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 (0)
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 (16)
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.)
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