For a classical work that features in only 19 of the 123 concerts in this issue’s listings that involve a choir (or choirs), Handel’s Messiah still commands a lot of Christmas concert attention. (I think the rule is I am allowed to say “Christmas” if I use “Messiah” in the same sentence.)
The sheer number of concerts in our listings is impressive enough. Even more impressive is the resonances between seemingly unrelated events once you start to dig a little deeper and start to connect the dots. Take, as an example, Art of Time and Sinfonia Toronto, mainstay ensembles in our midst for almost as long as The WholeNote has been around. Each is in the midst of a silver anniversary, 25th season with the founding artistic directors of both groups (Nurhan Arman and Andrew Burashko) still at the helm of their respective ensembles. Both of them delight in arranging music, and in creative programming, constantly seeking to blend the familiar with the new, introducing top-flight soloists to challenge their ensembles and delight their audiences.
December is usually filled with the return of shows we think of as old family favourites, so it is exciting when new candidates for that status take a step into the spotlight. One such is new holiday musical Chris, Mrs. making its world premiere debut in December at Toronto’s beautiful Winter Garden Theatre December 5-31.
I walk into the Crow’s Theatre gallery space, on a mid-November day, excited to be here to sit in on the afternoon’s rehearsal of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. The space is familiar to me from stage managing Uncle Vanya and The Master Plan here, but I have never seen it so full of stuff. There are instruments everywhere – a double bass, two cellos, a drum set, two keyboards, two accordions, a clarinet, someone with a guitar...
Picture the scene: you are flannel-clad at an orchard, attempting to engage in Instagrammable autumnal fun, having spent well over $150 CAD on gas, Onroute snacks and admission for your family (and your son’s strange friend), and you stand there suffering the indignity of realizing you must pay a further $30 for your roleplay harvesting of subpar baking apples which (you can already picture it) will die a slow, ignoble death in your garage, eaten by no one but insect interlopers and, possibly, an intrepid raccoon.
The feeling: despondency, somehow trifling and catastrophic at the same time.
The remedy: therapy, probably. But maybe as the hankering for outdoor activity abates, seeing some indoor live music couldn’t hurt.
Hugh’s new room: On Sunday, October 15, saxophonist and bandleader Jesse Ryan takes the stage at Hugh’s Room Live, as the venerable venue settles into its new location at 296 Broadview. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated at both Toronto’s Humber College and at Berklee in Boston, Ryan’s music investigates the links between jazz and Afro-Caribbean music. (This link is foundational in the language of jazz, particularly in its rhythms; the pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who began touring professionally around 1904, contended that the “Spanish tinge” – the tresillo and habanera rhythms that made their way to the port city of New Orleans from Cuba – were essential to distinguishing jazz from other kinds of music.) The Juno Award-nominated Ryan possesses an agile, accomplished voice on his instrument, which fits naturally into his compositional language. Joining Ryan on this date is another of Canada’s rising star jazz musicians, the vocalist Joanna Majoko, who brings an incredible sophistication and self-assuredness to her vocal performances, on her own original songs as well as her arrangements of standards.
The Jazz Room: On Saturday, November 4, the guitarist and vocalist Jocelyn Gould celebrates the release of her new album, Sonic Bouquet, with a show at The Jazz Room in Waterloo. Gould is an excellent guitarist who plays with the robust swing, archtop tone and blues-inflected bebop language of luminaries like Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. Gould will be bringing a stellar band with her, including pianist Will Bonness, drummer Mark Kelso and bassist Mike Downes. (Her new album features fellow guitarist Randy Napoleon, drummer Quincy Davis, bassist Rodney Whitaker and Canadian clarinetist Virginia MacDonald.)
Jazz Bistro: On Thursday, November 23, the release of another new album will be celebrated, this time at Jazz Bistro. The LA-based, Ontario-born drummer Anthony Fung’s new album, FO(U)RTH, features pianist Michael Ragonese, bassist Luca Alemanno, and the esteemed saxophonist Mark Turner, whose work (with the likes of Kurt Rosenwinkel, Tom Harrell, Billy Hart and countless others) will likely need no introduction. At Jazz Bistro, Fung is joined by his long-time Toronto collaborator, the bassist Julian Anderson-Bowes, as well as the aforementioned clarinetist Virginia MacDonald. Fung is a confident drummer who plays in a modern, straight-ahead style. His playing effectively manages to be exciting, propulsive and also eminently supportive of the phrase at hand, whether that phrase is generated by a bandmate or by Fung’s own sense of drumset melodicism.
Burdock: Through the pandemic, for all of the obvious reasons, Burdock took a long break from presenting shows in its Music Hall, a venue that had become a mainstay for indie artists, jazz musicians, rock bands and a host of other musical projects, all of which found a home on Burdock’s beautifully maintained stage. Now, after a lengthy hiatus, and under the leadership of new Music Hall programmer Deanna Petcoff, live shows at Burdock are back, with a number of interesting offerings currently in the books for the coming months. So, if it’s been a little while since you’ve seen a show at Burdock – or if you’ve never been – stop by, have one of their excellent beers (or the non-alcoholic kombucha on tap), and enjoy.
Colin Story is a jazz guitarist, writer and teacher based in Toronto. He can be reached at www.colinstory.com, on Instagram and on Twitter.
This time last year, the opera community was celebrating as companies large and small started to announce their first “normal” year of programming. Even as live performance began creeping back after the initial lockdowns, opera presenters struggled to balance reduced seating capacities and ticket sales, and shutdown-related revenue loss with the budgets needed to mount full scale productions – especially those presenters whose audiences have grown accustomed to productions with full operatic scale.
Weaving disparate threads together to create something new is a fundamental approach for any creative artist, and in the world of contemporary music, the spectrum of elements interwoven into new works continues to progressively expand. Numerous concerts scheduled for October and November exemplify this trend, with some of these concerts drawing inspiration from the past to achieve this evolution.
It’s no secret: right now, among our various cultural sectors troubling signs can readily be found. Stresses, fissures and cracks, intergenerational change and systemic failures – some chronicled elsewhere in this issue – feel as though they are starting to be as common as the wildfires that scourged the globe this past summer.
When you have an actor with the musical and acting chops to play Mama Rose, it is a good idea to program the musical Gypsy as part of your season.
Here on the island, there’s artistic blood in everybody. I mean, everybody somehow sings and dances and carves and – or plays an instrument. And there’s nothing more natural and more true to the human being than art and music. – Mahani Teave
Mahani Teave [Tay-AH-vay] – who makes her Koerner Hall debut at 3pm on October 1 as part of her first North American tour – is the sole professional pianist on one of the most remote, inhabited islands on Earth, Rapa Nui (Easter Island). There she heads the island’s only music school. She’s living a remarkable story.
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.”
