For more than a year now, I have been using this little bit of column space to explore the landscape of arts and culture in Ontario from the viewpoint of my home in a remote community in the north of the province, a hop-skip-jump over the 49th parallel.
“From Up Here” has been my loosely defined beat, and the idea has woven its way into this space in different ways: highlighting the people making music, and the spaces they are making it in, in the “up here” region; featuring artists who are bridging the “up-down” divide in different ways; and trying to offer a “bird’s eye view” of the creative life (and well-being) of remote and rural communities that aren’t necessarily seen as having a “music scene.”
Luckily for me, I’ve also been granted “backstage access” to an incredible resource for my armchair travelling. Over the last year, and particularly through the cold and dark of winter, I’ve been digging into the wealth of current and historical information in The WholeNote listings archive – at least as far back as 2012 when the current listings database came online: tens of thousands of individual music listings, extensive databases of artists and presenters; and, most fascinating from my point of view, a database titled “venues” in which there are well over 2,100 venues and spaces that have been home to the events that have found their way into The WholeNote.
I’ve replaced much of my regular internet scrolling time with mapping, updating and analysing the data. It has been a fascinating and useful exercise.
Views and overviews: The “up here” idea is fine for overviews, but not so helpful when you are trying to trace the human connections that make artistic life possible in the community you are actually in. Unless of course you are just climbing to the top of the roof on the tallest building in that particular community to trace possible routes to explore when you are back in street view mode.
Speaking of possible routes to follow in a column about musical life, I admit there has probably been too much talk here over the past year about travelling by train: but the advantage of travelling on the ground is that you don’t just arrive at a destination, you arrive with an understanding of how you got there. And instead of the journey being just two points on a map, you realize that there are all kinds of places, and people, in between. It’s a start for a new kind of awareness, but it’s far from a perfect solution. In the 1,100 or so kilometres on my trip home, there is only one stop (Capreol, around 5am) where I could actually get off the train long enough to explore or talk to anyone who wasn’t getting back onboard with me to continue on.
At some point, if you’re serious about documenting the scene, you need boots on the ground.
Over the last several weeks, therefore, I’ve been in touch with friends and colleagues (some of whom have contributed to this column over the past year) to try to get their takes on “their community,” however they define it. Over the next couple of columns, I am hoping they will help me paint a picture of the cohesive “micro-zones” which are fundamental to community-based artistic life across Ontario.
Kensington-Chinatown, Toronto
There were three tallest places from which I remember getting an overview of my neighbourhood as a child – my village in the town. Two were private property and required getting a current tenant to let me onto their rooftops. The third is the top of the Green P municipal parking lot that runs from St. Andrew to Baldwin, just west of Spadina Avenue. Locally based musician Dafydd Hughes and I have spent some time sharing memories of that particular neighbourhood lookout point. He agreed to take on reviewing the venues in our listings database, for the “M5T” zone of Toronto, where The WholeNote was born.
He quickly spotted a few venues that aren’t on that list – including the Free Times Cafe, a fixture for decades. A quick search of the concert listings shows lots of events at that venue, so it’s some quirk of the venue database that’s at issue here. But it took a street’s eye view of the community to spot the omission.
Similarly for the 37 venues on the list I gave him: he mentioned a few venues that are still open but don’t seem to be presenting music anymore. And he noted a few venues that are annual and event-specific (like Tom’s Place during the Kensington Market Jazz Festival), or “for special occasions only” (like the venue that is simply listed as “Green P Parking Lot across from Drom Taberna”). He also added a couple of other venues to the list, and pointed me in the right direction for us to invite them to start contributing their listings.
Maybe it’s a hopeful sign in troubled times, but he confirmed that only six of those 37 venues are now listed as “permanently closed.” What was most interesting to me was that he agreed to actually photo-document what was at those locations now. On my next trip home, I’m curious to see whether any of the new things that have sprung up include music. Sometimes when a venue closes, the creative echo of the property carries on with the next use - under the curation of whoever moves in next.
A Different View
The wonderful Hamilton-based musician, theatre artist and creative mentor, mover and shaker Treasa Levasseur once told me (she isn’t quite sure who she heard it from) this quote: that “anyone over the age of 40 who doesn’t have at least one mentor under 30: you are doing life wrong”. I introduced one such “under-30,” Alyssa DVM, a few months ago in this column when she shared her experience of coming to play “up here.” Having returned to Kitchener-Waterloo, where she had her creative beginnings, she was kind enough to gather some intel and observations about her home turf. Again, I gave her a list of the venues we knew about to start.
As Dafydd had done, Alyssa noted a few venues I’ve missed, and confirmed the closing of a few. One of the things that struck me in her response was her frank assessment of the venues that, for one reason or another, present barriers to younger artists or emerging or smaller ensembles. Things like “pay-to-play” are still very much an obstacle for younger artists, and practices like food and drink minimums, while likely very necessary to a venue’s survival, are becoming less and less manageable for audiences – particularly younger ones. From my perspective, the message was loud and clear: the powers that be (i.e. that control the places music happen) need to find their mentors under 30, and to better consider the perspective of the new generation of artists who are collectively trying to find a home - both creatively and quite literally.
And while we consider those under 30, Alyssa’s survey of the community also highlights the need to include and affirm those who are under the age of 19 and therefore aren’t legal to drink (and depending on the license may not even be allowed into the venue). An example, she mourns the loss of Rhapsody Barrel Bar: “I was so sad when this venue closed, they supported all sorts of bands and even let a bunch of high schoolers (our School of Rock) play there all the time.” Letting young musicians in to listen is an important piece of the equation, and making established venues available to the young musicians who will one day inhabit them to actually perform and build relationships is equally so.
In better news, she celebrates the re-opening of The Boathouse: “I went to a couple shows here when I was in high school (2017/2018) and was super excited to get the chance to play here when I got a band together. [The venue] actually closed in fall of 2019, which obviously sucked. They reopened in November 2024, and have been hosting a ton of open mics and shows!”
She also noted that relationships with venues don’t necessarily mean for an audience, pointing out that while she hasn’t performed at the Kitchener Public Library, she and collaborators have often used the studio spaces there which she describes as amazing and “super well equipped - we love it here!”
Overall, her report leaves me thinking about artists’ relationships with physical spaces over time: the venues that mark milestones past, the ones that sustain them for long stretches of the journey, and the ones that become goals to strive for. From the venues on my list, she recalls singing the national anthem during the Canada Day celebrations in 2016 at Carl Zehr Square at City Hall - an experience she describes as “surreal and incredible.” And she and her brothers all had their high-school graduations at Centre in the Square. “This is a larger venue, and often used by orchestral ensembles,” she noted, “so I have not been able to play here (yet!)”.
Continuing the journey.
I am writing this as I prepare for another trip south (mostly by train!). My first landing point is St. Catharines, where over the last number of years I’ve started to find another “home away from home.” I am looking forward to continuing the homes-for-music exploration and engaging in some ground-level discovery of my own. I know some of the venues on the St. Catharines-and-environment list quite well. There are others I am less familiar with I can find out more about. And I am certain there are others I can, with help, add to my map – even if some of them are parking lots used “for special occasions only.”
And then I have a quick trip to Kensington-Chinatown, my original home base, where I’ll get to see for myself the changes Dafydd Hughes documented.
But my time in both places will be short, and besides, the train home won’t give me time to explore any of the places in-between. So if you would like to give me the street (or road, or track)-level view of your creative zone, I would love to hear from you, and am happy to send you a list and a map to build on!
Happy exploring.
Sophia Perlman grew up bouncing around the jazz, opera, theatre and community arts scene in Toronto. She joined the creative exodus to Hamilton in 2014, and now eagerly awaits the arrival of her regular WholeNote to Hornepayne, Ontario, where she uses it to armchair-travel and inform her Internet video consumption.
Join the streetview brigade!
If you would like to join The WholeNote’s Ontario-wide, homes-for-music venue-finding brigade, contact Sophia Perlman at breve@thewholenote.com, and we’ll send you a list of what we know about your community already, so you can set us straight about what we don’t!
