Beat Columns (Live Music)

Ah, September. Across the country – as books are cracked open, backpacks are zipped up, and “”back to school” carries a whole different set of connotations: a pervasive sense of COVID-related anxiety weighing heavy on the collective national consciousness. It still doesn’t quite feel as though things are getting back to normal. It does, however, feel as though we’re gradually heading in the right direction, further potential lockdowns notwithstanding. Let’s hope so: for the venues I cover here, it’s a knife-edge situation still. 

As I have documented in multiple pieces over the last year, the pandemic has been exceptionally difficult for Toronto’s club scene, not least, as I outlined in a recent article, the exorbitant insurance premiums that venues have been asked to pay this year. For many venues, this development intensified existing financial hardship, introducing yet another element of precariousness to the Sisyphean task of hosting live music. 

The changing season, however, brings with it a kernel of hope. Though jazz venues don’t follow the same seasonal cycle as classical institutions, the relatively recent date – July 16 – of the return of live music means that this fall represents a potential turning point for clubs. Having had the summer to hire/re-hire staff, implement new safety protocols, make changes in payment policies, and attend to the myriad other demands of the reopening process, clubs are as ready as they’ll ever be to get back to business, whatever that may look like as the fall progresses into winter. 

Hamilton, Ontario
September 25, October 2, October 9

Since 2014, The Zula Arts Collective and director Cem Zafir have been programming the further shores of jazz and improvised music in Hamilton, from an annual festival to various concert series throughout the year. Now, with the lightening of COVID-19 restrictions, Zula launches a series of festive Saturday performances: each presents four groups – some local, some travelling, some interdisciplinary – and, following a dinner service, concludes with a film that’s intimately involved with improvised music. 

September 25

Film: Imagine the Sound

In 1981, Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann (creator of Grass, Altman and Comic Book Confidential) and musician/writer/producer Bill Smith undertook a significant project to document some major figures of the free jazz movement, producing a mix of performances and interviews with Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Bill Dixon and Archie Shepp that retains its power today, including some extraordinary footage of Taylor’s end-to-end piano runs (7pm). Ron Mann is on hand for a Q&A (8:30pm).

The film and Bill Smith’s career are also apparent in other performances. Trombonist Scott Thomson presents a solo set of music inspired by Bill Dixon (5:15pm). Hamilton’s Lee/Palmer/Bennett (bassist David Lee, guitarist Chris Palmer and saxophonist Connor Bennett) presents music performed by the Bill Smith Ensemble in the 1980s when Lee was a member (5:45pm). Another Ensemble veteran, the brilliant guitarist/singer Arthur Bull, performs as part of Spokes with longtime collaborator drummer Bob Vespaziani. The duo is then joined in by Lee/Palmer/Bennett to form a blues/rockabilly band called The Five Spokes (3pm).

First launched in 1994, the Guelph Jazz Festival has defined itself as a champion for the music’s creative edges, whether artistic or social, over the years, having presenting major international artists such as Randy Weston and Anthony Braxton. For its 2021 edition, running from September 14 to 19, the festival is rising to new challenges, shifting its programming to include new venues and more free events and presenting varied music throughout the day and throughout the city of Guelph, creatively and socially engaging within the limitations imposed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, the festival has shifted its usual downtown outdoor presentation of continuous bands to an innovative set of park concerts: three programs of three bands each, with each program presented daily from September 16 to 18, at different parks throughout Guelph. The concerts include a program of groups exploring “Old Jazz Made New” (see details below); “Percussion International,” with Amadeo Ventura’s Spoken Rhythms, Aline Morales Baque de Bamba and Ensemble Jeng Yi exploring different rhythms from around the world; and “Pops said All Music is Folk Music,” with Turkish Music Ensemble, Boxcar Boys and Abebe Fikade’s ETHIO AZMARI.

There’s also a traditional series of ticketed evening concerts focusing on distinguished Canadian performers. On September 16, turntablist SlowPitchSound presents “Bending Things We Know So Well,” a project which includes field recordings from the Guelph area; longstanding duo of trumpeter Jim Lewis and drummer Jean Martin employ live electronics as part of an improvised music set on September 17; the Rob Clutton Trio performs on September 18 (see below); and, closing the series on September 19, Montreal’s distinguished Quatuor Bozzini performs works by Toronto composer Martin Arnold.

Other festival programming this year showcases a remarkably varied range of music, including reinvented instruments, a sound installation and witty street art. Three distinguished pianists explore Andrew Wedman’s radically retuned pianos in Bass Piano XII (September 17 to 19, see below). At the Goldie Mill Ruins, Guelph sound artist Lisa Conway presents SOUND MILL, using underwater recordings, analog synthesizers and light sensors to create a shifting soundscape based on river flow and changing light (September 14 to 16). For “The Birds of Marsville”, Oakville-based composer Friendly Rich Marsella plays his mechanical street organ at three different outdoor sites, exploring the songs of 80 different (and imaginary) species (various times and locales, September 16 to 18).

Before the pandemic, Canadian musical theatre composer, lyricist and writer Britta Johnson was on a roll. Hot on the heels of her musical Life After’s US premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2019, she was off to Connecticut to workshop a new show with regular collaborator, actor, singer, and playwright Sara Farb.

Based on a true story from 1915 about a New York City mother suing her daughter—and heiress—for incorrigibility after the latter gets caught up with a seductive tango dancer, KELLY v. KELLY is the third in a series of three musicals that Johnson was commissioned to create for her three-year residency with The Musical Stage Company.

It was supposed to premiere at Toronto’s Canadian Stage in May 2020, but the pandemic struck mere weeks before the production was slated to begin rehearsals.

Just as the Stratford Festival’s stunning new Tom Patterson Theatre has been completed and is ready to be filled with eager actors and audience members, the exigencies of the ongoing pandemic are keeping its doors closed and forcing performances outdoors in an uncanny – or canny? – echo of the Festival’s roots. 

Almost 70 years ago, in the summer of 1953, the dream of a young returning soldier who had fallen in love with the theatre he had experienced in Europe, came to exciting life in the very first Stratford Festival Theatre. That magical first stage, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch and envisioned by the first artistic director Tyrone Guthrie, sheltered under the canvas of the famous Stratford tent, kept whole though rain and shine by tent master Skip Manley for that groundbreaking first season. 

Now, after an unprecedented year without any live performance at all by the renowned classical theatre company, an innovative new season will begin, not indoors, but in two tents, or more accurately, under two beautiful new canopies outside the Tom Patterson and Festival Theatres. 

Toronto Summer Music’s 16th edition – New Horizons – will be entirely virtual this year, with a combination of free livestreamed and pre-recorded hour-long concerts from July 15 to August 1. “For three weeks in July, New Horizons looks beyond the challenges of the pandemic, and forward to a better future,” said TSM artistic director, TSO concertmaster Jonathan Crow. “We celebrate this summer with a wonderful assortment of music from both past and present, showcasing the resilience and creativity of our featured artists.” 

This year’s festival was launched on June 7 over Zoom with Crow performing Reena Esmail’s solo violin piece from 2020, When the Violin, while standing at the foot of an empty Walter Hall. Inspired by Hafiz’s poem – When the violin can forgive the past, it starts singing… When the violin can forgive every wound caused by others, the heart starts singing – and based on a Hindustani raag, it begins mournfully, expanding into four emotional minutes of mesmerizing beauty. It was a subtle nod to the series of five filmed concerts comprising the complete cycle of Beethoven’s ten Sonatas for Piano and Violin that Crow and pianist Philip Chiu will present along with five new compositions. When the Violin is the featured contemporary work in the first of their traversal, July 18, along with the first and fifth sonatas, filmed at Salle Raoul-Jobin in the Palais Montcalm (Quebec City). 

Sonatas Nos. 3 & 7, with Kevin Lau’s if life were a mirror, will be presented July 19; on July 25, the program consists of Sonatas Nos. 2 & 9 “Kreutzer”, with Jessie Montgomery’s Peace; Sonatas Nos. 6 & 8, with the world premiere of Alice Hong’s for all is not lost, comprise the July 26 recital; and Sonatas Nos. 4 & 10, with the world premiere of Gavin Fraser’s like years, like seconds, play August 1. All were filmed at Koerner Hall and, as will be the case with most concerts in the festival, will be free and available to view for a week after their initial performances.

Although there is a lot of focus these days on the pandemic, we are all at some level aware that lurking in the background is a much bigger issue for which there is no vaccine – the climate crisis with the threat of rising seas, worsening storms, runaway fires and more. These issues are increasingly becoming the focus for many artists of all disciplines, myself included. How do we continue working as creative people with all the impending disasters just around the corner? What relevance does the next orchestral composition or sound improvisation have in light of the issues we’re collectively facing? 

I recently approached one of my composer colleagues, Claude Schryer, whom I originally met when we were both graduate students in composition at McGill University in the 1980s, for his thoughts on all this. Schryer has been involved for years in issues related to the relationship between sound, listening, musical composition and the environment, an area that has become known as “acoustic ecology”. This particular field of ecological awareness, encompassing both artistic practice and academic scholarship, was originally born on Canadian soil out of the work of composer R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues in the World Soundscape Project (WSP) during the 1970s. 

Later, in 1993, a conference was held at the Banff Centre for the Arts called The Tuning of the World, the title of Schafer’s influential book published originally in 1977. Schryer was instrumental in behind-the-scenes organization of the conference, but, as he points out to me, it was a group effort that brought about a watershed moment: the birth of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and its Canadian spin-off called the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology or CASE.

There is an indescribable beauty that comes from a quintet working as one on stage to dazzle an audience. The most amazing, calming physical sensation accompanies those moments where your preparation and instinct have successfully married one another. At the chessboard, it is also this beautiful. The drums, bass and piano are like your rook, bishop and queen. The jazz happens from move one to checkmate. The applause from the audience is the hand reached out to you from across the board.      — Michael Shand

I was recently digitally flipping through an old DownBeat magazine from 1937, and came across an article on musicians who played chess by mail, by forwarding moves on penny postal cards. It made me think of our current state in the global pandemic, and how people are finding creative ways to connect without the ability to be in the same room.

As a pastime, chess has enjoyed a resurgence during COVID-19, in part due to the acclaimed Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit. I have not been immune to this trend; learning the intricacies of bishops, rooks and knights has helped to fill the long hours at home. But as a musician, my interest also stems from stories about our jazz heroes playing chess.

From Anthony Braxton playing in Chicago’s Washington Square Park for money, to Charlie Parker setting out the board during breaks at the Rainbow Ballroom in Denver, Colorado, to Dizzy Gillespie playing on a plane against Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, there is a rich history of jazz musicians dedicated to the game. Several even incorporated it into their musical work – trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson’s group Sicilian Defense, organist Freddie Roach’s album Good Move! and Charles Mingus’ album Chazz!. Art Blakey was also a chess player – the first track on The Big Beat (1960) is The Chess Players by Wayne Shorter. (I’m tempted to add that America’s greatest blues record label is named Chess Records, but it was named after Phil and Leonard Chess, the brothers who owned and operated it. So let’s just leave it there.) 

Is this devotion still around? In fact, fans may be surprised to learn chess is as popular as ever in the jazz community in Toronto and environs, in part fuelled by a recent swell of interest among young musicians who, like me, have started to play online on sites like chess.com. Here are short interviews with four musicians (from earlier this spring) explaining their love of the game!

If one were to compile an orchestra and soloists to perform a religious work by Georg Frideric Handel, audience members could be forgiven for thinking that Messiah was on the program, so synonymous has this oratorio become with both the Christmas and Easter seasons. Despite this strong connection, there is another large-scale piece written by Handel that combines his uniquely dramatic style with Christian theology. 

La Resurrezione is a two-part oratorio, or liturgical drama, focused on the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion and burial, detailing the events between Good Friday and Easter Sunday through the eyes of Lucifer, an Angel, Mary Magdalene, John the Evangelist and Mary Cleophas. Composed when Handel was only 23 years old, it is one of the composer’s earliest surviving works, preceded only by the opera Almira and a single oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.

Although an early-career work by a relatively junior composer, La Resurrezione was premiered in grand fashion on Easter Sunday, April 8 1708 in Rome, with the backing of the Marchese Francesco Ruspoli, Handel’s patron at this time, featuring lavish staging and scenery as well as four-tiered seating for the orchestra. In an interesting convergence of significant musical figures, Arcangelo Corelli led the orchestra in this premiere performance, a large ensemble (by early music standards) consisting of 39 strings of varying types, one viola da gamba, two trumpets, one trombone and four oboes. 

As I write this while an early spring blooms beyond my locked-down window, music presenters are trying their best to surf COVID-19’s Third Wave. The venerable Women’s Musical Club of Toronto – founded in 1898 – calmly announces on its website, “We’ve been here before… and we’ve survived.” After all, they have been holding Music in the Afternoon concerts since well before the flu pandemic of 1918/1919, enduring two World Wars, depressions and recessions, and our current devastating virus. “We will survive this one too.” 

Their 2020/21 season has pivoted to live streaming and video on demand. 2019 Banff International String Quartet Competition winner, Viano String Quartet, has just concluded an on-demand run from April 1 to 25. May is devoted to Lebanese-Canadian soprano, Joyce El-Khoury, and Armenian-Canadian pianist, Serouj Kradjian, in an on-demand recital that mixes songs by Bizet, Fauré, Chausson, Ravel and Saint-Saëns with 20th-century Lebanese songs in Arabic. El-Khoury and Kradjian are preparing an extensive project involving music and instrumental artists from their home countries culminating in a CD that will include these Lebanese songs.