Features

Jazz festivals sometimes follow an uncomfortable pattern. Early success breeds an appetite for more. It’s difficult to attract crowds with niche music, so the emphasis turns to the most accessible forms of jazz, sometimes even distant relations. Fortunately, there are people like Hamilton’s Cem Zafir, committed to jazz at the margins, edgy, experimental music that’s defined by the risk of improvisation not by the tapping of feet.

Zafir, who first started booking radical jazz-John Zorn’s Masada and Rashied Ali-in BC around 2000, started the four-day Something Else! Festival of Creative Music in 2014. He’s clearly developing a sustainable model, using well-known, compatible musicians whose working lives involve overlapping ensembles. Amid the welter of bands appearing between June 16 -19 is a hard core of international improvisers, with musicians from the Netherlands and Japan as well as Canada and the US.

Ken Vandermark, saxophonist, composer and master of creative musical networking is artist-in-residence. He opens the festival with a solo performance and then over the next few days appears in numerous shifting ensembles. The DKV Trio (the other members are percussionist supreme Hamid Drake and stand-out bassist Kent Kessler) appears with guest guitarist Joe Morris on Saturday afternoon; during the Sunday matinee, DKV combines with Eloping with the Sun, the long-standing trio of Drake, Morris and New York bassist William Parker in which the three emphasize various African, ethnic and small instruments (even the trumpet is the pocket version). Alone, Eloping with the Sun concludes Saturday evening; DKV returns for the Sunday evening concert.

In another combination, Vandermark appears in duet with trumpeter Nate Wooley. Vandermark’s contribution to the duo is a work-in-progress called Sequences of Snow, in which he takes “visual and sonic aspects from [Michael] Snow’s films…as inspiration for material to interpret and transform for a completely different medium.” Wooley, whose experimentation extends to applying the International Phonetic Alphabet to trumpet sound production, also appears in a solo concert as does Joe Morris, who can alter one’s view of a guitar’s possibilities.

Perch Hen Brock & Rain, heard on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, consists of two well-travelled couples with distinguished resumes: Netherlander saxophonist/clarinetist Ab Baars and violist Ig Henneman and Brooklyn-resident saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey. Baars, a prominent member of Amsterdam’s ICP, also has a guest-spot with Eloping with the Sun. Another couple, the Tokyo-based trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and pianist Satoko Fujii appear in Kaze (Japanese for “wind”), an intercontinental explosion of brassy brilliance with the French trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins.

There are plenty of other performances as well, including solo turns by trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. Montrealer Woody Epps’ Togetherness includes stand-out musicians, like saxophonist Erik Hove and trombonist Scott Thomson. Spontaneous ensembles punctuate the afternoon series, including a tribute to the late Toronto guitarist Ken Aldcroft.

It’s an opportunity to hear a spectrum of international radicals who are never heard in Toronto in this concentration.

For a complete schedule and locations, see zulapresents.org

For a half hour or so, around 10:15pm, last Saturday April 29, in Kingston, Ontario, two individuals with concert halls named after them occupied the same stage at the same time, albeit for quite distinct reasons.

One was Jeanne Lamon, first and recently retired director of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, for whom Tafelmusik’s recently renovated concert hall at the Trinity-St.Paul’s Centre in Toronto is named. The other was Isabel Overton Bader, for whom Queen’s University’s Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston is named and without whom (along with husband Alfred Bader), the Centre and its stunning 566-seat recital hall would almost certainly never have come into existence.

Lamon took a bow onstage at the Isabel last Saturday night as one member of a distinguished 10-person jury (along with fellow violin virtuosi Martin Beaver, Jonathan Crow and Barry Shiffman) for the inaugural Isabel Overton Bader Canadian Violin Competition, which kicked off on Wednesday April 26 with a two-day semifinal round during which the field was winnowed down from seven to three violinists. Friday was an intensive rehearsal day with the competition’s two indefatigable collaborative pianists, Benjamin Smith and Michel Szczesniak, for the three finalists: Toronto-based Katya Poplyansky, Vancouver’s Lucy Wang and Yolanda Bruno from Ottawa. 

Saturday’s final round consisted of three separate short solo recitals (at 6pm, 7pm and 8pm, respectively) with order of appearance drawn by lot, and roughly 15-minute breaks in between. As with the semifinal round, which was a very clever blend of compulsory and optional elements, the final round was deftly structured to allow both for clear points of comparison and for artistic self-expression.

To explain: each of the seven semifinalists was required, ahead of the competition, to choose the first movement of one of the five Mozart violin concerti to open their final program, should they make it to the finals. (For the detail-driven among you, each of the five, except Concerto No. 2, was chosen by at least one competitor, and, as it turned out, two of the three finalists, including the winner, chose to prepare No.3 in G Major.) What made the exercise particularly intriguing from an audience perspective, though (and I expect particularly revealing for the jurors), was that each performer was also required to perform her own original cadenza for the chosen concerto. It also gave each violinist the opportunity to establish a rapport with the pianist playing the reduction of the orchestral score, and to hear themselves in the hall.

After that appetizer, the main course of each program was a complete violin concerto, again with piano reduction, of the performer’s own choosing, and it was here that the personalities of the individual players shone through. Katya Poplyansky (who had chosen Mozart Concerto No.4 in D Major to start her program), followed it with the Prokofiev Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.63. Lucy Wang, who followed, chose Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53.

To round the evening off, Yolanda Bruno, the eventual $20,000 first prize winner (and winner of the audience choice prize), took on Bartók’s Violin Concerto No 2, BB 117 with Benjamin Smith as pianist. It should be said that the competition was open to Canadian violinists from 18 to 29 years of age, and that while age is not necessarily an indicator of musical maturity it was clear from the first downstroke of the violin in the Mozart that Bruno has at this stage in her career achieved a level of comfort in her own musical skin that enabled her to fully relish the moment, interpretively and collaboratively. She and pianist Smith played off each other in the Bartók to an astonishing extent, evoking the full orchestral scope and scale of the work. The fact that Bruno currently performs on the 1700 Taft Strad on loan from the Canada Council for the Arts Musical Instrument Bank probably had something to do with it. So too did Smith’s extraordinary feathering of the pedals of the hall’s first-rate Steinway piano.

But the hall itself, and the kind of listening it evokes from its audiences – a kind of collective responsibility for the acoustical occasion – is in and of itself something unique in the Canadian musical landscape. It’s a facility that will, if well curated, and supported in its programming with the same sense of responsibility as went into the acoustical perfecting of the place, become one of those places that chamber musicians, and others, seek out, for the pleasure of the opportunity to simply be their best.

Tricia Baldwin is executive director of The Isabel Bader Centre, wooed back to Kingston from Tafelmusik, where she was general manager during Jeanne Lamon’s heyday. As for the future of this particular competition, she tells me, the plan is for it to continue as a triennial affair (like its illustrious counterparts, the Honens Piano Competition in Calgary and the Banff International String Quartet Competition). “But don’t expect solo violin to be its defining characteristic,” she says. “More central is the idea that it is a competition for young Canadian musicians.”

However that idea plays out, it’s off to a flying start.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

Johannes Debus will take the podium at Koerner Hall on May 24 to launch the 2017 edition of the Royal Conservatory’s 21C Music Festival, along with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, the Elmer Iseler Singers and soloists.

The program they will offer includes two works by 21C Festival artistic advisor, Brian Current, one of four composers featured during the festival who are former grand prize winners in one of the CBC/Radio-Canada national competitions for young Canadian composers. Current, Chris Paul Harman, Ana Sokolović and Andrew Staniland all have premieres of major works during the festival. These four composers, who won the CBC competition when they were in their 20s, 30s or, in Harman’s case, teens, have all demonstrated the promise and the purpose of the composition competitions by developing into successful professionals, now among the nation’s leading mature composers.

By way of background, the CBC/Radio-Canada National Radio Competition for Young Composers (1973-2003) was initiated by John Peter Lee Roberts, who was head of CBC Radio Music from 1965 to 1975. Roberts, who commissioned over 150 original Canadian compositions for broadcast during his tenure as head of music, saw the development of emerging composing talent in Canada as one way of fulfilling the objective, as defined by the Broadcasting Act, to “Encourage the development of Canadian expression by providing a wide range of programming that reflects Canadian attitudes, opinions, ideas and artistic creativity.”

Clearly, the development of artistic creativity spoke to Roberts in a strong voice, and he grasped the need to develop the next generation of Canadian composers. He brought together his colleagues at Radio-Canada, as well as the Canada Council to help fund the competition in its first year, 1973, and then received additional support from several provincial arts councils the following year. When Roberts handed me the Young Composers project at the end of his time at Radio Music, in 1975, it was already the most important vehicle for young and emerging composers in Canada. The creation in 1978 of the national new music series Two New Hours provided a national network radio vehicle to share the unfolding story of the emergence of Canada’s musical future. And through the system of international program exchange between the world’s public broadcasters, we were also able to introduce the music of these young creators to listeners around the globe. The linkage of a national contemporary music network series with the young composers competition produced a generation of new Canadian composers. The list of winners reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary Canadian music.

Returning to Brian Current, he was a finalist at age 24 in the 1996 CBC/Radio-Canada competition but he won the Grand Prize when he entered again in the 2001 edition. He told me that just being a finalist opened a door that inspired him to raise his composing to a higher level. Current is represented in the 21C Music Festival by performances of two movements from his large-scale multi-movement oratorio, The River of Light, for soloists, choir and orchestra. Current says that “The River of Light is about transcendence and is based on the texts of several traditions (Hindu, Christian, Jewish, First Nations Canadian, Sufi, Maori and Chinese) that describe mystical journeys towards an exalted state.”

The first part, The Seven Heavenly Halls, won the inaugural Azrieli Commissioning Competition prize in 2015. The world premiere was last October in Montreal with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Kent Nagano. Mervon Mehta, the Royal Conservatory’s (RCM) executive director of performing arts, was present for the premiere and was so moved by the work, he persuaded Debus to perform it with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, together with tenor soloist Andrew Haji and the Elmer Iseler Singers at the 21C opening. Debus describes his feeling about the piece this way: “I would like to call The Seven Heavenly Halls an ecstatic, overwhelmingly colourful, opalescent, kaleidoscopic and at times turbulent journey through a galaxy of mystique and vision. It feels as majestic and luminous as a temple.” The text of the work is based on the Zohar, which Current’s longtime collaborator and librettist, Anton Piatigorsky calls, “The most mysterious of Jewish mystical texts.”

Part III of The River of Light will receive its world premiere in the concert. It’s a work for narrator, choir and orchestra titled Nàaka, and is based on stories of the Northern Lights in the Tłįchǫ Dene tradition. “I was grateful to meet the remarkable Tłįchǫ Dene author and storyteller Richard Van Camp, who is quite justly treated like royalty wherever he goes in the Northwest Territories,” says Current. “Spending just one minute listening to Richard’s stories is to be immediately put under his spell.”

In Nàaka, (meaning Northern Lights, in the language of the Tłįchǫ Dene), Van Camp will narrate his text accompanied by the orchestra and choir. The translations and pronunciations were prepared by Tłįchǫ Elder Rosa Mantla. The work was commissioned by the Royal Conservatory/Koerner Hall with support from Kris Vikmanis and Denny Creighton. (The May 24 opening concert also includes music by American composer/conductor Matthew Aucoin, Korean composer Unsuk Chin and Canadian composer/conductor Sammy Moussa.)

Chris Paul Harman was 19 years old when he won the CBC/Radio-Canada Young Composers Competition Grand Prize in 1990, making him the youngest laureate of the competition. Similar to Current, he had been a finalist in an earlier edition of the competition, in Harman’s case at the age of 16. Harman’s two works, included in the May 28 21C concert, presented by Soundstreams Canada, are both part of a series of pieces he based on the music of the English popular composer Ray Noble (1903-1978) and, in particular, songs recorded in 1934 by singer Al Bowlly, Love Locked Out and It’s All Forgotten Now. Harman wrote that, “The popular music of this era appeals to me for its elegance, melodic and harmonic sophistication and subtly nuanced orchestration.” His Love Locked Out was commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra in 2014 and premiered in London, England. Harman notes that “in alluding to the popular music of a bygone era, Love Locked Out likewise chronicles developments in the classical music of the same period, by quoting or adapting excerpted material from seminal works by Anton Webern (Klavierstücke, 1925) and Béla Bartók (Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta: first movement, 1937), both of which contain the opening five-note pattern of Ray Noble’s tune.

It’s All Forgotten Now, receiving its world premiere, was co-commissioned for Soundstreams and 21C by Stanley Witkin and the Royal Conservatory.

Canadian Arts Song Project (CASP) co-artistic directors Steven Philcox and Lawrence Wiliford created a program for the 21C Music Festival on May 25 that celebrates the Canadian sesquicentennial with Canadian art song. They commissioned Montreal composer Ana Sokolović to create a cycle of songs that sets poetry from every province in Canada, Dawn Always Begins in the Bones. And they also included the Canadian premiere of a song cycle by Andrew Staniland, Peter Quince at the Clavier.

Sokolović and Staniland complete our quartet of former CBC grand prize winners featured at this year’s 21C. Ana Sokolović was the Grand Prize winner in the 1999 CBC/Radio-Canada competition and St. John’s composer Andrew Staniland won the 2009 CBC/Radio-Canada Evolution Young Composers Competition, which was a one-time event, created as a new vision of the earlier competition. For both young composers, their respective grand prizes raised their standing in the musical community. “It gave me, an emerging composer, crucial visibility at an important time in my creative career,” Sokolović said, “like a Cinderella moment.”

Sokolović told me that her search for the right poetry for her new cycle took two years. She was assisted by University of Toronto professor Linda Hutchinson. Staniland’s cycle, on the other hand, sets a long, four-part poem by American Wallace Stevens. The CASP concert, which takes place at the RCM’s Temerty Theatre, also includes Lloyd Burritt’s Moth Poem. Lawrence Wiliford said, “We are thrilled to have commissioned and to be presenting an incredible new work by Ana Sokolović in recognition of Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation and are delighted that we will be presenting the Canadian debut of a brilliant set of songs by Andrew Staniland as part of the the 21C Festival at the RCM.” Baritone Ian MacNeil will sing the Staniland and Burritt songs with pianist Mélisande Sinsoulier. COC Ensemble director Liz Upchurch will accompany the Sokolović cycle, sung by soprano Danika Lorèn, mezzo soprano Emily D’Angelo, tenor Aaron Sheppard and baritone Bruno Roy. In fact, it’s an all-Canadian cast!

The 21C Music Festival consists of nine concerts and 31 premieres in the space of five days, May 24 to 28. Besides the concerts already mentioned, there are performances of contemporary music by the Bang on a Can All Stars, violinist Benjamin Bowman with pianist Claudia Chan, the Cecilia String Quartet, Cinq à Sept, Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà and the Soundstreams Emerging Composers Workshop. The affordable Festival Pass makes it possible for every new music lover to take in the entire program. The major sponsors of the 21C Music Festival are Michael and Sonja Koerner.

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

Denis Brott, founder and artistic director of the Montreal Chamber Festival (MCF/FCM), now in its 22nd year, and I are about 20 minutes into a lively phone conversation and I’m explaining to him why this year, more than any other so far, I have a hunger to play hookey from my work here and head east to take in all three weekends of MCF/FCM.

“I heard the complete Beethoven String Quartet cycle done by the Amadeus Quartet in Toronto over a two-week period in April 1976,” I explain. “Eight months after arriving in Canada. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I think. It was…” I struggle for words.

“So you know what I am talking about then,” Brott jumps in. “It is really a life-altering experience and I am hopeful the public will appreciate it as such, and appreciate the wonderful playing of what I consider to be the foremost young quartet before the public today.”

He’s talking about the Dover String Quartet, winner of the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, and the fact that the quartet will play the entire Beethoven cycle at MCF/FCM on three consecutive Fridays and Sundays starting May 26 and ending Sunday, June 11, 2017.

“How long has something like this been in the planning?” I ask.

“Years,” he replies. “Three, probably. I was in Banff the year they won, teaching. And I was asked to give a lecture on the final day of competition, right before the Beethoven round, on the subject of the emotional language of Beethoven. I had been there all week listening to all the rounds with avid interest and I had picked out right from the beginning the exceptional nature of the Dover Quartet, their emotional intelligence. They ended up being grand prize winners and winners in almost every area of the competition.”

He invited them to MCF/FCM right away, he says, and they’ve been there almost every year since. “This profession [chamber music] is one where people actually make friendships and colleagues and experience camaraderie,” he says. “It’s one of the things that makes chamber music different from almost every other segment in the music world.”

The idea of doing the cycle was one that he raised with them right from the start. “I planted in their ear right away that any quartet that takes itself seriously has to play the cycle – something I remember from when I jumped into the Orford Quartet in 1980. In one year I had to learn all the quartets and play the cycle. Believe me that was quite an undertaking.” It was during Brott’s eight years with the Orford that the quartet completed their landmark recordings of the Beethoven quartets for Delos over an 18-month period from 1984 to 1986.

“So I encouraged the Dovers, and said when you have it up, let’s do it at the festival. And when it became clear that this would be the year, I said, okay so then we should do a festival theme of Beethoven; the whole idea of Beethoven’s role as a pivotal figure in the transition between the classical and Romantic era.”

Beethoven has fascinated Brott for decades, he says. “I have played every single piece he wrote that has a cello in it, and it’s a musical language that I understand and enjoy, and more than enjoy, that I am in awe of. I am privileged to have access to playing this music and obviously in designing this season I wanted to have a Beethoven work on every concert or most concerts where possible, and that’s what I have done. And I have put it together with a great deal of care over the last year and a half, two years; you know it takes about that long.”

The Dover Quartet, it should be said, will have completed two other complete Beethoven cycles this season, one in Buffalo, one in Connecticut. But each will have consisted of coming to town for two concerts, on three occasions spread out through the year.

“I come back to what I said before,” says Brott. “Experiencing the cycle in a condensed time frame, for audience and performers is quite remarkable. I remember doing it with the Orford at the Rubens House in Antwerp, the atelier of the artist Rubens, and there was a concert every second night with one night in between. So let’s say the Dover have been in training for doing this, and they are looking forward to it; needless to say we are looking forward to it immensely.”

Of the aforementioned other two Beethoven cycles on the Dover Quartet’s calendar this year, the Buffalo engagement is a highly idiosyncratic one: the “Slee Cycle,” which has been running since 1955, requires quartets to perform the cycle in the exact sequence preferred by Frederick Slee who endowed it.

“Did you have discussion with the Dovers about the sequence for your festival?” I ask. His reply is emphatic. “You are asking a fundamental question about what I believe in as a director, instigator, shepherd, call it what you like. The way you have people perform at their best is by letting them do what they want, as artists, people of distinction. On something like this I would never impose my will. They are presenting, it is in my interest for them to be playing at their best.”

Listening to Brott talk about the rest of the programming for the festival (and the Beethoven cycle is only the main course of a very satisfying full-course musical meal), the same sense of enjoyment at empowering inclusion comes through again and again. All built around the camaraderie he referred to earlier in describing chamber music’s unique place in the musical world.

“So how many people do you think will come for the whole cycle?” I ask, wistfully returning to the idea of making a two-week and two-day pilgrimage, for my older self to revisit one of the formative experiences of my musical life.

“How many people will take in the whole cycle? I don’t know. But it is a festival in every sense; an immersion, a celebration, so you have to be into immersion, not just social concertgoing. It’s for people who are as passionate about the music as the musicians. Just think of it this way. Two or three weekends in a row in Montreal is not so bad!”

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

In the well-known Edward Lear nonsense poem from which Jumblies Theatre derives its name, the Jumblies set sail in search of adventure, less than adequately provisioned. As the end of the opening stanza has it: 

 Far and few, far and few,

 Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

 Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

 And they went to sea in a Sieve.

You can see where, as an image, this would have captured the imagination of Ruth Howard, almost 20 years ago, precisely because of the great and glorious impracticality of it all. How fine to be launching an arts venture which almost by its inherent design would be nigh impossible to keep afloat following the usual professionalized arts rules: one-, two- and three-year business plans; spit-spot arts management; immutable calendar-based deadlines for shows and grants and budget reports.

Howard and I met in late April in The WholeNote podcast studio, to talk about a current Jumblies’ project, titled Touching Ground Festival. Official start and end dates for Touching Ground are May 13 to June 23, but its tendrils extend backwards in time, more than a decade, and its potential offshoots extend just as many years into the future, because of the astonishingly dense web of community-based, social and artistic connections, that go into every project this remarkable organization undertakes.

Just the description of Touching Ground in Jumblies’ own releases about the festival, speaks to this layered complexity: A suite of new works inspired by three years of exploring themes of Toronto’s layered and Indigenous histories and present landscapes. All works and events feature community members as art-makers, singers, dancers and performers, and many artists from Jumblies and our offshoots and partners.

The range of activities encompasses installations, audio tours, newly created short films and discussions about them, photographic and art exhibitions, dance and creative explorations, open art-making drop-ins, a work-in-progress musical, a comic book launch, and other workshops and presentations.

And there is music everywhere, lots of it, including: the ongoing involvement of Jumblies own “mixed-ability choir” directed by Shifra Cooper; Métis fiddle tunes by Alyssa Delbaere Sawchuk; a new choral work by Martin van de Ven, with original songs by Rosary Spence, inspired by and running concurrently with an installation about Toronto’s Treaty histories and current implications.

Of particular note, in terms of The WholeNote’s usual musical preoccupations, on Saturday and Sunday, June 3 and 4 at the Evergreen Brick Works, will be a performance titled Four Lands presented with Continuum Contemporary Music, and including new musical works created by composers Jason Doell and Juliet Palmer. Palmer is no stranger to Jumblies’ ways of working, having been the composer for the community play, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, that was the culmination, in 2011, of Jumblies’ four- year community arts residency in East Scarborough.

The range of venues announced so far is as wide-ranging and eclectic as the range of activities: the Ground Floor (Jumblies new City Place street-level home base/studio, just east of Bathurst and north of the Gardiner); the previously mentioned Evergreen Brick Works; the new Fort York branch of the Toronto Public Library; under the Gardiner; Canoe Landing Park;  Historic Fort York; and Cedar Ridge Creative Centre in Scarborough, which exists as a legacy project of Jumblies’ earlier East Scarborough community play project.

In all this welter of facts it’s hard to get a fix on what makes this festival a cohesive “thing,” a bit like trying to figure out what it is that made Edward Lear’s Jumblies sieve a boat! The answer to that lies partially in looking back at the “thing” called “the community play” an idea developed by English theatre professionals-turned activists Ann Jellicoe and Jon Oram and exported to Canada right at the start of the 1990s. Dale Hamilton’s Spirit of Shivaree which took place in the ruins of the Old Woolen Mill in Rockwood, Ontario, was the first instance of community play principles put into practice here, and it was in Rockwood that Ruth Howard caught the bug. She talks about it interestingly and at length in our podcast interview so I’ll be brief here. Basically the community play involves going into a community for no less than 24 months for the purpose of creating a theatre work on an epic scale, about, with and for that community, based on “wholehearted social inclusion” of everyone who wants to get involved, and a commitment to ongoing rewriting of the script so that everyone who wants a part can have one. And just as important, to bring to the undertaking the same professional commitment, resources and aesthetic standards as to any professional production. 

For Jellicoe and Oram, the community play movement almost by definition entailed a retreat from large urban centres. Howard’s efforts have taken an intriguingly different path, seeking out the living smaller communities within the megacity, disempowered by amalgamation: Mabelle and Dundas in Etobicoke; Lawrence Heights; Davenport-Perth; East Scarborough: each in turn became home base for Jumblies for three or four years at a time, while the community itself crafted the story that needed to be told there.

In the final stanza of Edward Lear’s The Jumblies, after “twenty years or more” the Jumblies reach dry land, safe at home again: “And everyone said, ‘How tall they’ve grown!’”

“Tall” might not be quite the right word, but with Touching Ground, one senses that Jumblies has moved, in some ways, beyond its community play roots but without abandoning their principles.

The company’s extraordinary Train of Thought project in 2015 saw them travel west to east across Canada: 70 artists, two and a half months, 25 stops, hundreds of participants – following the railway, finding stories, abandoning the railway in the places where the railway has done the abandoning “so sometimes a minivan convoy of thought, sometimes a chartered bus of thought, whatever it took. Starting before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee but catching up with each other as we went.” What made that project possible, Howard says, was the three years of outreach that went into it, community by community, not just arriving on the scene. Ideas and artifacts born of that tour are everywhere to be found in Touching Ground.

Another big change for Jumblies is, for the first time, having a viable urban base (albeit in a faceless new urban neighbourhood struggling for an identity) to use as the “Ground Floor” from which to launch its forays. A third, and perhaps most thought-provoking change, is in the kind of partnership the Four Lands performances at the Evergreen Brick Works represent: partnerships, encouraged by arts agencies, with established, “shipshape” organizations like Continuum, and others. It will be interesting to see as, and if, these partnerships evolve over the years, who benefits more from the association. Expertise in keeping sieves afloat is no small talent in these artistically troubled times.

For more details on the Touching Ground Festival as it develops visit touchinggroundfestival.ca

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com