Beat Columns (Live Music)

It was participating in the Toronto Improvisor’s Orchestra that offered a lifeline for electroacoustic music improviser, teacher, researcher and producer Michael Palumbo. During 2019, Palumbo was experiencing multiple crises in his life which eventually led him into performing improvised music on his modular synthesizer. “It was a form of music making where empathy is very important,” he told me during our phone interview. “I could go and play my heart out. It saved my life that year.”

In March of 2020 – while COVID anxiety was swirling through Toronto, but just before lockdown protocols were announced and enacted – news broke that Hugh’s Room Live would be leaving their Dundas West location, having failed to come to terms with their landlord in lease negotiations. It was a major blow for the city’s club scene.

Summer and Music Festivals make great partners. Now that concert life appears to be fully alive after the past few years of the enforced doldrums, the summer festivals are alive with several offerings of new music and Canadian compositions. I’ve picked out some of the upcoming highlights, both local and further afield.

On June 3, 2023, the clarinetist, composer, bandleader and educator Phil Nimmons celebrated his 100th birthday. Born in 1923 in Kamloops, Nimmons has been a major force on the Canadian jazz scene since the 1950s, when – following his formal music education, at both Juilliard in New York and at Toronto’s own Royal Conservatory of Music – he formed his much-venerated Nimmons ’n’ Nine group, with which he would go on to record nine albums, embark on innumerable tours, and perform regularly on CBC broadcasts.

The beginning of the summer season is exploding with the openings of new musicals – shows previously delayed by COVID shut downs, new projects and classics revisited – with a little flood in late May, inconveniently early for our May 31 release, but worthy of mention nevertheless.

Toronto Summer Music (TSM) returns July 6 to 29 with Metamorphosis as its motif and, appropriately enough, a butterfly as its graphic signature.

Emails from Cambodia

Earlier this year an email appeared in my inbox with an intriguing invitation. “Join us in celebrating Peter Chin’s last major work, featuring an international cast of dancers and musicians on June 23 and 24 at 8pm, and June 25 at 2pm at Harbourfront Centre Theatre.” The announcement continued, “trillionth i signifies the third eye and beyond, to the trillionth eye, in an embrace of endless ways of sensing, knowing and of being in the world…” and was signed off with “choreography and music composition by Peter Chin.”

The 20th century term “postmodern” is often uncritically applied to a whole range of artistic expressions that are not easily compartmentalizable – wherever influences and traditions whose conceits lie on a continuum somewhere between antithetical and oppositional are blended together. Sometimes, though, it is entirely appropriate, as was the case with Andrew Balfour’s beautiful and important piece, NAGAMO (Ojibway for “sing”), recently presented on a coast-to-coast tour by Balfour and musica intima.

The Rex: On April 12, guitarist/vocalist Jocelyn Gould plays The Rex in a four-night run with her quintet. Originally from Winnipeg, Gould came to Toronto by way of the University of Manitoba, where she did her undergraduate studies in jazz, and Michigan State University, where she earned a Master’s of Music. A Benedetto endorsee, Gould plays in a traditionalist style, with the athletic bebop lines, octaves and bluesy flourishes of her cited influences (Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Kenny Burrell, Grant Green) on full display.

“What strikes you instantly is that Pouliot’s sound is a beauty: big, rich and warm in the lower registers, clean and clear up high, feathery and husky qualities, along with sweet and rough, all equally there in his colouristic palette.” – Gramophone Magazine

Toronto-born violinist Blake Pouliot (pronounced pool-YACHT) brings his passionate music- making to Koerner Hall, where he will make his debut on April 21. Winning the Grand Prize at the 2016 Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal Manulife Competition – the most significant of Pouliot’s early accolades – led to his first recording (for Analekta). His 2019 Juno Award nomination was further evidence of an ascending career path, leading to this much-anticipated Koerner visit. The following email Q&A took place in early March.