$15
CANARY MINE cd release, DJ SCOOTZ, VANESSA JOHN AND THE BACHELORS => Rivoli, $10
ROB CAMPBELL QUARTET => Rex Hotel
DRAGONLORD, ECLIPSE ETERNAL, TRITON, VALKERIES CRY => Reverb, $20
AVENGED SEVENFOLD, SAOSIN, DEATH BY STEREO, OPIATE FOR THE MASSES => Kool Haus, 5 pm, $22.50
AMICI CHAMBER ENSEMBLE, LESLIE KINTON => Glenn Gould Studio, 8 pm, $10-$40
Carmina Burana w/ TORONTO MENDELSSOHN CHOIR => Yorkminster Park Baptist Church (1585 Yonge), $35-$65
GENE DINOVI/DAVE YOUNG => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 3-5)
BELVEDERE, THE FULL BLAST, NIGHTS OF VIOLENCE => Kathedral, $12.50
SAT NOV. 5
** THE REVERIES (Rat Drifting improv trio) w/ JEAN MARTIN play the music of SADE (!) => Tranzac, 10 pm
** JENS LEKMAN, THE PHONEMES, STEVE SHIFFMAN & THE LAND OF NO, art by SHARY BOYLE => The Music Gallery, $8/$10
** QUINTRON & MISS PUSSY CAT, NO DYNAMICS => Silver Dollar, $10.50
* A Midautumn Night's Dream w/ RYAN BISHOPS, NATHAN LAWR, KATE MAKI, RUTH MINNIKIN, DALE MURRAY => Gladstone
* THE HOLMES BROTHERS => Horseshoe, $16.50
* That Crazy American Music w/ ART OF TIME ENSEMBLE => Harbourfront Centre Theatre (231 Queens Quay West), $25-$35 (Nov 4-5)
* HABANA SAX => Lula Lounge, $25-30 (NOV. 2-6)
* TAAFI's BONER party w/ PEACHES, MC TEXASS, BIG PRIMPIN', SCOTT McEWAN/JOHN CAFFREY => Drake, 10 pm, $25
DARK RAVE v.69 w/ DJs B7, PHINK & LAZARUS, FRACTURED, MARA'S TORMENT => Funhaus, $5 b4 11 pm, $10 after
WOODPIGEON (w/ SANDRO PERRI, AARON BOOTH), JAMES ANDERSON (of Singing Saws), more => 78 Crawford St., potluck 6 pm, show 8 pm, free
RICHARD UNDERHILL QUARTET => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
Bright Lights Festival w/ ELBOW, THE DUKE SPIRIT, ISLANDS (ex-Unicorns), THE CALL UP (members of Dears, Stills), THE MELIGROVE BAND, STIRLING, THE COAST, more => Stone Distillery Fermenting Cellar, Distillery District, 55 Mill Street, 3 pm- 1 am, $25
BROTHER'S PAST => El Mocambo, $10
BIF NAKED => Phoenix, 6 pm, $20
BLACK DAHLIA MURDER => Reverb, $16
LINDI ORTEGA, TANISHA TAITT, KELLY GOODLAD => Victory Café, $8
THE TREVOR FINLAY BAND => Healey's
Songs of Hope & Inspiration w/ TORONTO CHILDREN'S CHORUS => Metropolitan United Church (56 Queen East), 3 pm, $25-$40
LINDA ORTEGA, TANISHA TAITT, KELLY GOODLAD => Victory Café, $8
TORONTO SINFONIETTA FEAT. MATTHEW JASKIEWIÇZ => Calvin Presbyterian Church (26 Delisle), 7:30 pm, $30-$50
We Dance w/ DJ SNEAK's Birthday Beats, MARK FARINA, JUNIOR SANCHEZ, TEELOO'S KITCHEN, JASON HODGES, MISCHIEF AND FRANKIE, MARIO J & DOM G => 270 Spadina Ave., 10 pm-8 am, $30+
GENE DINOVI/DAVE YOUNG => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 3-5)
KUSH, NICK BROWNMAN ALI => Gypsy Co-op, $10
BIRDS OF WALES => Lee's Palace, $10
CATCH 22, SUICIDE MACHINES, FLATLINERS => Kathedral, $17
JANINE STOLL cd release w/ MR SOMETHING SOMETHING, LISA WINN, BRIAN MacMILLAN, ANGIE NUSSEY => NOW Lounge, 189 Church, $12-$20 (w/cd)
DJ Starting From Scratch's 15th Anniversary Gala w/ GLENN LEWIS, DIVINE BROWN, JACKSOUL, RAY ROBINSON, KARDINAL OFFISHALL, BLESSED => York Event Theatre (101 Eglinton East), $30
BUBBA & THE AGENTS OF GROOVE, MICHELINE CARONE => Dominion on Queen, $5
Dub & Beyond w/ UNDADOGG, NICK HOLDER, VERSION XCURSION => Andy Poolhall, free before 10 pm, $5 after
CAMERON FAMILY SINGERS => Cameron House
THE GUTTER DEMONS => Cadillac Lounge
SUN NOV. 6
* TAAFI panel on DEEJAYING URBAN INDUSTRIAL ROOTS FROM DETROIT TO DUSSELDORF => Drake, 4 pm, $6
* BROADCAST, GRAVENHURST => Lee's Palace, $15
* FEAR FACTORY, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, ARCANE => Opera House, 7 pm, $25
* PETULA CLARK => Hummingbird Centre, $39.50-$69.50
* HABANA SAX => Lula Lounge, $25-30 (NOV. 2-6)
* SISTERS OF SHEYNVILLE ("yiddish swing chick band"), SHAKSHUKA (Mediterranean groove fusion) => Gladstone, 7:30 pm, $10
* Wavelength 288: Ladyfest Ottawa Tour w/ COUGAR PARTY, THE MAYNARDS, LES ALUMETTES, DJ BANJORDIAN => Sneaky Dee's, pwyc
* COUNTRYPOLITANS, KEVIN QUAIN & THE MAD BASTARDS => Cameron House
ELLEN McILWAINE => Tranzac, 7:30
MODEY LEMON, THE APES => Horseshoe, $8
CONTINUUM presents "In The Asylum" => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $5-$20
Solo Piano Sundays w/ JOE SEALY => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
TORONTO ALL-STAR BIG BAND => Lakeside Terrace, Harbourfront, 2-5 pm
AKADEMISKA SåNGFäRENINGEN => Hart House, 3 pm
BEN LEE => El Mocambo, $13.50
HOOTIE & THE BLOWFISH => Phoenix, 7 pm, $30
BEVERLY TAFT QUARTET => the Rex, 3:30 pm, $5
Christos Hatzis's Sepulcher Of Life , Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace w/ ORPHEUS CHOIR OF TORONTO => Metropolitan United Church (56 Queen E), 3 pm. $10-$30
MON NOV. 7
* OKKERVILL RIVER, MINUS STORY => Lee's Palace, $10
* THE SHOUT OUT LOUDS, ESSEX GREEN => Mod Club, $13.50
* HILARIO DURÁN LATIN JAZZ ORCHESTRA => Mod Club, $20
* The See-Saw Sing-Songer Showcase w/ JON RAE FLETCHER, STU STOUT, GEOFF OLSON, WOODY JAMES => Supermarket, $4
OK GO! => Horseshoe, $13.50
SING THAT YELL THAT SPELL, VOLTAGE => The Bagel
ELANA McMURTRY, DAN FOURIER, ADAM WARNER => Cameron House
SERENA RYDER, JEEN O'BRIEN, JACK BREAKFAST => Mitzi's Sister
RUBEN ESGUERRA, CHIVA => Trane Studio
BIG SMOKE BAND => Dominion on Queen
TUES NOV. 8
** THE NO-NECK BLUES BAND, CCMC, THE DISGUISES => Music Gallery, $10-$12
** ROB CLUTTON => Tranzac, 8 pm
** CHIP TAYLOR & CARRIE RODRIGUEZ => Hugh's Room, $20
** SHOOTER JENNINGS (Waylon's kid), THE HIGH DIALS => Horseshoe, free
* CHRIS COOLE & ERYNN MARSHALL => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
* ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL => Tranzac, 10 pm
TOM WILSON/BOB LANOIS => Drake, 8 pm, $15
RIVER CITY TANLINES (Memphis, ex-Lost Sounds), more => Silver Dollar
RUN WITH THE KITTENS, LICKPENNY LOAFER => Cameron
SECRET ARCADE Tuesdays => The Bagel, 9 pm
The Ambient Ping w/ DREAMsTATE, LYNN HARRIGAN => Hacienda, 9 pm, pwyc
JANN ARDEN => Massey Hall, $49.50 (NOV. 8-12)
STEVE SINGH & HIS HOT SHIT BAND, guests => Cadillac Lounge, 10 pm (every Tues. in November)
WED NOV. 9
** KANYE WEST, FANTASIA, COMMON, KEYSHIA COLE => Air Canada Centre, $45.50-$69.50
** "JUST ACE OF SPADES" Red Cross Benefit w/ six hours of Motorhead's Ace of Spades marathon => The Boat, 8 pm-2 am, minimum pledge $5, downloadable pledge form @ http://www.indiepolitic.org
** THE UNDERHOLDE (Mia Sheard/Leah Salomaa/Chris Gartner/Ryan Granville-Martin/Tania Gill) presents a night of obscure covers w/ JILL BARBER, TORY CASSIS, DAVE CLARK, LORI CULLEN, LILY FROST, JOEL GIBB (The Hidden Cameras), DAN GOLDMAN, KURT SWINGHAMMER, ROYAL WOOD => The Rivoli, 8:30 pm, $10
* THE DINNER IS RUINED, guests => Tranzac, 10 pm, pwyc
* COHEED & CAMBRIA, BLOOD BROTHERS, DREDG, ME WITHOUT YOU => The Docks, $23.50
* High Lonesome Wednesdays w/ CRAZY STRINGS (bluegrass) => Silver Dollar (every Wed.)
* COL. TOM'S SWINGING DOORS, FRIENDLY RICH, more => Cameron
HUNTER VALENTINE, FLIPSIDE COLLECTIVE, J'S BASEMENT, WREN CITY CHURCHES, FOREVER COMES CRASHING => Reverb
KIRK MacDONALD-LORNE LOFSKY DUET => Dominion on Queen
JUNIOR MANCE/ARCHIE ALLEYNE/DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 9-12)
NORTH MISSISSIPPI ALL-STARS => Lee's Palace, $17.50
JANN ARDEN => Massey Hall, $49.50 (NOV. 8-12)
EAST VILLAGE OPERA COMPANY => Mod Club, $13.50
CHRISTINE BOUGIE TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, HELLA, BETWEEN THE BURIED & ME, HORSE THE BAND => Opera House, $20
THURS NOV. 10
** FINAL FANTASY/ NINJA HIGH SCHOOL/ HENRI FABERGE AND THE ADORABLES/ LAURA BARRETT => The Boat, $8
** TIGER LILIES, THE LOLLIPOP PEOPLE => Innis Town Hall U of T, $12 (all ages)
** 416 Improv Festival w/ OPEN HOUSE, QUORUM, THE EVERYTIME BAND, I HAVE EATEN THE CITY, hosted by David Dacks (CIUT/Exclaim) => Tranzac, 8 pm, $5
* KATHLEEN EDWARDS, JOEL PLASKETT => Phoenix, $18.50
* TOM VEK=> Drake Hotel, $15
* New Orleans fundraiser w/ C'MON => Bovine Sex Club
* ARRAYMUSIC cd launch, incl. pieces by JAMES TENNEY, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, JO KONDO, more => Lula Lounge, 9:30 p.m., $5-$20
* DAVID BUCHBINDER cd release, Shurum Burum Jazz Circus => Rex Hotel, 9:30 pm, $12 (Nov 10-11)
* Trumpet Is Jazz w/ LINA ALLEMANO, ADREAN FARRUGIA => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
IMMACULATE MACHINE, SPITFIRES & MAYFLOWERS, THE GUEST BEDROOM => Speakeasy
NINE INCH NAILS, QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 => Air Canada Centre (sold out)
Ciao Edie Roxx w/ CRACKPUPPY, DJ MARTA => Ciao Edie, 9 pm, band @ 11:45 pm, free
Open Door Music Festival w/ JILL BARBER, LADYBIRD SIDESHOW, D'BI YOUNG, KEVIN FOX, MIKE EVIN, AVRIL BENOIT => Mod Club, 7 pm, $15-$25
JUNIOR MANCE/ARCHIE ALLEYNE/DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 9-12)
HANSON => Kool Haus, $34.50
ADAM FRANKLIN of Swervedriver (solo) => The Old York,167 Niagara, $5
New Orleans Benefit w/ LES SIX, ARIEL, EDEN ANTS => El Mocambo, $5
JANN ARDEN => Massey Hall, $49.50 (NOV. 8-12)
BOHEMOTH, NECRONOMICOM, EXHUMED, WETWORK => Lee's Palace, $15
GRAND THEFT BUS => Rivoli, $10
THE CHARIOT, EVERGREEN TERRACE, STILL REMAINS, UNDERMINDED, TO CHERISH => Opera House, $12.50
THE KILLAZ, MINDBENDER => Supermarket, $5
FRI NOV. 11
** SHARON JONES & THE DAP KINGS => Horseshoe, $15
** 416 Improv Festival w/ WOODCHOPPERS ASSOCIATION, THE MIROBOLUS TRIO, ODRADEK, hosted by Mike Hansen (CKLN) => Tranzac, 10 pm, $5
* ANDREW BIRD => Revival, 783 College, $12.50
* DAVID BUCHBINDER cd release => Rex Hotel, 9:30 pm, $12 (Nov 10-11)
* Three-Hour Tour w/ DOC PICKLES, BEETHOVEN FRIEZE playing nautical songs => The Boat, $5
* MASTA ACE => Reverb, 9 pm
* LAILA BIALI TRIO => Royal Conservatory of Music, 273 Bloor St. W., $15
* Trumpet Is Jazz w/ KEVIN TURCOTTE TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
* BELL ORCHESTRE (cd release), KEPLER => Music Gallery
AGNOSTIC FRONT, BRASS KNUCKLE THERAPY, more => Kathedral, $13.50
Pitter Patter Nights w/ IMMACULATE MACHINE, The Postage Stamps => Cameron House
CHILDREN OF BODOM, TRIVIUM, AMON AMARTH => Opera House, $25.50
SOULIVE => El Mocambo, $16.50 (also Nov. 12)
ANDREA HENRY, THE CRYSTAL SOUL BAND => Trane Studio, $10/$15
JUNIOR MANCE/ARCHIE ALLEYNE/DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 9-12)
JANN ARDEN => Massey Hall, $49.50 (Nov. 8-12)
CHRIS DE BURGH => Roy Thomson Hall, $59-$75
We Dance w/ DAVID MORALES, NEVIO, CARLO LIO & VINYL JUNKIES => 270 Spadina Ave., 1 am, $30
MATINEE SLIM & THE ULTRALIGHT ORCHESTRA, PETER KATZ => Mod Club, 8 pm, $12
Orbit Room 11th anniversary w/ALEX LIFESON, JACK SEMPLE, DAVE MURPHY BAND, THE DEXTERS => Orbit Room, $15
BEAT SOCIETY w/ MR. ATTIC, MOSS, AGILE, MARCO POLO, SUPASTITION, KING REIGN, ZAKI => Reverb, 9 pm, $15-$20
THE LIVING THINGS, THE ROPES => Drake, 11 pm
SAT NOV. 12
** 416 Improv Festival w/ CCMC + SCOTT THOMSON, NICK FRASER AND JUSTIN HAYNES ARE FAKING IT, KEN ALDCROFT’S CONVERGENCE ENSEMBLE, RYAN DRIVER’S FAKE NEW AGE MUSIC BAND, hosted by ZOILUS => Tranzac, 9 pm, $5
** SHARON JONES & THE DAP KINGS => Horseshoe, $15
* THE CRIBS, LONGWAVE, GIANT DRAG => Lee's Palace, $13.50
* Milk party w/ LADYTRON => Gypsy Co-op
* STEPHEN PARKINSON, ALLISON CAMERON compositions performed by MARTIN ARNOLD, ALLISON CAMERON, ERIC CHENAUX, EMILY PARKINSON, STEPHEN PARKINSON, MARCUS QUIN => Arraymusic, 60 Atlantic, $5
* MICHAEL FRANTI => Bloor Cinema, $24.50
* Trumpet Is Jazz w/ DAVID BUCHBINDER QUARTET => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
* RON DAVIS QUARTET w/ THE SHIMMERING RHYTHM ENSEMBLE => Isabel Bader Theatre (91 Charles West), 7:30 pm
JANN ARDEN => Massey Hall, $49.50 (NOV. 8-12)
New Music Concerts: A Scelsi Centenary w/ LOUISE BESSETTE, piano => Music Gallery (197 John), $5-$25
CHILDREN OF BODOM, TRIVIUM, AMON AMARTH => Opera House
SOULIVE => El Mocambo, $16.50 (also Nov. 11)
JUNIOR MANCE/ARCHIE ALLEYNE/DON THOMPSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 9-12)
Celebration of Long John Baldry w/ DANNY BROOKS, PAPA JOHN KING, MR RICK & THE BISCUITS, ROY YOUNG, GREG GODOVITZ, JOHN DICKIE & THE MISSISSIPPI HIPPIES, more => Hugh's Room, 8:30 pm, $20-$25
MATT MAYS & EL TORPEDO, THE NOVAKS => Opera House, $15
FIRE HYDRANT => Lot 16 (1136 Queen St. West), free
SIANSPHERIC, TOSHACK HIGHWAY => Drake Hotel
BUTCH WALKER, DAMONE => Mod Club, doors 7 pm, $13.50
SALSA SATURDAY w/ DIEGO MARULANDA + PACANDE => Lula Lounge, $10
Embryon Just 1 Fixx w/ ANALOG PUSSY, LOU CYPHER PROJECT, DEZTRO, EXT, DHARMA LAB => Funhaus, $10-$15
SUN NOV. 13
** JOHN CALE, PRIYA THOMAS => Lula Lounge, 6:30 pm doors, $25 (Nov. 13-15)
** Wavelength 289 w/ BRIAN BORCHERDT, MINSK MENSK, OHBIJOU, DJ SELECTIVE SERGERY => Sneaky Dee's, pwyc
* ART BRUT, THE DIABLEROS => Lee's Palace $12
AMERICAN ANALOG SET => Horseshoe, $12
HIM, FINCH, SKINDRED => Kool Haus, $23.50
OAR, MICHAEL TOLCHER => Opera House, $22.50
BACKWOOD JUSTICE, BARN OWL, RICHARD LAVIOLETTE, MEN WOMEN KIDS & BUFFALO, CHRIS YANG, FIN => Rancho Relaxo, 8:30 pm, $7
Solo Piano Sundays w/ GARY WILLIAMSON => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
KEN PERLMAN & ALAN JABBOUR => Tranzac, 7:30 pm
MON NOV. 14
** JOHN CALE, PRIYA THOMAS => Lula Lounge, doors 6:30 pm, $25 (Nov. 13-15)
* Open Mic w/ ALEX LUKASHEVSKY => Tranzac, 9:30 pm
ARCTIC MONKEYS => Lee's Palace, $10
GOGOGOAIRHEART, THE JOGGERS, DDMMYYYY => Sneaky Dee's, $8
TUES NOV. 15
** JOHN CALE, PRIYA THOMAS => Lula Lounge, doors 6:30 pm, $25 (Nov. 13-15)
* VIDEO GAMES LIVE (Orchestral Arrangements of Game Music, inc. Halo, Frogger, Everquest, Mario, Zelda, Tomb Raider, more) => Massey Hall, doors 7 pm, $39.50-$59.50
* BAD RELIGION, ANTI-FLAG, PROTEST THE HERO => Kool Haus, doors 7 pm, $34.50
* ILLUMINATI, MARK INSIDE, PRIESTESS, more => Horseshoe
GEORDIE HALEY TRIO => Tranzac, 10 pm
RICHARD UNDERHILL cd release => Montreal Bistro
The Ambient Ping w/ SOFTWARE, TOASTYBIRD VISUALS => Hacienda, 9 pm, pwyc
PHILOSOPHER KINGS => Mod Club, 8 pm, $21.50
THE CHOIRGIRLZ => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St., 8:30 pm, $10
STEVE SINGH & HIS HOT SHIT BAND, guests => Cadillac Lounge, 10 pm (every Tues. in November)
WED NOV. 16
* LOLLIPOP PEOPLE, JOHN OSWALD/SCOTT THOMSON, JOHN KAMEEL FARRAH => Cameron House, $6
* BAUHAUS => Kool Haus, $42.50
* High Lonesome Wednesdays w/ CRAZY STRINGS (bluegrass) => Silver Dollar (every Wed.)
* TERRY KING => Rex Hotel
* THE DINNER IS RUINED, more => Tranzac, 8:30 pm
SUNDAR VISWANATHAN/DAVID BRAID => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
THE IMMORTAL LEE COUNTY KILLERS => Horseshoe, doors 9 pm, $8
Secret Arcade Tuesdays => The Bagel, 9 pm
ROSANNE AGASEE QUARTET => Montreal Bistro
Orthopedic Foundation jazz benefit w/ NORM AMADIO, TOMMY AMBROSE => Lula Lounge, 7 pm, $20
THE SILENT => The Horseshoe Tavern
The Venatio de Spero Fall Tour w/ GREELEY ESTATES, MY AMERICAN HEART, A CHANGE OF PACE, AGENT SPARKS, THE CONFESSION => El Mocambo, all ages, doors 7 pm, $15
THE MARIGOLDS w/ GWEN SWICK, CAITLIN HANFORD, SUZIE VINNICK => Hugh's Room, $14-$16
THUR NOV. 17
** LYLE LOVETT, JOHN HIATT, JOE ELY, GUY CLARK => Massey Hall, $49.50-$69.50
** PHOSOPHORESCENT, CASTANETS => Sneaky Dee's
** SOUR KEYS, VERMICIOUS KNID, BURDOCKS, GERMANS => Rancho Relaxo, 9 pm, $6
* RAINER MARIA, FIVE BLANK PAGES => Lee's Palace, $10
* Club Filth w/ DJS ARE NOT ROCKSTARS (w/PRINCESS SUPERSTAR, ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE) (NYC), MISS B-HAVE & WANNABEASTAR (NL), JOOST VAN BELLEN (NL), FRITZ HELDER & THE PHANTOMS, more => State Theatre, 69 Bathurst, 9 pm, $12.50 adv.
* NICK 'BROWNMAN' ALI TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St. (Nov 17-18)
IVAN BANFORD & COLIN ANTHONY => Tranzac, 10 pm
BORODIN QUARTET => George Westin Recital Hall (5040 Yonge), $35-$65
DAN MCVEIGH cd release => Hugh's Room, $10-$12
AMANDA MARTINEZ & EVARISTO MACHADO => Lula Lounge, 9 pm
JULIE MICHELS QUARTET => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 17-19)
JIM HILLMAN’S MERLIN FACTOR w/ TUKU => Rex Hotel (Nov 17-18)
EUGENE RIPPER'S FAST FOLK UNDERGROUND => Drake Hotel, 9 pm, $10
FRI NOV. 18
** DRUMHELLER => Tranzac, 10 pm
* THE FLESHTONES => Opera House, $10
* SARAH HARMER, THE WEAKERTHANS => Glenn Gould Studio, 250 Front W, $30
* Rendezvous with Madness film festival presents THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (documentary) => Workman Theatre, 1001 Queen St. W., $8
* LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, THE JUAN MACLEAN, ARTHUR BAKER, SHIT ROBOT, KENNY GLASGOW, WILL MUNRO, A.D/D => Kool Haus, $25
* NICK ALI TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St. (Nov 17-18)
FRONT 242, GRAY AREA => Guvernment, doors 7 pm, $25
Mini-Shoegazer Fest 3 w/ AIDAN BAKER, OFF THE INTERNATIONAL RADAR, DIAGRAM & THE SLEEPING KINGS OF IONA => Sneaky Dee's, $5
MEMBERS OF THE PRESS , BLUESCREEN => El Mocambo $5
ANDREA HENRY, THE CRYSTAL SOUL BAND => Trane Studio, $10/$15
THE RIZDALES, ATOMIC 7 => Cadillac Lounge
JIM HILLMAN’S MERLIN FACTOR w/ TUKU => Rex Hotel (Nov 17-18)
APRIL WINE => Club 279, $20-$25
DROPKICK MURPHYS => Docks, doors 7:30 pm, $20.50. 416-870-7000.
AEROSMITH, LENNY KRAVITZ Air Canada Centre, doors 6:30 pm, $59.50-$119.50
ALL AMERICAN REJECTS, ROONEY, ACADEMY IS => Phoenix, doors 5 pm, $21
FOZZY, REASON DISAPPEARS => Opera House, $20
JULIE MICHELS QUARTET => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 17-19)
Cuban Fridays w/ CAFE CUBANO => Lula Lounge, $10
DARLENE, SWEETWATER WOMEN => The Kitchen (983 Victoria Park Ave)
SAT NOV. 19
* Small World Music presents THE DHOAD GYPSIES OF RAJASTHAN => Jane Mallet Theatre, 27 Front Street, 8 pm, $30
* Acoustic Harvest Folk Club w/ THE FOGGY HOGTOWN BOYS => Birchcliff Bluffs United Church, 33 East Rd., 8 pm, $15
* RYAN DRIVER QUARTET => Tranzac, 10 pm
RIZDALES, ATOMIC 7 => Cadillac Lounge
BLACK KEYS => Opera House, $15
JENG YI (Korean drums) => Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles West), $15-$20
MASTA ACE, WORDSWORTH, DJ A VEE => Reverb, 9 pm, $22.50
KAMELOT, SEVEN WITCHES, PENETRATOR => Lee's Palace, $24.25
THE PLANET SMASHERS => Horseshoe, $10.50
Toronto Music Expo w/ JEFF HEALEY & THE JAZZ WIZARDS, KITTIE, ROSES IN THE SNOW => Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front West), 11 am-6 pm, $10 (Nov 19-20)
JULIE MICHELS QUARTET => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 17-19)
VICTOR BATEMAN QUINTET => Rex Hotel
Salsa Saturday w/ CACHE => Lula Lounge, $10
DARREN SIGESMUND QUINTET => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
SUN NOV. 20
** COACH HOUSE BOOKS launches uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto w/ REPUBLIC OF SAFETY, FREE SCHOOL, more => Gladstone, 2-5 pm panels & activities, 8 pm-midnight music, $5
* Solo Piano Sundays w/ HILARIO DURAN => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
DR. DRAW => Hugh’s Room (Nov. 20-21)
Wavelength 290 w/ RAISE THEM & EAT THEM, THE VERTICAL STRUTS, DJ CHICKEN LEGS => Sneaky Dee's, pwyc
Toronto Music Expo w/ JEFF HEALEY & THE JAZZ WIZARDS, KITTIE, ROSES IN THE SNOW => Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front West), 11 am-6 pm, $10 (Nov 19-20)
BOBBY WATT => Tranzac
BARRY ROMBERG cd release => Rex Hotel
REEL BIG FISH, THE TOSSERS => Phoenix, $19.50
MON NOV. 21
* Grand Festival of Autumnal Happiness w/ "N" (Rob Clutton/Ryan Driver/Lina Allemano); A PEOPLE'S FAME (John Millard/Tania Gill/Jay Burr), SHUFFLE DEMON DUO (Rich Underhill/Stitch Wynston) => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St., 9 pm, $6-$10 (see also Nov. 27)
THE EFFECTS (Tulsa) => Silver Dollar
DR. DRAW => Hugh’s Room (Nov. 20-21)
NICK CUDA => Lula Lounge
Open Mic w/ BEN SURES => Tranzac, 9:30 pm
TUES NOV. 22
** In The Boneyard w/ THE HIDDEN CAMERAS & TORONTO DANCE THEATRE => Harbourfront, $17-$38 (adv. purchase recommended) (Nov 22-26)
** SHALABI EFFECT (Mtl), FEUEURMUSIC => Drake, 10:30 pm, $10
* EDGAR BREAU (ex-Simply Saucer) & TIM BUTLER (ex-Tim McB, Garble Rays) => Cameron House, $6
* BILL MAYS/TERRY CLARKE/NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 22- 26)
The Ambient Ping w/ SYLKEN, URM, ANOMALOUS DISTURBANCES & GENERAL CHAOS VISUALS => Hacienda, 9 pm, pwyc
GREG HOBBS => Tranzac, 10 pm
KELLY PERRAS => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
STEVE SINGH & HIS HOT SHIT BAND, guests => Cadillac Lounge, 10 pm (every Tues. in November)
WED NOV. 23
** In The Boneyard w/ THE HIDDEN CAMERAS & TORONTO DANCE THEATRE => Harbourfront, $17-$38 (adv. purchase recommended) (Nov 22-26)
* LOLLIPOP PEOPLE, JAMIE WAYNE, SLY JUHAS DUO => Cameron House, $6
* High Lonesome Wednesdays w/ CRAZY STRINGS (bluegrass) => Silver Dollar (every Wed.)
* THE DINNER IS RUINED, more => Tranzac, 9 pm
* BILL MAYS/TERRY CLARKE/NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 22- 26)
* ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN => Carlu, $27.50-$30
* ERIC BOGLE => Hugh's Room, $25-$27.50 (Nov 23-24)
* MATT BRUBECK/DAVID MOTT => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
OTTMAR LIEBERT, LUNA NEGRA => Winter Garden Theatre, $49.50-$57.50
THE SMASH UP, YOUTHINASIA, WHEELS ON THE BUS => Drake, $10
JAMES BLUNT => Mod Club, 8 pm, $16.50
THUR NOV. 24
** In The Boneyard w/ THE HIDDEN CAMERAS & TORONTO DANCE THEATRE => Harbourfront, $17-$38 (adv. purchase recommended) (Nov 22-26)
* ERIC BOGLE => Hugh's Room, $25-$27.50 (Nov 23-24)
* BILL MAYS/TERRY CLARKE/NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 22-26)
* MARILYN LERNER'S MAD SATIE TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St. (Nov 24-25)
* THE MIGHTY GILL => Tranzac, 10 pm
* EAGLE & HAW, JAY BURNSTICK, NADJIWAN, WOLF PACK, TAGAQ => Silver Dollar, 9 pm
THE SHOW BIZ INDIANS, MARC NADJIWAN, host LORNE CARDINAL => Tranzac main hall, 8 pm
LES SIX => Reverb
BARENAKED LADIES, BUCK 65 => Massey Hall, doors 7:30 pm, $42.50-$69.50 (Nov 24-25)
DOXAS BROTHERS QUARTET => Rex Hotel (Nov 24-25)
FRI NOV. 25
** In The Boneyard w/ THE HIDDEN CAMERAS & TORONTO DANCE THEATRE => Harbourfront, $17-$38 (adv. purchase recommended) (Nov 22-26)
* BILL MAYS/TERRY CLARKE/NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 22-26)
* MARILYN LERNER'S MAD SATIE TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St. (Nov 24-25)
* DEEP DARK UNITED => Tranzac, 10 pm
DIONNE TAYLOR, PAT LaBARBRA => Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts, 5040 Yonge, $40
The Bass Game w/ IDUBNEWYORK feat. RAS KUSH, DUB STYLIST, GNOSTIC ROCKET => Club Trinport, 249 Ossington, $10
FELIX DA HOUSECAT, KENNY GLASGOW => Mod Club
CONTROLLER.CONTROLLER => Spin Gallery, $10
LOWEST OF THE LOW => Horseshoe, $10.50 (Nov 25-26)
LES SIX => The Edge, free
RUSSELL WATSON => Roy Thomson Hall, 8 pm (doors 7 pm), $49.50-$69.50
TOBAGO SIGNAL HILL ALUMNI CHOIR => St Andrews Presbyterian Church (73 Simcoe), 7:30 pm, $30-$40 (Nov 25-26)
DOXAS BROTHERS QUARTET => Rex Hotel (Nov 24-25)
Salsa Friday w/ CACHE => Lula Lounge, $10
BARENAKED LADIES, BUCK 65 => Massey Hall, doors 7:30 pm, $42.50-$69.50 (Nov 24-25)
SAT NOV. 26
** In The Boneyard w/ THE HIDDEN CAMERAS & TORONTO DANCE THEATRE => Harbourfront, $17-$38 (adv. purchase recommended) (Nov 22-26)
** CONTINUOUS DICK (aka POLMO POLPO), TINKERTOY, ADAM MARSHALL => The Boat
** MARTIN ARNOLD & ERIC CHENAUX => Tranzac, 10 pm
** TORNGAT, HYLOZOISTS => The Boat
* ASHLEY MACISAAC cd release => Hugh's Room, $28-$30
* STYROFOAM, ALIAS, ESTHER DRANG => Rivoli
* BILL MAYS/TERRY CLARKE/NEIL SWAINSON => Montreal Bistro (Nov. 22-26)
Edge Electric Xmas w/ THEORY OF A DEADMAN, HURST => Opera House, $18.50
WOMEN’S BLUES REVUE w/ SUZIE McNEIL, LEE AARON, SALOME BEY, ROXANNE POTVIN, SHAKURA S'AIDA, DIONE TAYLOR, host SHELAGH ROGERS => Massey Hall, 8 p.m., $35–$45
ECCODEK, DJ MEDICINEMAN => Drake, 9 pm, $15
HOUSE OF DOC => The Speakeasy, 120 Church St., 9 pm
TOBAGO SIGNAL HILL ALUMNI CHOIR => St Andrews Presbyterian Church (73 Simcoe), 7:30 pm, $30-$40 (Nov 25-26)
The Box Salon (readings/film/music/etc) w/ JASON CAMLOT, LINDA GRIFFITHS, KAREN HINES, IZABELLA PRUSKA, DAVID HYDE, DAVID MCGIMPSEY, MICHAEL TURNER, “mystery rock band” => Rivoli
Salsa Saturday w/ CAFE CUBANO => Lula Lounge, $10
THE LAWS => The Kitchen (983 Victoria Park Ave)
JAMES COTTON => Healey's, $20
MOST SERENE REPUBLIC, DEBASER => Lee's Palace, $10A Baroque Christmas w/ THE MUSICIANS IN ORDINARY =>Heliconian Hall (35 Hazelton), $15-$20
JOSH RAGER SEXTET => Rex Hotel
LOWEST OF THE LOW => Horseshoe, $10.50 (Nov 25-26)
SCOTT MARSHALL TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
THE WEBER BROTHERS => Stone's Place, $10
THE DIABLEROS, UNCUT, LIPSTICK MACHINE => Sneaky Dee's, $10 (incl. CD)
ANDREW MACPHERSON, DJ MEDICINEMAN => Drake, $15
Toronto Wildlife Centre benefit w/ CARBONAS, DIABOLLOCKS, PANTYCHRIST, PSYCHOPATHOS, THE FALLOUT => Vatikan, 9 pm, $5
SUN NOV. 27
* Grand Festival of Autumnal Happiness w/ SELINA MARTIN, BOB FENTON, DON FRANCKS & THE TIM POSGATE HORNBAND => St. Andrew by-the-Lake, Toronto Island Church, 2 pm, $6-$10
* ROGUE WAVE => Lee's Palace, 9 pm, $10
* Solo Piano Sundays w/ DAVID BRAID => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
KONOVETS QUARTET (Russian male a capella ensemble) => Eglinton St. George's United Church (35 Lytton), 2:30 pm, $18
Wavelength 291 w/ LUNCHMEAT, FIVE BLANK PAGES, THE ACORN, DJ RYAN => Sneaky Dee's, pwyc
JOHN LEGEND => Massey Hall, $38.50-$57.50
LYNN MILES => Hugh's Room, $17-$19
BOB SEELEY/BOB BALDORI => Rex Hotel
MON NOV. 28
** BETTYE LAVETTE => Lee’s Palace, 8 pm, $15
* DAMIAN MARLEY => Guvernment, $32
RUNCIBLE SPOON cd release => Montreal Bistro, 9 pm, $10
SERAFIN w/ THE ROYAL JELLY ORCHESTRA, guests => Mod Club
Open Mic w/MIKE OVERTON => Tranzac, 9:30 pm
TUE NOV. 29
* DOUG TIELLI => Tranzac, 10 pm
The Ambient Ping w/ INSIDEAMIND, PHOLDE => Hacienda, 9 pm, pwyc
Fado Blues w/ CATARINA CARDEAL, MIKE SIRACUSA => Lula Lounge, 8:30 pm, $15
PIRATE JENNY => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
STEVE SINGH & HIS HOT SHIT BAND, guests => Cadillac Lounge, 10 pm (every Tues. in November)
WED NOV. 30
** LOLLIPOP PEOPLE, BOB WISEMAN, HANK COLLECTIVE => Cameron House, $6
* High Lonesome Wednesdays w/ CRAZY STRINGS (bluegrass) => Silver Dollar (every Wed.)
* SARAH HARMER => Harbourfront, $31 (also Dec 1)
* THE DINNER IS RUINED, more => Tranzac, 10 pm
HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS, SILVERSTEIN, BAYSIDE, AIDEN => Phoenix, $21.50
GARY BENSON/DUNCAN HOPKINS => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St.
Read More | Live Notes | Posted by zoilus on Wednesday, October 26 at 7:41 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (1)
Au Revoir, Little Luca
(The Second Floor Will Never Be the Same!)
I've been decked-out with a cold virus the past couple of days - 'sbeen all I could do to meet regular deadlines, so no bloggery. But I wanted to pop in and wish a cheerio and a pip-pip to Luca aka Captain Easychord, who is about to take his grime-lovin' self off to Blighty in order (I'm guessin') to be closer to the action. But the T-dot will miss his reppin' for and spreading the seeds of the new grooves, for serious. Last chance tonight to catch his classic joint Expensive Shit, five bucks at the Boat on Augusta, with possible special guests and so forth. Me, I'll be working, so if you go, high-five the guy, buy him a drink and request some M.I.A. to bug his ass for me, wouldja? And tell him to keep in touch.
Elsewise - the Times plays catchup on the Do They Know It's Halloween story. Today's NOW puts my boys Tangiers on the cover, gets the lowdown on the Fiery Furnaces' grandma project and tells us Dunjen is pronounced Doo-yen, a fact one wishes would be mentioned in Eye's cover story on them. Eye does score, however, in getting the lowdown on the Fugees reunion and the New Pornographers-Broken Social Scene BEEF.
In other local news, a reminder of Saturday's event to help out Mike Hansen, who ran New Works Studio for quite awhile as a venue for experimental soundz in Toronto; he had to close it for personal reasons anyway, but first it got B&E'd and burgled this summer. The event, at the Oasis from 5 pm till closing time, should be a great noisy-music night, tho it competes with the Hidden Cameras New Orleans benefit the same night - ah, too much charitas to go around. See the gig guide for further edification on all things live and local, all creatures great and small.
Now back to rockin' my pneumonia and boogie-woogyin' my flu.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, October 06 at 5:51 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (5)
'What I Really Need Now Is Ideas'
The October concert schedule in this city is so insane - seriously, there's barely a night in the next month that there aren't battles for your love goin' on - that compiling the calendar has taken up all my spare time the past couple of days. Leavin' zis heah blawg bohh-rinnng, je sais je sais. Enjoy the above picture of Dan Destroyer Bejar singing in Vancouver meanwhile and jot over to Artblot for more of the same from the New Pornographers' show out there (they're due in Hogtown - does anyone still call this city that? - a week from Sunday). (Thanks to For The Records for the link.)
With the avalanche of (mostly) third albums this week from various highly hyped Toronto-based bands - Broken Social Scene, Constantines, Metric, Deadly Snakes, Tangiers - as well as the disbanding of Three Gut Records, it seems like a good moment for taking stock, and I hope to give the matter some consideration in the next couple of days. I'd be interested to hear your own theories.
Meanwhile I'm writing up an interview with the gentle and thoughtful Alejandro Escovedo for this Friday's 7 - the weekly entertainment tabloid in the Globe. I'm going to be doing mid-length show previews for them most weeks from here in, a less-stressful substitute for ye olde columnal duties. Links, comme d'habitude, will be posted here. (Sorry for the franglais introjections - i just finished that Godard biography at long last ... far from a definitive book, I'm afraid - worthwhile for fans, but not enough of either new information or new insight, just dribs and drabs of each, and certainly its treatments of the various films seem fitful.)
Last evening I attended night 2 of the fall Interface series with Achim Kauffman, Michael Moore, Dylan van der Schyff, and Wolter Wierbos at Arraymusic. (I believe my colleague Mark Miller will have a review of night 1 in Wednesday's Globe.) The Monday program featured a generous evening of five sets - three planned improvs followed by unannounced sets by the trio and the trio with Wierbos - happily, since I thought I wasn't going to get to see those combos this week. In fact I was too Monday-night bleary to give it proper attention, but Wierbos's solo trombone set certainly woke me up for awhile, a tremendously energetic and varied performance in which he often vamped a little to set up a pulse and then solo'd "over" himself - quite a trick for a single brass instrument. Not profound, but with great robust humanity. The first and third sets didn't really 'get' me. The drumming in each case was too busy/overbearing (Joe Sorbara's impulses were solid, but the dynamics evaded him) and I didn't find myself in love with Michael Moore as an improvisor - I enjoy his work in compositional form (especially his Bob Dylan cover albums) but didn't feel much spark from him on this particular Monday evening. On the other hand, Achim Kauffman was a beautifully liquid and assured pianist previously unfamiliar to me, reminding me how I am missing my piano while we are in our temporary digs. (Not that I can play remotely like that - he just spread the 88-fingered love.) Eric Chenaux was the ingenious burdock as always. I was pleased to see Matt Brubeck for the first time since witnessing his Oranj Symphonette in the nineties, though he seemed a bit out-of-water in that set. And Vancouver's Dylan van der Schiff is just a stupendous drummer, who had the volume issue totally under control and whose blows always fell gracefully (almost too gracefully?) on the ear. So there was plenty to enjoy, and no doubt I could have taken in more if my own spirit had been more willing - but the "interface" between locals and guests this particular night wasn't at its strongest. There's plenty of promise in the climax of the series tonight, so if you are in town and free, treat yourself.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Tuesday, September 27 at 4:06 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (2)
Falling Into Place (Sept-Oct Gig Guide)
Left to right, top to bottom: Oct. 29, Oct. 22, Oct 9;
Oct. 18-21, Oct. 4, Oct. 16, Oct. 27;
Oct. 10, Oct. 17.
[... to continue, click ...]
Corrections & additions welcome. Zoilus-approved shows are marked with a *star. Special picks are **double-starred. If it's not starred, it may mean I don't find it especially thrilling, or just that I don't know or am not sure enough to recommend it. Listings will be updated weekly. All info subject to change - this is a casual effort, please do call the venues. Sources include the Stillepost.ca Toronto board, Eye, Now, Greg Clow, ListMe.ca, Canoe.ca, Soundlist, The Whole Note, Toronto Life and, as the saying goes, you - email or post in the comments with show information and disinformation.
FRI OCT 21
** THE SUN RA ARKESTRA => Lula Lounge, $30 (Oct 18-21)
** ENGLISH BEAT => Horseshoe. $25.50
* MIKE WEBSTER NONET (w/Kevin Turcotte, William Carn, Kelly Jefferson, Alex Dean, David Occhipinti)=> Rex Hotel (Oct 21-22)
* MISS KITTIN = > System Soundbar
* HOLY FUCK => Mod Club, $10
DJ FREDDY FRESH => Supermarket
THEE MORE SHALLOWS => Silver Dollar
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 18-22)
DYNASTY, THE WORLD PROVIDER => Sneaky Dee's
FUNK SERVICE INTERNATIONAL => Gypsy Co-op
THE HEILLIG MANOEUVRE => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
THE BLUE RAINCOATS => Rivoli
DEBASER cd release, THE EARLY MORNING, EVIL DOERS, PUT THE RIFLE DOWN => El Mocambo, $5
SONGS IN THE KEY OF TOM (A musical portrait of Tom Thomson) w/ DAVID SEREDA and friends => University of Toronto Art Centre, 15 King's College Circle, 7:30 pm, $12-$15
SAT OCT 22
** FREAKWATER, CHRISTOPHER REES => El Mocambo, $12.50
* Exclaim! presents Four for Fall w/ SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT, LUKE DOUCET, THE FEMBOTS, WHITEY HOUSTON => Lee's Palace, $12-$14
* MIKE WEBSTER NONET (w/Kevin Turcotte, William Carn, Kelly Jefferson, Alex Dean, David Occhipinti)=> Rex Hotel (Oct 21-22)
Five Weeks For Coltrane 4 w/ THE DOUG RICHARDSON QUARTET, guests => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, $15-$20
NEIL SWAINSON QUARTET => Rex Hotel
BONNIE BRETT & MARK EISENMAN TRIO => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 18-22)
MELISSA STYLIANOU TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
Salsa Saturday W/ CACHE => Lula Lounge, $10
THE JIM YOSHII PILE-UP => Sneaky Dee's
I AN EYE, LO & THE MAGNETICS => Horseshoe, $6
JAKALOPE => Phoenix, 6 pm, $17.50
The Yellow Umbrella Tour w/ DUNCAN SHEIK, SARAH BETTENS, DAVID POE, CHRISTINE BAZE => Mod Club, $20
Acoustic Harvest Folk Club w/ BILL GARRETT & SUE LOTHROP => Birchcliff Bluffs United Church, 33 East Rd., 8 pm, $15
SUN OCT 23
* Shameless Magazine launch & Halloween party w/ REPUBLIC OF SAFETY, COUGAR PARTY, horror-movie makeovers, more => Gladstone Hotel, noon-4 pm, $10 ($7 w/ costume)
* THE CLIENTELE, ANNIE HAYDEN => Lee's Palace, $10
* LIZ PHAIR, MATT POND PA => Phoenix, $20
* Wavelength 286: THE VERMICIOUS KNID, BEEF TERMINAL cd release, THOMAS & THE EVIL COMPUTER, DJ SEPARATE BILL => Sneaky Dee's, pwyc
* Pitter Patter presents THE POSTAGE STAMPS, OHBIJOU, NOW YR TAKEN => The Music Gallery, 6 pm, $10
HENRY ROLLINS => Convocation Hall, U of T
Solo Piano Sundays w/ JOHN ROBY (9 pm), BILL KING (10:15 pm) => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
16th ANNUAL MASSED MILITARY BAND SPECTACULAR => Roy Thomson Hall, 2 p.m., $29-$63
MON OCT 24
* CSARDAS: THE TANGO OF THE EAST => Roy Thomson Hall, $35-$75
KAREN PLATO QUARTET => Montreal Bistro
RUBEN ESGUERRA & CHIVA => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, pwyc (every Monday)
TUES OCT 25
* THE COUP, LIFESAVAS => Reverb, $15
DRESDEN DOLLS, DEVOTCHKA, FAUN FABLES => Mod Club Theatre, 9 pm (doors 8 pm), $16.50
The Ambient Ping w/MARA'S TORMENT and AKUMU => Hacienda Lounge, 9 pm, pwyc
SLIPKNOT, AS I LAY DYING, UNEARTH => Air Canada Centre, $31-$49
VIENNA TENG => Drake, $15
STATUES, MALCOLM BAULD, TERROR LAKE => Sneaky Dee's
BRIAN BARLOW QUARTET w/ GUIDO BASSO => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 25-26)
Secret Arcade Tuesdays => The Bagel, 9 pm
Anything But Jazz Tuesdays w/ CEDAR AND SPRUCE => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
Acoustic Soul Tuesdays => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, $5 (every Tues.)
WED OCT 26
* HILARIO DURAN TRIO, BETO CALETTI => Lula Lounge, $20
* High Lonesome Wednesdays w/ CRAZY STRINGS (bluegrass) => Silver Dollar (every Wed.)
* COLONEL TOM'S SWINGIN' DOORS => Cameron House, 7-9 pm, pwyc (every Wed)
SERENA RYDER, JUSTIN RUTLEDGE, MICHAEL JOHNSTON => Hugh's Room, $18-$20
THE HEMINGWAY SOLUTION => Lee's Palace
DAVID CLAYTON-THOMAS => Opera House. $32.50 (Oct 26-27)
THRICE, THE BLED, VEDA => The Docks. $23
PETER TURNER QUARTET => Rex Hotel
BRIAN BARLOW QUARTET w/ GUIDO BASSO => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 25-26)
NATE RENNER & LAUREN FALLS => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
NICK "BROWNMAN" ALI & THE ELECTRYC TRIO => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, pwyc (every Wed.)
KYE MARSHALL (cello), DANIEL IONESCO (guitar) => Mezzetta, 681 St Clair Ave W, 9 and 10 pm, $7
THURS OCT 27
* MATISYAHU (Hasidic reggae) => Lee's Palace, 8 pm, $20
* JASON KAHN/AKI ONDA, SANDRO PERRI/NILAN PERERA, STEVE BATES/JASON TAIT (Weakerthans/Fembots) => Tranzac, pwyc
* 2nd Annual Chet Baker Tribute w/ PAUL BAKER, DANNY DEPOE'S ALL STAR QUINTET, HAROLD DANKO => Lula Lounge, 7 pm, $20
DULCE PONTES (Portugal) => Roy Thomson Hall, 8 pm, $30-$90
MIN RAGER QUARTET => Rex Hotel (Oct 27-28)
ESPRIT ORCHESTRA (playing R. Murray Schafer, Harry Freedman, Marc-André Dalbavie, José Evangelista) => Jane Mallett Theatre, 27 Front East, $10-$32
Trane In Session w/ WALEED ABDULHAMID, KWANZA MZINGA, BRUCE CASSIDY & THE AFRICAN JAZZ ENSEMBLE => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, $10 (also Oct 13)
RASPUTINA => Mod Club, 7 pm, $16.50
DAVID CLAYTON-THOMAS => Opera House. $32.50 (Oct 26-27)
BRIAN BARLOW QUINTET => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 27-29)
FRED DULIGAL TRIO => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
HOSTILE TAKEOVER => Sneaky Dee's
FRI OCT 28
** Pop Avant series w/ JON-RAE & THE RIVER (w/ 17-piece choir!), THE SILT, CASTLEMUSIC => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $8-$10
** OPETH => Opera House, $32
* Carnival of Curiosities w/ LENNI JABOUR, DIANA OBSCURA, ALLISON RICE & AIDAN ORANGE, HEEBEE GEEBEES, THE HAUNTED BURLESQUE DANCERS, guest DJ RUSSELL SMITH, DJ AKUMU => Great Hall (1087 Queen West), 8 pm to 1 am, $15
* TRICKY WOO, STARVIN HUNGRY => Horseshoe, $8
* CLUB V w/ guests tba => Lee's Palace
* Darker Rave w/ UNITUS (dtrash/dross:tik) vs. CRUSHKILL (hmcr) live, VINYL VANDAL (hmcruk) [uk], SKEETER (hmcr/smerk), C64 (dross:tik), ORBZ (32 division) => Gladstone, 9 pm, $5 (prizes for costumes)
MIN RAGER QUARTET => Rex Hotel (Oct 27-28)
BASSNECTAR, WASABI COLLECTIVE, DJ ROLLIN CASH => El Mocambo, $17
JAMIROQUAI => Kool Haus, $41.25
BRIAN BARLOW QUINTET => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 27-29)
SHANNON GUNN & BRIAN DICKINSON => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
MARK PATTERSON ALTERNATIVE JAZZ QUARTET => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, $8
Cuban Fridays w/ CAFE CUBANO => Lula Lounge, $10
SAT OCT 29
** ORNETTE COLEMAN => Massey Hall, $89.50–$39.50
* Pornoween w/ THE CHINESE STARS, MAHI MAHI, guests => Metro Adult Cinema, $10
* QUEER JEWISH WEDDINGS w/ MARILYN LERNER, ADRIENNE COOPER, FRANK LONDON, LORIN SKLAMBERG, SARA FELDER => Miles Nadal JCC, 750 Spadina Ave., $10
THE SILVER HEARTS => Rivoli
SUFFOCATION, CRYPTOPSY, DESPISED ICON, ABORTED => Opera House, $25
Vague Terrain presents KERO, NAW, DES CAILLOUX ET DU CARBONE => Art Bar at the Gladstone Hotel, 9 pm, $5
BLACK HALOS, ILLUMINATI => Horseshoe
JAZZ FOR HERBIE fourth annual benefit for Sick Kids' Hospital => Rex Hotel, noon-6 pm, $20 min. donation
THE FORGOTTEN REBELS => Lee's Palace, $10
SAVES THE DAY, SENSES FAIL, EARLY NOVEMBER, SAY ANYTHING => The Docks, $23.50
TESLA => Phoenix, $29.50
THE GROUP SOUNDS (NYC), UNCUT, DJ NNY + Guests => The Social, $10
Five Weeks For Coltrane 5 w/ THE DOUG RICHARDSON QUARTET, guests => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, $15-$20
CHRIS GALE QUINTET => Rex Hotel
BRIAN BARLOW QUINTET => Montreal Bistro (Oct. 27-29)
BOB BROUGH QUARTET => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
DAVID CALZADO Y SU CHARANGA HABANERA => Lula Lounge, $35
JOHNNY RAWLS => Silver Dollar, 10 pm, $18
VAUX => El Mocambo, $10
SUN OCT 30
** STEVE REICH & FRIENDS => MacMillan Theatre, 80 Queen's Park Crescent, $25-$40
* Wavelength 287: evil halloween costume party w/ ROBOCOPP, RIGOR MORTIS GOT ME DOWN (five-part zombie musical!), DJ WEST EYES
=> Sneaky Dee's, pwyc
* THE GO! TEAM, THE GRATES => The Phoenix, $18.50
* The Composer Now w/ JOSEPH PETRIC (accordion), PENDERECKI STRING QUARTET => Music Gallery, 8 pm, $5-$15
Solo Piano Sundays w/ TANIA GILL (9 pm), BILL WESTCOTT (10:15 pm) => The Red Guitar, 603 Markham St
AFRICAN SPIRIT DRUMMING => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, $10
CHRIS MCKHOOL cd release => Hugh's Room, 2 pm, $10-$12
Ghosts, Goblins And Things That Go Bump In The Night! w/ TORONTO CHILDREN'S CHORUS => Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, 230 St. Clair West, 4 pm, $25-$40
GENITORTURES => Lee's Palace
STAIND, DEFAULT => Kool Haus, $33.75
MON OCT 31
* KARDINAL OFFISHAL => Mod Club, 8 pm, $15
YORK JAZZ ENSEMBLE (big band) => Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst, doors 8, show 9 pm, pwyc
Read More | Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Sunday, September 25 at 6:36 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (7)
Robert Zend's Toronto
A City of Two Kinds
There are two kinds of cities:
where you can live
but you can't make a living;
where you can make a living
but you can't live;
Toronto is almost both of them.
- Robert Zend; July 16, 1972; from Beyond Labels (Hounslow Press).
Robert Zend was a Hungarian writer who moved to Canada in, of course, 1956, and died 20 years ago this week, in 1985. He was by all accounts a remarkably free spirit and contributor to Toronto's experimental literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s (the above is not a representative example), and by direct evidence a marvelous phrasemaker. Mrs. Zoilus is reading this afternoon at a memorial service (he was a family friend). This is a piece Zend wrote in 1972 as part of a sequence in which he struggled with his feelings about his adopted city; it's remarkable how, for all of the tremendous change the place has gone through, this still feels exactly right. I think of it particularly as describing Toronto's relation to its triangulated cousins, Montreal and New York.
The Writ | Posted by zoilus on Saturday, September 24 at 3:05 PM | Linking Posts
Tora! Tora! Toronto! ...
And Otherwheres
So much going on. There will be a gig guide update this afternoon with the first couple of weeks of October added - a preview of the wonders of the upcoming Zoilus refurbishment which will give the guide its own standalone page. (But I use the term "upcoming" advisedly... mañana, mañana.) First things first though:
I'll be talking as part of a Toronto bloggers' panel at this Sunday's Word on the Street, at 4:15 in the "Beyond the Page" tent, in the southeast corner of Queen's Park, discussing how blogging helps knit a community. Besides Carl of Zoilus, the knights of this roundtable will include Sarah of Torontoist, Robert of Reading Toronto and Sam of Daily Dose of Imagery. Our king will be Matt B, the potentate of the droll M@B strip, of Spacing magazine (the print wing of the Toronto Public Space Committee) and its new Spacing Wire blog as well as Matt's own Matt B Images photoblog. Yeah, this mutha's earned his crown. The panel's only about a half-hour long, so don't dally. Come say hey.
Additions: This Pop Montreal ad does a pretty good job of supplying the persuasion I sought earlier. Due to the fire etc. I can't go, but now I think I would.
Cat & Girl does it again with Girl's new band, The Upper-Middle Class: "Well I saw her face/ Now I read The Believer." (Speaking of which, there's an interview with Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo up there today.)
In a related development, the new David Grubbs album is a collaboration with the poet Susan Howe, which strikes me as one of the most promising examples of "lit. rock" in an age: Both of them do nonlinear work, but it seems to me impossible to subject to a straight translation (why? well, here's a sample of one of the Howe works they're setting to music - see?) - which means the works will have to be wholly reinvented as musical pieces, and thus should genuinely be musical pieces.
In other news: Are the Comments broken or something? The readership stats are hitting new highs and yet you're all so quiet ... How did you like that Kate Bush single, for instance?
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Friday, September 23 at 1:21 PM | Linking Posts | Comments (6)
Jandek Live in Torontopia?
Rumour of the day: Jandek live show in Toronto in the works???? (See Zoiluses past on Jandek - just the tail-end of that column, actually.)
And here's a bit cut for space from my Essential Tracks list coming out tomorrow in The Globe and Mail:
The White Box
The Mountain Goats, from Down in a Mirror: A Second Tribute to Jandek (http://www.summerstepsrecords.com)
This menacing Pandora’s-box parable fittingly introduces the weird world of Houston recluse Jandek, who has self-released 42 harrowing albums since 1978 and recently shocked followers by making live appearances. Singer John Darnielle has reinvented his vocal style markedly for his contribution to this second anthology of indie-rockers’ Jandek covers, which also includes Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.
Via Toronto | Posted by zoilus on Thursday, September 22 at 6:56 PM | Linking Posts
Kicked to the Ground
Sleater-Kinney, not coming soon to a CNE-grounds music festival near you (or at least not near me).
So for the second year in a row, a well-programmed summer-season music festival at the CNE grounds in Toronto has been deep-sixed. Yeah, I'm talkin' about Ear to the Ground, which was to have featured everyone from Sleater-Kinney to the Hidden Cameras (see crossed-out entries in the gig guide), is no more. Brief flailing attempts to schedule compensatory club shows have gone nowhere. There looks to still be an okay show Thurs at the Gladstone and I think also Friday at the Phoenix (the latter put together by Dan Burke rather than by the festival organizers, w/ Ninja High School, RJD2, Kid Koala, Zoobombs). Too bad - the festival had a good blend of acts (i.e. it was not all rock, which is a shock in this town's music-festival biz - there were good electronics and hip-hop/r&b components) and a high quality average. Mixing with the CNE does not look to be a good bet for festival promoters. But neither does getting in over your head financially. Bads on both sides? Seems like it.
Speaking of festivals: Can anyone make a convincing argument about why anyone from Toronto would drive up for Pop Montreal this year (aside from just to hang out)? I don't see much on the schedule that persuades me I'll miss out on musical essentials if I don't go. What do you think?
Meanwhile the benefitingest of New Orleans benefits is on tonight at the Comfort Zone, again organized by the inimitable Dan Burke and featuring the aforementioned