This one will take some setting up.

Mark Lepage was the rock critic for The Gazette in Montreal from 1988 to 2001. Which means he got there a year before I did, and I have always trusted him implicitly.

Last month on Facebook I asked friends for the names of up-and-coming musicians I should know about. Mark wanted to talk about Angine de Poitrine. They’re a costumed, anonymous instrumental duo from Saguenay by way of some shattered interdimensional universe. Their name is French for “angina pectoris,” which is the chest pain that can precede a heart attack. When Mark wrote to me I had just begun to focus on them, because everyone in Quebec was talking about their appearance a few days earlier on Tout le monde en parle.

Every indoor venue on their world tour through November is sold out, although they’ll play outdoors for free at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal and can be seen with general-admission tickets to the outdoor Ottawa Bluesfest. Foo Fighters guitarist Dave Grohl said they “blew my f*&$ing mind” and music Youtuber Rick Beato begged his followers to stop writing him about Angine, in a video which itself drew 2.3 million viewers.

Ground Zero for Angine-mania is this video from their appearance at a festival in France, which was posted on the Youtube channel of a Seattle radio station only two months ago. It’s closing on nine million views.

And now, here with more is Mark Lepage. — pw

Because it is not there.

Pace Edmund Hillary, that’s the correct math for musical creativity and exploration. Because while climbing an Everest looming before you may be the challenge as a mountaineer, launching a newfangled musical project is after the opposite goal. It’s filling an absence. An ask that isn’t even asked yet. What an audience cannot yet see or hear. Over to the suddenly famous nobodies* in Angine de Poitrine.

By now, you may have heard of this polkadot-head duo. Some of you certainly have: 8.5 million Youtube views and counting of their 28-minute performance on KEXP in France. We cannot guarantee that 10 million people (by the time you’ve read this) will have watched all 28 minutes of that singular set, but each one of them clicked on a link that was significantly longer than the average 3:17 attention span. Three weeks ago, the duo announced their first New York show at a groovy club called Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, capacity about 900. Great place to see a band. A week later, word-of-net added a second show. Which sold out in 4 minutes.

Those might be normal numbers for some hot-hot new indie singer-songwriter, or whatever follows K-Pop. Not so much for a duo with no names or faces – hence the * above. Last October, there was a rooftop Pop Montréal show. This summer, there will be a Festival International de Jazz de Montréal outdoor gig on the main stage that will draw dozens of thousands and generate massive media coverage of uniquely Kébek weirdness. These guys were playing in a Chicoutimi closet a year ago. So how did we get here? And what does it mean?

Well, ultimately, why shouldn’t there be a mirror-inverse polka dot-suited jazz-rock duo in papier-mâché piñata heads with fake interplanetary names? If ever there were a world-time that needed its head fucked with… And Saguenay duo Angine de Poitrine are serious as a heart attack.

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Chicoutimi is a 5-hour drive northeast of Montreal, meaning it only gets colder, and isolated. Makes perfect sense as the place where Angine de Poitrine could hatch. Where a duo named Klek and Khn could woodshed on drums and a double-neck microtonal bass/guitar, respectively - as in, frets within frets, 36 on the guitar, 32 on the bass - and cook up a “mantra-rock dada-pythago-cubiste” sound, with Khn triggering a genuinely impressive and disciplined set of loops on the effects rack.

From there it was a 9-hour flight from Montreal to Rennes, France for a 27:53 performance in December during the Trans Musicales 2025 festival, launched into virality by KEXP global media on Youtube, which should be seen to be believed and has been by zillions and counting. Ladies and gentlemen, meet The Angies (you’re welcome).

Two conceptualists seemingly embalmed in papier-mâché polygon-cartoon outfits. To the right you’ve got Klek on drums in the white pyjamas and black papier-maché head-tube with the flaccid nosepiece, in black arm (and what appears to be face) paint. To his left, Khn in black bodysuit and white inverted triangle headpiece, also full polkadot regalia, playing the bespoke doubleneck guitar/bass, volume or tone knob shaped like a die, with an Area-51 rack of pedals on which he aggressively (and transparently) triggers bass and guitar loops to play over-with-against, all done with bare feet. Also polka dotted. The feet, I mean.

After a little triangle hand-sign ritual between the duo and out to the audience sets the mood, opener Sarniezz leaps from its plodding intro to a winding relentlessness and unfolds into a controlled double-time chaos. The speed-desert Mata Zyklekk sends an intimidatingly tight guitar lick over propulsive drums, while the devastating Fabienk opens with staggered robofunk before releasing into two of the best heavy riffs in a decade+, played at once on bass and guitar. Sherpa revels in an Eastern or Saturn motif driven by hammer-ons and pull-offs. Four songs in less than 28 minutes, meaning they shred the 4-minute straitjacket in every track, followed by the triangle hand-sign and robot-ribbit voice.

And man, it must be hot in those suits. Malade, ’stie. That is dedication.

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But here’s the thing. It is intricate. It is fast. These are identifiably prog-jazz stagger-rhythms and atonal guitar figures and scales, but the momentum is identifiably rock’n’roll, an obsessive, self-cycling Groove above all, with Khn worrying every tautly-wound, obsessive riff phrase on his double-neck. And yes, you can dance to it. As the drummer, his arms painted black and working beats from complex polyrhythms to driving 4/4, glares at you through the mouth slit of his headtube.

Not even Lady Gaga can channel that arcane drama, or this kind of geometric-math art design. Gen Z fell all over themselves, with the BrooklynVegan site hilariously referring to them as “Angine Poutine” and feverish online comments and posts running inspiringly wild:

I am intensely fascinated by every aspect of whatever the fuck this is

Never thought I’d be into microtonal math rock, but here I am

You can’t not dance. And I can’t even dance

Finally, the perfect romantic mood music for my next date

And best of all:

This is our reward for a quarter century of Coldplay

Well… yeah. But certainly, this is not all sui generis. There are precedents, or at least influences, in whole(s) or in parts. We could look at a laundry list of prog, prog-rock, prog-jazz, math-rock and mix-match all those subcategories of bands, but why subject you, dear reader, to that?

Louisiana’s venerable art collective The Residents will come up, for the anonymity, oddball headgear and avant-prog poise, but that’s as far as it goes. For all the dark cabaret obsessiveness of Duck Stab! / Buster & Glen, Not Available or the Top-40 mauling of Third Reich’n’Roll, even a cursory listen will settle that this band was a glancing influence at best. I mean, if it’s about anonymity, why not Ghost? (By the way, worth the gag to look up how the Residents got the band name). Throw an iteration of King Crimson into the mix.

No, let’s focus on the band that’s most often cited as a contemporaneous feeder: King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Aside from being a band name I could swear I invented one night at the Montreal Gazette bar, Australia’s band has the headfuck vibe, polyrhythmic elbows-out sonic assault that makes is likely pointless for me to try to define the genre(s) or concept that makes up this sound. So I’m going to do so anyway.

Their most math-rock album Polygondwanaland for all the time signatures (5/16, 7/16, 9/16, 5/4 etc) bears more resemblance to Johnny Clegg dancing among the goblins than anything impossibly arcane or alien. Skip over to 12 Bar Bruise (for the title alone…) and tracks Muckraker and Nein and you’re into indie Beach Boys/Pavement territory. Aggressively indie-osyncratic, but identifiably poppy. I mean, there are hooks in those time-signature shifts.

They once allegedly recorded a song with 4 iPhones in a room. Zany! And yes, they play microtonal guitar and bass… along with synth, piano, saxophone, Mellotron, harmonica, violin, cello, sitar, a Rush-ton of percussion and something called a zurna which I pointedly did not look up. There must be mystery in life. They also have something of a sextet line-up, and, yeah, vocals that carry melodies.

This is not remotely similar to the Angies. Gizzard (or maybe Liz-Wiz) have a dozen songs that could and do make it onto some form of what remains of radio, certainly in their native Oz. This band once released five albums in a calendar year by gar, so somebody is listening. And one might imagine Phish or Flaming Lips or even Tedeschi Trucks jumping onstage with this band for some Osheaga-style lollapaloozery - and in fact Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg who hit the skins in Nashville, and even Jello Biafra (bless ‘im, get well soon, weirdo) already have.

Who is going to climb onto a currently small but soon to be quite teched-out stage with Khn and Klek? What would they do up there? Interpretive dance? If anything, the Angies are less arch and more focused than either of those bands.

Where is all this going? Well… it’s already gone there. The amalgam of oddballery, ambition, inspired symmetry and instrumental discipline are more encouraging than a dozen School-of-Rocks.

Fresh from releasing the Vol. II album, with 3 of the KEXP tracks, their website declaims “Angine de Poitrine is an anonymous artistic project. Any speculation regarding the identities of its members is unverified and not endorsed by the band”. Let’s enjoy the mystery while it lasts, because in hyper-saturated mediaworld we’ll be lucky if we last a week before some sleuth unearths high-school yearbook photos of these two as either super-nerds in braces, or Chicoutimi’s musical dissidents.

Above all, there is the triumphant return of regionalism, the Great Weirdness Incubator, the hidden haven fostering idiosyncrasy, experimentation and invention. Every single worthwhile strain of jazz or rock’n’roll or hip-hop emerged from a hidden or unknown scene where artists brewed up and absorbed the musical accents. I mean, CBGB was “regionalism” micro-located in one single dive. And out there, kids still want Weird.

This is from an interview with Alex Nino Gheciu of La Presse Canadienne.

«Parfois, je m’amuse en disant qu’on est un bon attrape-clics », souligne Khn. «Mais si, une fois qu’ils ont cliqué, les gens sont satisfaits musicalement parlant, tant mieux pour nous et tant mieux pour eux.»

(“Sometimes I joke that we’re good at getting clicks,” Khn states. “But if, once they’ve clicked, people are satisfied, musically speaking, that’s great for us and great for them.”)

Amen. Or whatever they say in outer space.

I owe you some sort of thoughtful piece on Mark Carney’s new defence industrial policy, but winter travel threw logistical curveballs into my day so that will have to wait until I have more time to myself.

Instead I find myself writing on a train, so here’s something different.

I want to come back to one, not particularly political, detail in the Stephen Harper portrait that was unveiled the other day: the piano.

You can see it above, in the detail I’ve cropped from Phil Richards’ acrylic-on-canvas portrait. Stanley, the Harpers’ family cat, lurks under the piano (a baby grand?), which in turn is so far over to the side of the painting that you can see no more than a foot of its width in the full portrait.

Richards’ portrait is a sort of toile à clef, packed with details that refer to important moments and relationships in Harper’s life. The piano is one such. While he was prime minister it was a matter of some notoriety that Harper enjoys playing piano for relaxation. He used to have friends over to 24 Sussex Drive regularly to play as a rehearsal band, with professional musicians hired to fill out the group. That lineup would sometimes perform in public, usually at Conservative Party social events, under the name Herringbone. At a National Arts Centre fundraising gala in 2009 Harper sat in with faster company, singing and playing a Beatles song with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and guest cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

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Shortly after the NAC gig, Harper gave an interview about music to Maclean’s editor Ken Whyte. Turns out he was once fairly serious about the instrument for a long time. “I took piano for 10 years,” he told Whyte. “I got my Grade 9 Royal Conservatory.” I’m impressed: I went only as far as Grade 6 in piano and then, in high school, Grade 10 in trumpet, which was enough for me to half-consider a career in music. Harper’s problem was that he was nervous, his hands would shake. “Indirectly, this led to where I am now because at a very early age, almost from the first time I ever gave a public speech at school, I spoke without notes so nobody would notice I was nervous.” The turns a life takes.

When music came back into his life, it was on different terms. No more clammy kid worrying about his hands shaking. This time it was social.

“I played the piano hardly at all for almost 30 years. I only started to get back into it a bit when my son Ben started to pick up the guitar and he wanted me to accompany him, so I'd play a few chords. And then Roger Charbonneau, our house manager and a great musician, he would play guitar and fiddle at house parties we would have, and I would sing with him. And over the last couple of years, it got bigger and bigger…”

My chats with Harper have always been brief and intermittent. The only time we talked about music, he showed how thoroughly he had come to enjoy the human interaction of group interplay. Somehow it came up that I used to play the trumpet. “Then you can come over and play ‘Penny Lane’ with my band,” he said. I didn’t take him up on it, but I was struck by the easy generosity of the thought. It’s fair to say that, while I did interview him formally a few times over the years, Harper never responded to my mention of any political topic with the offer of an interview.

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Stephen Harper will be relieved to learn this isn’t really a post about Stephen Harper. It’s more about the pleasure of making music with other people. It’s different from playing alone. You lose whatever control, or illusion of control, you might have had. But in return, you become part of something bigger.

I remember my first few times rehearsing piano duets in my teacher Mrs. Vasey’s living room in Sarnia, sitting next to a boy named David on the same bench. Suddenly it wasn’t good enough to play when I was ready. I had to play as soon as David had played two measures — right precisely then, from one beat to the next — and in the same tempo, and on the same downbeat.

If you make a mistake when you’re playing alone, it’s human nature to stop and try again. In any group larger than one, this choice becomes impossible. You have to keep going. The other musicians have to pretend nothing bad happened. Success depends on musical skills that are hard to distinguish from social skills. You have to wait your turn and be ready when it comes, be humble and then bold, sit still for 48 bars and then bam. You have to listen — to adjust your attack, tone and tuning to a consensus that evolves as it moves. Your only hope of making something beautiful together is trust.

I wasn’t really serious about music until I started to play in my high school band, four or five years after I started taking piano lessons. My greater interest and engagement were all about the difference between solo and social. I was a year younger than most of my classmates and not athletic. Music was the only arena in which I could hope to compete, and later, my only hope of impressing girls, although, Lord knows, not most of them.

But of course music quickly becomes more than jousting and flirting if you have any heart in you at all. It becomes a way to get to know about people, the specific ones you’re playing with and people in general. I once asked the violinist Pinchas Zukerman about teaching, a discipline he took seriously. I told him that when I was a kid, I used to tutor younger students in math, music and French, and that teaching helped me figure out my own processes: the first step to helping a trumpet player stop making that horrible sound was to figure out how to produce that horrible sound, and then how to back up and find the path to making a prettier sound.

Zukerman was dismissive. Teaching for self-development? “That’s so basic,” he said. “The real reason you teach is that if you’re lucky, you might hear something beautiful.”

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Society, benchmarking, humility are basic characteristics of working with peers, and they’ll come to you late, if ever, if you stick to yourself. That’s why Billy Higgins, a central figure in jazz drumming, used to tell younger players, “Get to a bandstand as soon as you can.” It’s why, when Miles Davis got tired of calling his music jazz or debating whether it was jazz, he took to calling it “social music.” To some extent the term is redundant. If it’s music it’s social. (The other benefit of getting to a bandstand is that it enables the other fundamental interaction in music, which is between musicians and audiences. Also deeply social.)

A very different kind of drummer, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, got to bandstands as soon as he could. In fact he dropped out of high school because he’d got to bandstands. “I found a kid up the street with an old drum set,” he said in his South by Southwest keynote address in 2016. "I found a kid down the street with an old bass. I found a kid across the street with an old basement. And we found a kid across town with an old PA. Several awkward jam sessions later, and we had a band.” A few bands later, Grohl and Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic changed music, at least for a while.

Grohl also said the way to make music is to suck until you don’t suck. So on top of all the other things music is about, it’s about learning to forgive yourself.

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It’s so important to meet other musicians where they are that even famous loners soon learn they won’t get far without peers and colleagues. I’ve long been struck by an eerie echo in two pieces of advice from Thelonious Monk and John Cage, near-contemporaries in 20th-century jazz and concert music.

Monk used to give the members of his bands advice, or Zen riddles, or odd observations. Eventually in 1960 the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy wrote some of this stuff down. The result, two pages scrawled in a ring-bound notebook, has been making the rounds of creative people for decades.

Some of Monk’s advice strikes me as glib (“You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”) and some of it has stayed with me for years (“A genius is the one most like himself”). But in the middle of it all, career advice: “Don’t sound [i.e. bug or annoy] anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.”

Compare with the advice a silkscreen artist and art-studio teacher named Sister Corita Kent used to give her students in the late 1960s, advice that was popularized by the avant-garde composer John Cage to such an extent that some sources don’t even mention Sister Corita. It’s similar stuff to Monk’s advice:

All of this is worth at least a conversation (“If you work it will lead to something,” damn) but again, there’s something about just showing up: “Always be around. Come or go to everything.”

Any of us who work in any creative field — this certainly includes politics, and maybe journalism — knows the importance of this advice. Be on the scene. Always be around. One thing I learned early in journalism was that pesky questions aren’t seen by other journalists as a faux pas, as long as they’re questions about the material and not about work opportunities as such. Questions about the material are evidence of interest, and the only young people who get to ask their elders pesky questions are the ones who show up. Geoff Keezer — another jazz musician, sorry — talks about meeting the legendary Herbie Hancock after a show when Keezer was an impossibly nerdy-looking 18-year-old.

“Mr. Hancock, Mr. Hancock! Can I ask you some questions?”

He said, “Ok.”

I had them all ready: “What are the last four chords in ‘Dolphin Dance?’ What’s the turnaround on ‘Footprints?’ And what’s that dissonant voicing in ‘Eye of the Hurricane?”

He said, “Oh! Well, here,” and takes me up on stage, literally within ten minutes of finishing the set. People are still sitting at tables and settling up, and gives me a private lesson in front of everybody. He showed me all that stuff.

This stuff is so hard to figure out, and so few people out in the rest of the world even care, that there’s an instant camaraderie between the people who know and those who want to know. For many years now I’ve sent the bulk of my charitable donations to OrKidstra, an Ottawa organization that gives free lessons and long-term instrument loans to children whose parents usually can’t afford either. It’s a fantastic organization that makes my city better every day. But one of the things I love is when these kids sit down for joint rehearsals with the musicians of the NAC Orchestra, who are some of the best musicians in the world. The pros automatically start addressing the youngsters as colleagues. They don’t talk down. Imagine how that makes the students feel. There’s a hierarchy of knowledge but no hierarchy of worth, because they’re all trying to figure the music out.

I’ve wandered pretty far afield from Stephen Harper and his piano, but maybe not all that far. For most of his adult life Harper was just a politician, and despite the energetic and mostly charming Harper-washing of Official Portrait Week, not universally beloved. But even public people aren’t only public people, and each of us spends part of our time wondering who we are. There are any number of ways to sit with that question or work through it, meditation or sports or writing or naps, but music is one of the best.

It doesn’t even matter if you aren’t anybody’s idea of a great musician. At some point in their life, artists often start to fight against the notion that only artists should be permitted to make art. Chick Corea returned to that theme many times in his last years. Most musicians worth the name are trying to pull as many people as possible into the circle, not push any out.

Pianos used to be more common in portrait art because they used to be more common in houses. It was good to see one in a new portrait. These are some of the things I think about when I think about Stephen Harper’s piano.

Liz Pelly wrote in The Guardian about making lists as a way to take stock of what you care about, instead of handing that work to an algorithm.

“This year, rather than letting a streaming service tell you what records were important to you simply because you played them the most on one app, consider taking the time to write a list based on what you actually connected with. Share it if you feel like it — even if it’s just a notes app screenshot or a scribbled, handwritten list that you photograph and share with a caption. Even if you only text or email it to some friends. Or if you prefer, write it in a notebook just for yourself and your archives.”

Here’s my list for 2025, arranged thematically rather than in order of preference. I’ve been writing about music for as long as I’ve been writing about anything. I listen to more music than most people I know who aren’t musicians. It’s just how I’m wired. Some readers ask me to write about music more often. Here we go.

1. Bach had a good year

James Ehnes and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra: J.S. Bach: The Complete Violin Concertos (Analekta)

Nevermind, Bach: Goldberg Variations (Alpha Classics)

Chris Thile, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2 (Nonesuch)

If all the Bach you ever hear is Glenn Gould’s two recordings of the Goldberg Variations (1955 and 1981), you might not get around to hearing Bach’s sacred music, his music for choirs, his music for orchestras. Dance forms, breath and Biblical texts informed his music in ways that aren’t obvious from listening to a solo pianist. I didn’t plan to end the year celebrating three quite different recordings of Bach, but when I whittled my list down, here they were.

I still don’t think Canada appreciates what we have in James Ehnes, born to American parents in Brandon, MB. He’s one of the very best violinists in the world. On the night I started writing this he was playing at Carnegie Hall. He has a singing tone and a self-disciplined approach to dramatic shading. Most years he visits the National Arts Centre Orchestra here in Ottawa at least once. Here he plays Bach concertos for one, two, or three violins, with his close NAC friends Yosuke Kawasaki and Jessica Linnebach, as well as other core repertoire. No orchestra knows Ehnes or this repertoire better than NACO. The soloists are bright, tuneful and sympatico. This album could have been made 50 years ago, and I mean that in the best way. I couldn’t find video of Ehnes with NACO, but here’s Ehnes playing Bach:

Nevermind is a French quartet — flute, violin, viola da gamba, which is like a cello, and a harpsichord or organ to fill in harmonies. They take Bach’s most famous keyboard work, the very same Goldberg Variations that Gould recorded twice, and split up its parts. Flute and violin take turns with the lead melody. The keyboardist is never assigned a melody and sometimes leaves the field clear to the other three, or to only the two string players. There’s a process to it, which most listeners will be wise to ignore, but the result is an intimacy and warmth that’s generally missing from expanded Goldbergs. There’s a bit of the slouchy feel of 90s alt-rock to it — a reaction that I assume would astonish Nevermind, who did not name themselves after the Nirvana album. I’ve heard so many versions of this piece, but this year I kept coming back to this one.

But if I had to name a favourite among these Bach recordings — perhaps even a favourite among all the albums in this year’s list — it would be Chris Thile’s performance, on mandolin, of music Bach wrote for solo violin. I know it sounds like a gimmick or stunt. Bear with me. This is Thile’s second turn at solo Bach. His first effort, Vol. 1, came out 12 years ago. It was stiff, correct, intimidated, forgettable. This one is another world.

Maybe the first thing you notice is the crowd sounds and the chirping birds on several tracks. Thile recorded the material in a bunch of non-traditional spots, including public parks. Sometimes the background sound even changes during a piece, evidence of different takes digitally spliced. Sometimes there are quite intrusive audio effects — echo, tape roar. But the big difference from 2013 is that Thile’s performances are so much looser and more assured. He picks Bach’s music up and hauls it into the arena of what’s possible on a mandolin, as determined by the way Thile grew up playing it in American bluegrass settings since grade school. He opens the new album, and Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, with a whispered tremolo that lasts two minutes and is nowhere indicated in the violin part. It’s haunting.

I suppose it’s possible to view this all as some sort of offence against proper Bach. But Bach borrowed heavily from folk and dance sources and always paid close attention to the instruments that would play his stuff. I think he’d have been delighted. Whatever. The end product is breathtaking. Here’s Thile beatboxing his way into the Partita No. 3 in Tompkins Square Park.

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2. Singers

Elton John & Brandi Carlile, Who Believes in Angels? (Interscope)

William Prince, Further From the Country (Six Shooter)

Rosalia, Lux (Columbia)

Florry, Sounds Like (Dear Life)

Brandi Carlile’s own 2025 solo album Returning to Myself showcases her ability to keep a distinctive style across a wide variety of song forms. But in the end there’s just more joy in her collaboration with Elton John, a friend and early influence. Another of Carlile’s talents is to inspire her elders, as we’ve seen with Joni Mitchell. That Elton sounds committed and joyful here is largely thanks to Carlile’s goading and encouragement. It’s more his album than hers, except that without her it’d be no album at all.

I saw William Prince as an opening act in a small Nashville venue a year ago, so it’s great to see he’s booked a tour of big plush-seat halls across Canada from February to April, and that most of those shows are on track to sell out. Clearly I’m catching up to something big. The gentle singer-guitarist from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba toughens his sound here, with a tight band and an elegant set of tunes about leaving home and heading into the big world.

If William Prince is a persuasive minimalist, Rosalia was the year’s big pop maximalist. The Spanish singer, who comes from flamenco roots in Barcelona, is wildly ambitious here: singing in 11 languages, Catalan, Sicilian, Ukrainian, German and more, some of which she learned for this album, with the London Symphony Orchestra playing arrangements by Caroline Shaw (who was on my music list last year) and others. Bjork shows up. Patti Smith reads a poem. Rosalia namechecks Clarice Lispector as an influence. Remember when artists used their albums to build a world — Kate Bush, Bjork, Prince, Queen? This is that and maybe more. It doesn’t sound like a term paper because the hard emotional edge of flamenco in Rosalia’s singing electrifies every song. Her own spring and summer stadium tour, weighted heavily toward the Spanish-speaking world — two nights in London, five in Mexico City — has one Canadian stop, June 13 in Toronto. It’ll be big.

Florry, a Philadelphia band led by a 24-year-old force of nature named Francie Medosch, works leaner, lower to the ground. Its ambling jams are built on actual guitar riffs, which the band plays as if they just came up with the idea. In interviews, she hints at broader influences and projects that won’t sound much like Florry, but in the meantime there’s this. It sounds dangerous, like friends thinking about something together.

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3. No words

Al Foster, Live at Smoke (Smoke Sessions)

Gabriel Kahane, Jeffrey Kahane, The Knights, Heirloom (Nonesuch)

Al Foster was the great utility drummer of American jazz for 50 years. He’d turn up with Tommy Flanagan, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano, Herbie Hancock. A big man who didn’t talk much, he had a unique groove, responsive to what the rest of the band was playing, relentlessly driving.

In January he played an 82nd birthday gig at Smoke in uptown Manhattan, and a few months later he was dead, and all of us are bereft. Live at Smoke documents that final week, with Chris Potter on saxophone, Brad Mehldau on piano, Joe Martin on bass. Each of the youngsters, now in their 50s, brought a tune. The rest is standards. The pleasure is in the conversation. Potter and Mehldau, who can both tend to run on, are concise and pointed here, more persuasive than on some of their own albums. The promise of jazz is that on any given night you might hear something special. Most nights that promise lets you down gently. Here it delivers.

Gabriel Kahane is a composer and singer-songwriter who thinks about a lot of things and, therefore, has a Substack. In 2016, trying to process Donald Trump’s election, he got on a train and started talking to people. Several thousand miles later he wrote a New York Times op-ed and made an album. But that’s another story. We are gathered here to consider Kahane’s latest, a big American concerto written for his father, the pianist Jeffrey Kahane, and the New York City chamber orchestra The Knights.

The work struggles with memory and individuation — how does a California polymath process his parents’ folk and classical influences, not to mention what was brewing in Europe a generation earlier, when his Jewish grandmother left Germany? What that sounds like is a big, unabashedly American concerto that juxtaposes passages of cool abstraction with warm melody and show-stopping fireworks. I thought I heard bits of Gershwin and John Adams, but that’s just my life as a listener meeting the Kahanes’ lives as makers. The symphonic concerto can seem like a form that’s tapped out — really, are we doing this again? — and then along comes something like this. Yes. Yes we are.

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Honourable mentions: Jason Moran x Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Go To Your North (Yes). Yamandu Costa with Martin Sued and Orquesta Assintomática, Saga (Bagual). John Scofield and Dave Holland, Memories of Home (ECM). Cecile McLorin Salvant, Oh Snap (Nonesuch). Brad Mehldau, Ride Into The Sun (Nonesuch again; I’m not sure this great label has had a better year in the last 30). Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Triste Animal (Bravo).

The year so short, the music so immense. Make your own list. Listen to the things you hear.

1. Prologue

I was so impressed by Michael Healey’s last two plays that I asked to attend rehearsals for his next one, Rogers vs. Rogers.

I knew the new play would be based on the book of the same title by Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, whom I had interviewed for the old podcast. I knew it would be about the succession battle at the company where I worked for more than a decade.

Mostly I knew Michael Healey is a rarity among today’s Canadian playwrights because his recent social satires have been situated squarely in the terrain of contemporary Canadian politics. 1979 was about Joe Clark losing the confidence vote that ended his short government. The Master Plan was about Google’s Sidewalk Labs subsidiary trying, and failing, to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a prototype city of the future. It ran for weeks in three separate runs in and around Toronto. It’s been a harder sell outside Toronto, but it just finished a run at Regina’s Globe Theatre.

Healey’s plays are angry, wistful and very funny. They draw crowds. Rogers vs. Rogers opens on Tuesday. Its four-week run sold out fast, plus or minus a handful of seats. A fifth week has been added. It’s selling fast too.

Healey liked the idea of letting me watch the new play find its feet. The team at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre, where Rogers vs. Rogers begins a month-long run on Tuesday, agreed.

“Rehearsal starts Nov. 3, you could come that day and watch the initial readthru,” Healey wrote. “It will still be early enough we won’t be at each other’s throats.”

Great, I replied. What time would the day start?

Healey: “Typical rehearsal day is 10-6, but we may opt for a 5 hr day given it’s just one actor (who’s still running Macbeth in Stratford).”

I had to read that a couple of times. One actor?

2. The Rogers bundle

In 2017, after more than 30 years of nomadic existence, the Crow’s Theatre moved into a roomy, comfortable permanent home on the ground floor of a condo building in Leslieville, a former industrial neighbourhood east of downtown Toronto. The theatre’s neighbours include a rock-climbing gym, a dentist’s office, a car repair shop and a digital-effects studio.

On the morning of Nov. 3, a dozen people gathered in the complex’s main theatre space. After opening formalities and some ice-breaking conversation among the crew, the play’s entire cast — the Canadian stage veteran Tom Rooney — stood at centre stage and delivered an opening monologue.

“My name is Matthew Boswell,” he said. “I am the Competition Commissioner of Canada.” And then, by God, Rooney-as-Boswell started explaining competition policy, and the sense of betrayal he feels when markets fail.

“Canada was a company before it was a country,” he said at one point. “There is no tradition here of economic dynamism; our tradition is, a thriving business is good for the country, even if it’s bad for the country’s citizens.”

It soon became clear that this play’s Boswell is deeply frustrated by his role as the watchdog of functioning markets in a country where nobody with any power gives a rat’s ass about functioning markets. Even the Competition Act of 1985, “created to help people not get screwed by corporations… contains ways for people to absolutely get screwed by corporations,” Boswell/Rooney said. “This, as the head of the Competition Bureau, is what I’m up against. I get it.

“But this case — this case — Rogers and Shaw, this merger, this seemed like a real moment to take a stand. Letting the second-largest telecom company in Canada swallow the fourth-largest telecom company in Canada? When there’s only four telecom companies in Canada? No goddam way. It seemed obvious to all of us that this would never be allowed to go through….

“Man, did I get fuckin’ shown something that day.”

A minute later, Rooney stooped and slumped into a chair. His voice jumped half an octave and took on a Catalan accent. Suddenly he was Eduardo, the Rogers family’s butler when Edward Rogers and his sisters were growing up. No slide projection on a screen behind Rooney announced this change. Audiences will figure it out.

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Soon the character changes were coming fast. Edward Rogers, the heir apparent whose fitness for empire is obvious to nobody but himself. Suzanne Rogers, his wife. Loretta Rogers, his dismissive mother. Martha and Melinda, his sisters and rivals. Three consecutive Rogers CEOs, from Nadir Mohamed to Joe Natale. Rooney — sporting a thick white beard because he still had three weeks as Macduff in Macbeth in Stratford ahead of him — introduced each new character with a change in vocal cadence, a tilt of the head, a quarter-turn from a left-facing to a right-facing stance. In all, Rooney plays 17 roles over the course of the play.

If English-Canadian theatre had stars, Tom Rooney would be one. He has played several of the biggest roles in the repertoire, from Cyrano at the Shaw Festival to Romeo at Stratford to Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie at Theatre Calgary. I wrote about his Hamlet at the National Arts Centre in 2004 for a magazine. Of course he’s also created countless new roles, besides playing the hits. In 2023 he played a black poodle in the Crow’s Theatre staging of the André Alexis novel Fifteen Dogs.

“I keep thinking, ‘I hope this gets easier at some point,’” Rooney told me later during a break. “It’s a lot of material. It’s a lot of material, and it’s definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” This was saying a lot. He’s done Hamlet, after all, who has the most lines in Shakespeare’s longest play, but by my rough math he has twice as many lines in Rogers vs. Rogers as he did in Hamlet.

“I feel like I want to do something that’s hard,” he said when I asked why he took on the challenge. “I do question it. I wake up at 3 a.m., wondering, ‘Can I actually do this? Can I actually get through an entire evening of this?’”

It helps that he likes the script. Rooney and Healey have worked together before, as has each with Chris Abraham, the director. Healey said he had nobody else in mind for all these roles except Rooney.

“I refer to Michael Healey as the Canadian Bernard Shaw, because there’s so much wit and so much intelligence,” Rooney said. “And it’s always so much about who we are at this time. Who we are as Canadians, living in the communities that we live in. He’s an actor as well, so he knows how to write for for an actor. His writing is so rhythmic, it makes sense to an actor. I love his outrage, how he turns it into stories and how he uses humor to make his his points. It’s a bit of a cliche to say, but his writing, I think, really is a gift.”

I’ve known Healey for several years. There’s a walk-on part in his 2017 play 1979 for a Parliamentary intern who shows up to debate, and torment, Prime Minister Joe Clark in the depths of his despair. The intern is Stephen Harper, who would have been 20 at the time. (A slide projected onto a screen behind the actors cheerfully points out that nothing like this encounter ever happened.) Much of Harper’s dialogue in the play is a paraphrase of stuff I wrote in my 2013 book The Longer I’m Prime Minister. That was a strange and not unpleasant experience for a political writer, so I’ve followed Healey’s work ever since.

In 2024 he told me he’d struggled with Posadzki’s fairhanded and dispassionate account of the Rogers succession crisis and the simultaneous Rogers-Shaw merger bid. The story has a lot of characters whom even business-page readers would barely recognize. Some of its central events, like a 2021 “butt-dial” in which Rogers executive Tony Staffieri was said to have accidentally called then-CEO Joe Natale while Staffieri was discussing a plan to push Natale out of the top job, remain in dispute. It was hardly clear what the plot of the story was, or even who it was about.

Healey told me he’d settled on the competition commissioner, Matthew Boswell, as the hero of the story. It felt like a stretch: the Rogers-Shaw merger went through despite Boswell’s best attempts to stop it. Good luck with that, I thought.

What Healey didn’t tell me in 2024, because he probably hadn’t yet decided it, was that the play would use only one actor. So that’s the first thing I asked him about on the first day of rehearsals. Was he trying to produce a smaller, logistically simpler play after The Master Plan’s elaborate sets and big cast?

Not really, Healey said. “Just trying not to bore myself.” The one-man-show thing came out of the demands of the plot. As an actor-playwright, he said he feels “a responsibility to give actors fun, hard things to do.” As a succession battle, the Rogers story is a bit of a dud: Growing up, Edward Rogers is dismissed by everyone, and he kind of buys into that dismissal, but in the end he wins handily, despite his sisters’ rivalry and the company’s internal drama. “That’s not a lot of fun for an actor to do,” Healey said.

Once he decided to make the Rogers-Shaw merger as big a part of the story as the succession battle, Healey realized he’d have two main characters, Edward Rogers and Boswell. “One guy acting in his own interest and one guy acting in the public interest. That’s when I realized, ‘OK, they can be the same actor.’” At that point casting Rooney became obvious. “He’s the country’s greatest clown as well as the greatest tragedian.”

3. “A theft of liberty”

I met Chris Abraham a year ago when he and Healey pried loose a single ticket for me on the last night of Healey’s Toronto waterfront farce, The Master Plan. Even after two runs at Crow’s, one in Hamilton and a final stint hosted by Crow’s putative crosstown rival Soulpepper, Abraham told me the play could have kept running indefinitely. The only thing stopping it was that Crow’s and Soulpepper had other plays they wanted to stage.

So I should not have been surprised when I asked him about his vision for Crow’s Theatre and he replied, not in terms of subject matter, but of audience impact.

“We’re trying to really push past the audience that we have, that see themselves as theatre lovers, and really radically grow an audience [of people] that are ready to fall in love with something new in their life — the live experience,” he said.

“We know that there’s capacity for the not-for-profit theater sector to do a lot better than it’s currently doing. Mirvish Productions, the one big commercial producer in the city of Toronto, does well over 200 million bucks a year in business.” But Mirvish does that by running local productions of Broadway hits — Some Like it Hot, The Sound of Music, jukebox musicals with stories built around hits by Queen or Neil Diamond — as well as heavier plays with some commercial hook, like an upcoming one-man production of Hamlet starring Eddie Izzard.

I don’t get the impression Abraham begrudges the big leagues their big-league sales, he just wants to coax some of those audiences into taking a chance. My ballpark estimate is that Soulpepper does about 5% of Mirvish’s business in a year. If that number could triple it would be a game-changer for locally-produced theatre in Toronto and, eventually, elsewhere in English-speaking Canada. This helps explain why Abraham spent years building an attractive, comfortable home for Crow’s, and why this year his company and Soulpepper announced a strategic partnership that’s all about bigger budgets and longer runs to attract larger audiences.

“I absolutely believe in the intrinsic value of what it is we do,” Abraham said. “It’s become more important in an era in which attention is such a fragile and important commodity now. Theater is a tool to retrain us on deep attention.”

So even as Abraham chases big audiences whose live-theatre experience might so far not extend much past Hamilton, he’s also trying to stage plays with intellectual heft, like upcoming adaptations of Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance and of Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of a Lion. He will be encouraged by the example of Rogers vs. Rogers, a play about competition policy that has already, even before it opens, sold more tickets than anything in Crow’s Theatre’s history.

Most of Rooney’s performance is naturalistic and relies only on posture and inflection to sell the multiple changes of character, but at its climax, Rogers vs. Rogers relies on modern technology. This is its depiction of a Rogers Communications board meeting, which took place on Zoom in the middle of a COVID lockdown.

The participants: Edward Rogers, Loretta Rogers, Melinda Rogers, Martha Rogers, the former Ontario premier David Peterson, the eternal Rogers proconsul Phil Lind, and four others. All portrayed by Rooney in the squares of a giant Zoom call. Most pre-recorded, some portrayed live with digital “makeup” to sell the different characters.

While Rooney and Healey looked on, video designer Nathan Bruce demonstrated the techniques he’ll use for the Zoom-call scene. He put a digital mask over his face that tracked his head motions. During the play, the mask will be transparent, with digital makeup and hair effects superimposed. Here’s a bit of video I shot:

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But after my day at Crow’s, I kept thinking about Rooney’s opening monologue in character as Boswell, the competition commissioner. First, because competition policy seems a nearly lunatic premise for a play that’s hoping for a big audience. Second, because the Canadian policy debate on competition in Canada is actually enjoying a moment, featuring young and cross-partisan voices at the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, the Public Policy Forum, at The Hub’s Hunter Prize for Public Policy, and in Sutherland Quarterly. Vass Bednar, a co-author of The Big Fix, served as a consultant to Healey on Rogers vs. Rogers, helping him get some of the details right.

So this odd and ambitious play comes along at a moment when much of the country is thinking about its themes. On Dec. 9, 30 people from the federal Competition Bureau will be in the audience for Rogers vs. Rogers. There’s a growing sense that when companies collude to keep prices high and options low, and governments don’t care or can’t help, then the country doesn’t work. But it’s Healey’s character Matthew Boswell who puts it best.

“A company with a large market share takes you, isolates you, and makes you feel dumb,” Rooney-as-Boswell says in that opening monologue. “Cuts you from the herd, gets you alone and gives you the impression you have no choice. And this is, let’s be clear, it’s a loss of freedom… a theft of liberty.

“…Unbridled corporate power isolates you and chips away at that liberty. And watching that happen to people, and watching people believe they have to just take it, without complaint — that makes me mad.”

Rogers vs. Rogers will play at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto through Jan. 4. Click here for information.

A quick note today on a story I covered closely for a few weeks in 2022.

Sasha Suda, the Canadian arts administrator whose departure in 2022 as director of the National Gallery of Canada pushed a lot of internal controversy into the open, was fired yesterday as director of the Philadelphia Art Museum. By email. “For cause.” After what was described as an emergency board meeting. For reasons that remain murky, although lots of people seem to be enjoying the chance to speculate.

Here’s the New York Times story. Lots of other stories are floating around. None has solid information beyond the shocking fact of the dismissal.

Why should you care? You’re free not to, but some of us remember the tumultuous autumn of 2022, when Suda’s sudden departure as Director and CEO of Canada’s flagship art museum had the effect of lifting a rock on some intense human-resources conflicts. Within short order, four senior employees were fired. One, Greg Hill, the Gallery’s curator of Indigenous art, publicly disputed the stated reason for his dismissal: that these four souls were somehow thwarting the implementation of the Gallery’s strategic plan. Something about decolonization and Indigenous reconciliation, which I don’t think are bad ideas, but if you’re going to fire your most senior Indigenous arts administrator, you should have a better story about how this accomplishes that.

Here’s where I started covering the story. This piece revealed that two unions representing 80% of the Gallery’s employees had already written to then-Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez expressing alarm about the work environment before the four firings. Suda’s interim successor gave me an interview about the controversy, which I didn’t find persuasive. I wrote that just about the entire Canadian art establishment was calling on Rodriguez to intervene. Seven months later the Gallery had a new Director. Whom I promptly interviewed for the old podcast. (He ended up publicly apologizing for the way he talked about decolonization in that interview.) I was honestly surprised at the audiences those stories drew.

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I should emphasize that most of the uproar I chronicled happened after Suda left Ottawa. But my friend Shannon Proudfoot reported in detail in the Globe and Mail about how Suda’s management style before her departure was at odds with her claims about a healthy workplace.

“We work at the speed of trust,” the strategic plan that was one of Suda’s signature accomplishments said.

“Staff are living a culture of fear and intimidation, afraid to speak out, afraid that they’re going to be restructured at any moment with no explanation,” Hill, the dismissed Indigenous curator, told Proudfoot. “It’s a really toxic environment.”

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But look, we live and learn. Philadelphia looked like a new leaf for Suda, a superbly-educated art historian who had good ideas about making galleries more relevant to regular folks, until the National Gallery became a place crowds were ignoring in droves. In Philly, an employees’ union strike that was underway when she got to Philadelphia was settled quickly, though not before the union hung a WHERE’S SASHA banner across the museum’s façade. The museum announced a big donor gift to endow a new centre for art from Africa and the African diaspora, a solid accomplishment in a city whose population is 40% Black.

But stories since yesterday suggest the board was concerned about slow fundraising, which would be a non-trivial problem in a big American arts organization, and about “woke” diversity initiatives (this article from a rewrite site at least has a glorious headline). A problem with that thesis is that The Philadelphia Museum of Art adopted its DEI policy before Suda’s appointment. Another is that anyone who thinks it’s “woke” to celebrate Black creativity in Philadelphia may have an overly broad definition of the word.

It’s probably significant that in Philly as in Ottawa, Suda presided over sprawling, self-congratulatory rebranding exercises whose utility is hard to discern. At the National Gallery of Canada, “conversations with Algonquin Elders” led Suda to decide in 2021 that the institution’s “path forward is Ankosé,” which means “everything is connected” and is represented by an animated logo, which is hard to reproduce on T-shirts. “Our brand is more than a logo and a new visual identity,” Suda wrote defiantly at the time. “It is a line in the sand — the beginning of a momentous transformation that will reshape the Gallery’s core.”

Perhaps surprisingly, in Philadelphia, Suda and the inevitable cast of pricey consultants she recruited seem to have skipped any conversations with the region’s Lenni-Lenape elders before announcing less than a month ago that the Philadelphia Museum of Art must now be called the Philadelphia Art Museum and that its logo is a griffin that needn’t be animated. Perhaps one day it will be clearer why two Brooklyn firms were uniquely positioned to discern the souls of museums in Ottawa and Philadelphia. At any rate, Philadelphians soon began referring to the Philadelphia Art Museum as phART, which may be all the reason a board needs to hold an emergency meeting and cashier the CEO by email.

I promised myself I wouldn’t get flippant. I’m actually not feeling mirthful. If the “line in the sand” of 2021 vanishes on equally unceded land in 2025, I start to wonder which manifesto was the one Suda didn’t really mean.

One last point. The story of Suda’s adventures in Ottawa and Philadelphia is, to some extent, a story of journalistic failure. I have checked coverage of Suda’s progress for three years, hoping for the best, fearing otherwise, and not one syllable about the controversies and labour strife she left behind in Ottawa has ever made its way into any local Philadelphia-based coverage of her tenure in Philadelphia. In the last century the Philadelphia Inquirer won 20 Pulitzer prizes. Apparently now, neither the Inquirer nor any of that city’s arts publications and city magazines employs anyone who can do a Google search. These days just about everywhere is a news desert.

In two weeks the National Gallery of Canada will open an ambitious exhibition about art — Indigenous, Canadian, European — on winter themes. It’s an attempt to show the Gallery can work as a team, put on a big show, draw crowds and put superb art in front of them. I look forward to going. This great institution, and the simple idea that a community prospers when people gather to look at art together, are due for a break.

Today the National Arts Centre Orchestra announced that John Storgårds will become its music director, beginning a year from now in the 2026-27 season. Storgårds is Finnish, and his friends back home call him Jontte, YOHN-tay, which is like “Johnny.” Hence my headline.

Storgårds will become the Ottawa-based orchestra’s eighth music director — the term for an orchestra’s main conductor and the person who sets its musical approach — since it was founded in 1969. The orchestra, and attentive members of its audience, already know him well: he’s been the NACO’s principal guest conductor, leading it from the podium at least twice a season, since 2015, and his visits are always memorable.

He’ll succeed the dashing Brit Alexander Shelley, who is about to begin his 11th and final season as NACO music director. Eleven years is a good run in orchestral circles. Only one other conductor has ever led this orchestra’s fortunes for longer.

A search committee designated by the orchestra’s management has been listening to potential replacements for Shelley, both in Ottawa and overseas, since long before Shelley’s eventual departure was announced in May. I volunteered on the search committee that recommended Shelley’s appointment in 2013. I don’t know who was on the committee this time around, and have enjoyed the luxury of guessing what they might be up to.

Shelley is a tough act to follow. He’s a youthful not-quite-46, athletic, eloquent and happy to explain the music to audiences before he starts to conduct it. He’s efficient in rehearsal, way more enthusiastic about contemporary music than some of his predecessors, an effective mentor and educator, and a superb conductor of Beethoven and Schumann. NACO audiences are younger, more diverse, and more enthusiastic now than before he came along. He’ll leave an orchestra that’s able to recruit talented players from abroad because it plays serious music well and because its members mostly get along, a blessing not every orchestra shares.

At 61, Storgårds’ features are more lived-in, and he’s unlikely to match Shelley’s 10K time. His English is solid, mostly, and I’ve never heard him speak French. He fits the old comic definition of a Finnish extrovert as somebody who looks down at your shoes. But he has a sterling international reputation. If Shelley has been unjustly underestimated until now, Storgårds’ career, closer to European capitals, has allowed him to be assayed at something closer to his right value.

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Finland generates world-class conductors at a bewildering rate. Storgårds, who started as a violinist and still plays the violin frequently as a soloist and chamber player, was chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic for many years and now leads, among other assignments, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, based in Manchester. As a guest, he’s conducted most of the world’s important orchestras with a decent sample of the world’s leading soloists. Few conductors have recorded more often. Storgårds is a first-call conductor for recordings of new compositions by Nordic and Baltic composers that even most orchestra fans haven’t heard of — Kalevi Aho, Sebastian Fagerlund, Sunleif Rasmussen — but with the BBC Phil, he’s also been recording big chunks of the standard repertoire. All the Sibelius symphonies. All the Nielsen symphonies. And, still in progress, all the Shostakovich symphonies. He loves to conduct Haydn, whose lowkey humour he gets, and he learned the Sibelius symphonies from scores Sibelius marked in his own hand a century ago.

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Reviews of Storgårds’s performances often border on ecstatic. The classical-music site Bachtrack called a June performance by the BBC Phil in Manchester “probably one of this city’s greatest performances in recent years.” The New York Times called his New York Philharmonic début in 2016 “a major success… gripping and profound.” A Finnish reviewer wrote in April, “There was no trace of bureaucraticness! John Storgårds' hands and body were waving like a wild madman: precise indications of what was to come, intensification of the composition, frenzied whipping of the orchestra.”

That last review is perhaps closest to what Ottawa audiences have learned about Storgårds: he comes loaded for bear, and it’s a rare appearance by him that isn’t an event. He’s been known to lead the orchestra with body language and bow gestures as he plays violin parts from the chair usually occupied by the concertmaster, or principal violinist. He sometimes joins musicians from the orchestra for weekend chamber-music concerts at local pubs. More often they leave their instruments behind and just go to the pubs for pizza and beer. But when he leads the orchestra through warhorses of the repertoire that sometimes last nearly an hour — a Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich symphony — he can build an almost breathtaking momentum.

That rare combination — collegial intimacy, big-maestro energy — has helped Storgårds develop a mutual affection and loyalty with the orchestra that should stand them in good stead as he prepares to become NACO’s main conductor. I’ve been a regular at NAC concerts for more than 20 years, I consider both Shelley and Storgårds friends, and I think they’ve picked the right person for the job, twice in a row now.

Here’s the news release from the NAC, with more details. Fans in Ottawa will want to get their hands on tickets to these November concerts, Storgårds’ next appearance with the orchestra, featuring the excellent violinist Augustin Hadelich. It’ll be a party.

I’m interested in the ways independent musicians attract attention and build audiences as a special case of the predicament so many of us face in so many fields: technology offers more tools than ever, but when everyone uses those tools at once, it actually becomes harder to get noticed.

One person who’s been unusually industrious in finding solutions is Dan Mangan, a stalwart Vancouver singer-songwriter who’s spent his adult life writing and playing his songs. He won Juno awards for Breakthrough Artist and Best Alternative Album in 2012. He married and had kids. And he’s still out here making music and helping other musicians find audiences.

His new album, Natural Light, features the ancient sound of a guy with a guitar. He’s promoting it through every contemporary social-media tool, including his Substack newsletter, where readers will find posters they can print and tape to telephone poles in their neighbourhoods. He’s on mass texting terms with thousands of fans. Perhaps most intriguing, he co-created Side Door, an online tool for connecting performing artists with venues ranging from plush-seat theatres to apartments and back yards.

No artist sets out to be a social-media virtuoso. But fewer and fewer can afford not to. I spoke to Dan Mangan on Friday about the new world for ancient arts. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Paul Wells: Can you tell me how the music business was different for an independent artist in 2005, when you were starting out, from what it's like now?

Dan Mangan: [When I started] it was entirely run by gate-keepers. There were fewer channels of distribution and marketing and proliferation of all sorts. You really had to appeal to the people in positions of power to gain access to the kingdom. You spent a lot of your time applying to showcases and festivals, trying to put yourself in places where you thought that the industry might be. It was like you would stand in the line of fire and hope for a stray bullet. I did Canadian Music Week, and North by Northeast, and I did BreakOut West, which was then called the Western Canadian Music Awards, and I did South by Southwest. There's a bunch in England, there’s one in Hamburg, in Australia there’s a festival called Big Sound. They’re all over the world. They’re these industry conferences, the same that there would be for realtors, or makers of kids’ toys. You’d go and listen to people speak, and then you would try and humbly press a demo into their hand, and hope that they would listen to it and go: Oh, my God, you're wonderful! That was how you got into the industry.

There was press back then. There was an arts weekly in every town. [He’s talking about weekly independent print newspapers stuffed with club ads and personals, on the model of New York’s Village Voice: Now and Eye in Toronto, Voir and the Mirror in Montreal, (X)Press in Ottawa, Fast Forward in Calgary…] Essentially all of that is gone. Now, once you've made the music it’s all about social media.

There was a good quote somebody tweeted recently: The joke is on musicians, because we still think music is the product and the truth these days, more than ever, is that you are the product. What that’s meant is that instead of having five distribution channels, you have infinite distribution channels, and we are completely oversaturated with artists. It's the only business model where there is 10x the supply that there is the demand, and every actor of supply is trying their best to squeeze their little bit of product in front of your face and ears, and hope that you remember them.

Now labels will run you through a calculation. The artists now have to entirely prove their concept on their own, from their living room or from their bedroom, posting online. And if the world is responding to it, if they're going viral, if they're blowing up on their own, well, then, clearly they're worth adding a little bit of coal to that fire, and let's shovel some money and some expertise, to try and make them blow up even bigger. Very few labels are signing anything that isn't already proven in the market already.

You can't just make music. You have to be a content creator. You have to be a video editor. You have to be a website designer. You have to be a photographer. You have to be a videographer. You have to be a marketing specialist. All these things.

PW: Did you ever think that you would have to be spending as much time as you do, thinking about how to find audiences, and how to connect musicians to money?

Mangan: Certainly not in the early days. When I first started out, I did a million house concerts. I came up with this philosophy that if your footprint cannot be wide, let it be deep, you know, a fox paw in the snow. If you can't sell a thousand tickets, how can you have the most memorable, earth-shattering experience with 40 people in a living room or in a backyard, let's say?

I didn't have access to the gatekeepers. I didn't have a way in. I didn't have a manager or label for a long time, and so I figured I would just try and learn to do all those things on my own. I realized if I played to 30 people in a bar I would get paid in beer tickets, but if I played to 30 people in a living room I'd make 400 bucks, and I'd sell a bunch of CDs, and I'd high-five a bunch of people and feel like I had left a mark in that city. When I came back to that city those 40 people were going to tell five friends each, and the next time there would be 80 people at the show, and there was some growth.

The idea of a network of house concerts was stirring in my head and in 2017 I started this company called Side Door with my friend Laura, who still runs it. And now there's 11,000 artists and about 4,000 hosts on there. The site connects artists and hosts for off-grid shows. There's a lot of cool bells and whistles and ticketing features, and you can split revenue and all sorts of stuff. My experience trying to bring users in and make them happy on a tech platform really altered how I think about having any kind of longevity as an artist.

I don't have a huge audience, but I do have a very dedicated audience: people who send me incredible notes about how my music has been a huge factor in their life, or how it’s been present in a really special moment. I’ve leaned on those people. The truth is that I want to have a relationship with these people that lasts.

I record every one of my concerts, and during the show I say, text me the password for tonight, and I will text you a Dropbox link, and a recording of tonight's show if you ever want to listen to it again. So now we have a relationship over text message. I've got about 12,000 people that I can text with through this app called Community. I can text by location, so if I have a show in Winnipeg I can reach out to everyone within 40 miles of Winnipeg and say, here's the link to the show. I probably sell about 60 to 70% of my concert tickets through email or through text message. And then the rest would come through digital ads from the promoter. Having that direct relationship has meant that I can survive into my forties as an artist and continue to have a relationship and continue to have a career.

PW: So it used to be that the entire game was to find the one door that could get you from not being in the conversation at all, to being in the conversation. And that's like John Hammond discovering Bruce Springsteen, where your life changes overnight. Now we're in what should be a utopia, because the costs of entry have collapsed. But the value of entry isn't nearly what it used to be, either. You can make an album in your living room. You can send it to anyone in the world and it sounds exactly like you made it. You can push out your own message on Instagram or TikTok. But since almost everybody on the planet is doing that, it gets you no closer to being in the conversation.

Mangan: That's right. It used to be that there was room for about 30 or 40 famous musicians at once. You know you had your Phil Collinses, and your Stings, and your Madonnas, and your Janet Jacksons, and all of those people were shoveled through the same four distribution channels. There were five big record labels in the world. And those record labels owned all the access to radio and all the access to distribution into stores.

Then in the ’90s, a bunch of indie record labels had some considerable success. You had Sub Pop who broke Nirvana. The model started to shift a little bit, and those massive labels kind of broke up.

But now the barrier to access is over. What that means is that everyone with a guitar is trying to get access. You're competing in the most absurd, oversaturated field. Sometimes people break through by being really earnest and sweet. Something that works on TikTok is an unexpected person playing music to you. It's not a really beautiful, well-filtered, well- photographed person. There's a guy who's 85 years old, and he sings these sweet cover songs, and he's a huge star on TikTok, because you wouldn't expect him to be the person. But then people start following that trend, and they’re trying to game the game.

I hate to be the old guy yelling at the sky or feeling like the world used to be better than it is. I don't actually believe that it ever was better than it is. However, it's different. Artists start to adjust their artistic inspiration or their output, or their north star to fit a model. They start making music that is immediately digestible in 15 seconds. You have to wonder: have we lost artistic patience? Rather than having a truthful thing that is magnetic because it is truthful, artists are making a thing only considering that it could be successful. And that is a very dangerous thing for art, because art that's successful in the short term is rarely meaningful in the long term.

PW: Tell me more about Side Door. How does it work concretely? I hadn't heard of it before this week, and most of my readers will not have heard of it. It's like Airbnb for gigs?

Mangan: Side Door was born of a philosophy of trying to sidestep the gatekeepers of the industry. We did some research, and we found that 97% of people playing shows do not have an agent. They don't make enough money to make it worthwhile for an agent. And so Side Door was born of this idea of, how do we serve that 97%?

Anyone can host a show. If you have access to a space, a backyard, your living room, your cafe, your warehouse, your bookstore, your office space, your co-work space, curling rink — whatever — you create a profile for that space, not dissimilar to Airbnb. Then you can create a Show Call, which is basically broadcasting your availability. Something like: “We were thinking about hosting a show this summer, and here's the kind of artist we're looking for.” Artists do the same thing. You build a profile as an artist, and you create a Show Call. You could say, “I'm going to be in Houston, Texas and I'm looking for a show between July 14th to 17th.” Both the hosts and the artists can broadcast their availability to each other, and then they can chat, and they can build a show together.

We built a ticketing mechanism where you can have multiple payees. You sell tickets and every ticket that's sold, you can see how much is going to the host, and how much is going to the artist, how much is going to SOCAN on the artists’ behalf to pay for the performance royalties. We're trying to bring daylight to this underground world and make it really normal to play a ticketed show in a cafe, after the cafe closes. It's mutually beneficial. Right? There's a bookstore here in town that's a Side Door host. I've seen a number of shows there, and now, every time I walk by that bookstore, I'm inclined to go in there and buy a book, because I have these positive connotations with it. Businesses are served by it. We’ve paid out over $3,000,000 to artists over the last seven years. It’s a part of my brain that I never thought I would access. I never thought that I would be pitching venture capitalists on my music tech company. But building a startup is not dissimilar to building a career in the arts.

Spotify has been in bad graces with the artistic community for many years. They've helped a lot of artists have a career. A lot of artists have been discovered on Spotify. The algorithm has just worked for them. The fact that [Spotify CEO] Daniel Eck invested 700 million dollars in military AI, though, is the biggest slap in the face. It's like some evil supervillain shit. Why does the guy who builds the platform have 700 million loose bucks hanging around to invest in military AI, and the millions and millions of artists who have given him that 700 million dollars can't pay their rent?

I'm not in a position where I can take my music off Spotify. I'm not comfortable enough financially, and that's a very shitty thing to say out loud. It's a very shitty thing to feel. I wish I could leave this thing, but I can't. But I've been using this app called Untitled for a while, just to share music with the label and the band and stuff like that. It's a private music sharing app. It works really well. So I decided to create my own little streaming service through this app, put my catalog on there, so people can listen to it another way. I put it behind the paywall on my Substack, and that was my way of saying, Hey, this is a way you can support me and sidestep these big, multinational corporations if that's something you're interested in.

PW: My solution as a consumer is to stream on Tidal, which pays artists better royalty rates than Spotify does. And I set aside a budget every month to buy albums on Bandcamp. [More about Bandcamp here]

Mangan: Beautiful. Effectively, you're an angel investor in these artists’ lives.

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PW: Most people aren't even aware that the service they're using to stream music is not helpful to the people who are creating the music. And it's a cosmic irony that the universe has provided a solution: they now have music that is not produced by people. There are bands that are nothing but an AI construct?

Mangan: Yeah. For a long time, when you'd hear AI music, it was jokey stuff. Something like, this is what The Police would sound like if Taylor Swift was singing their songs. And that was the extent of AI, and I didn't feel threatened by that. But this band, Velvet Sundown, well, it’s not good, but it's passable. If you heard it in a coffee shop, you wouldn't second-guess it. You wouldn't think: is this AI? For the first time I thought, oh, this is my lane, this is indie music.

It's really not good music, but they put out an album every 2 weeks for 6 weeks, and it had accrued in those 6 weeks almost twice my monthly listeners on Spotify. It’s about outpacing artists. They can affordably flood the market with so much of this music and eventually some of it's going to catch fire. I think there's close to 100,000 new songs on Spotify every day. How long before there's a million songs or 10 million new songs on Spotify every day? 99% of it just AI generated. It's just numbers to them. And they're hoping that one of those songs takes off. And eventually it will. That's just how the algorithm works.

I fear for a musical landscape where artists have altered the kind of music they make to fit the medium of social media. At what point is music just this thing that happens in the background of your life? When I was young I spent time listening to music. I would sit with headphones, and I would just listen to music, and I would consider the words and music, and I would feel it. I'm just hoping that teenagers who have that extra time and that insatiable appetite to consume the world and understand it— I hope that they're still having that sense of discovery with music.

I would love Spotify to offer the ability to check a box that says: I don't want any music that's AI. I think a lot of people would do that.

PW: You've got a new album out. Where are you in the cycle of that album? Are you touring?

Mangan: I'm in the social media content-creator portion of my album cycle. My record came out in May and I am trying to get the world to hear it. It's my seventh album and it is unquestionably the best thing I've ever done. It was made in this miraculous, serendipitous six-day stint at a cabin. I've never felt that amount of creative flow, ever in my life. I’m hoping that people connect emotionally with this music so that it might stay with them for longer than five seconds. I’m touring in the fall, doing a number of larger cities in Canada with the full band. Essentially, I'm going to be cycling between Canada, the States, and Europe for the next 18 months or so.

PW: Are you doing any of this through Side Door?

Mangan: I do. Especially in places where I'm less known. When I tour in the States or Europe, I tour alone just to keep costs down. In those instances, there's way more room to add a living room show. If I’ve got a few days off in a row, I’ll say, let's just add a cool side show here.

I cut short my visit to this year’s Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, for reasons I needn’t bore you with here. But I came away with good photos from two concerts, plus some stories about music. Such things are better shared. So here’s what I saw and heard.

As I did for last year’s festival, I worked with a wonderful photographer to show you what musicians look like at work. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin has been working frequently for the New York Times; she was covering British Columbia wildfires for them (trust me, that’s a link worth clicking) when I called her about working on this year’s festival.

My festival this year began a night early, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under the direction of the legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The JLCO was touring, as it often is, and the only night that worked for Montreal was the night before the festival’s official start. The venue was the Maison symphonique, a wonderful room for acoustic music but, as it turned out, one that puts up a fight when somebody tries to amplify the proceedings.

Jazz at Lincoln Center began 37 years ago as a series of summer concerts, when Marsalis was 26 and had already won seven of his nine Grammy awards to date. It soon became a permanent constituent department at Lincoln Center. Marsalis talked then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani into city funding for a permanent home for JALC on Columbus Circle. The organization runs an ambitious annual competition for high-school bands, Essentially Ellington, that has helped launch hundreds of musical careers.

Marsalis is an institution, in other words. He used to be more controversial. People worried, and he often seemed to hope, that more of his kind of jazz would mean less of other kinds. It’s clearer now that most musicians’ biggest problem isn’t other musicians. Marsalis in turn has mellowed. At the Maison symphonique, he acted as a section trumpeter and congenial host, never budging from his chair at the back of the horn section. He played only two trumpet solos all night. I’ve never heard less Marsalis at a Marsalis concert, and rarely enjoyed a concert by this big band more.

The JLCO is a superb ensemble. Thousands of nights playing jazz classics and challenging new compositions have honed its members’ sense of themselves and their colleagues. Their Montreal program started with three pieces originally written as commentary on American racial politics, Marsalis’ own “Black Codes,” Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” and John Coltrane’s “Alabama.” A comment on current events? Hard to tell for sure, especially because the boomy room defeated trombonists Chris Crenshaw and Vince Gardner in their delivery of Mingus’ barbed lyrics.

But any thematic unity to the night ended after the three openers. The rest of the program was an agreeably mixed bag, featuring suave ensemble playing and a succession of powerful solo turns, from everybody in general and trumpeters Ryan Kisor and Marcus Printup, saxophonist Abdias Armenteros, and drummer Obed Calvaire in particular. The band seemed taken aback by the warmth of the standing ovation at the end. Montreal audiences are reliably demonstrative. As we shall see.

Caity Gyorgy sang on the festival’s for-real opening night at the Gèsu, a gorgeous 425-seat converted chapel. It was her first festival concert in the city where she lives and went to university. It will surely not be her last, which means that next time, the disembodied offstage voice that introduces each act will get a chance to pronounce her name correctly. It’s pronounced “George,” as readers of this Substack are sometimes reminded. This is becoming useful information, especially at Juno Awards time.

At 27, she’s a charming singer whose often understated delivery belies serious study of harmony, ensemble dynamics and the example of her elders. Her originals sound like standards; her delivery keeps standards fresh. She’s developed a valuable rapport with the formidable Calgary pianist Mark Limacher; their duet album, from April, will compete with her album of originals backed by Limacher’s orchestral arrangements, coming in August, for next year’s Junos.

On Instagram the day before the concert, she invited followers to send in requests. I sent in one for “I Believe In You,” from the April duet album of Mark Loesser tunes, because I know how she likes to finish it: by building in volume and tension over the last half-chorus in a bravura display few singers anywhere can match. She didn’t disappoint.

Gyorgy sings in Ottawa tonight and in Banff in two weeks. Tickets are still available. This will not always be the case.

It was mostly a hazard of the festival’s early programming that made my concert choices this year hew so closely to the jazz mainstream. The festival is, of course, so big that a thousand other paths through its mazes are possible. Blue Rodeo played a free outdoor concert. The Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade filled a big hall for an intimate set, performed on acoustic guitar from a chair next to a side table with a bottle of mezcal on it. "¡Que viva México!", a guy in the audience shouted just before Lafourcade came onstage. (Here’s a review of her Boston show a few nights later.)

There is also still room for more unruly jazz. I was surprised to see David Binney’s name when I made a last-minute check of the festival’s opening-night schedule. I’m wired to notice names like Binney’s, but he didn’t appear in earlier drafts. Turns out the gig came together only days before the festival began.

Binney is an alto saxophonist from Los Angeles. I’m amazed to see he’ll turn 64 this year, but I suppose that’s fair, because he’s been an important player, however these things are measured in contemporary music, since the early 1990s. Increasingly he’s a hub and patriarch to a Los Angeles jazz scene that’s almost unrecognizably more quirky and adventurous than it was when most musicians in that city were earning most of their money in recording studios. (Here’s Nate Chinen on today’s LA scene.)

He played the opening-night 10 pm show at Studio TD, an unfussy venue for amplified music that opened in 2009 and fits 650 if nobody needs to breathe. It’s not even a quarter the size of the fabled Spectrum, the home to legendary performances by The Police, Miles Davis, Jean Leloup and hundreds of others that used to sit across the street that Studio TD effectively replaced. But Studio TD is still big enough that events there benefit from a sense of occasion as well as intimacy.

Under Laurent Saulnier, the FIJM’s former artistic director, Studio TD often hosted free concerts by artists who could easily have sold the place out if tickets were required. Saulnier just liked a room full of rowdy fans and didn’t think artists should aways have to worry whether they’d sell their quota of tickets. His happy example has been followed by the festival organizers who succeeded him.

But Binney isn’t a big name and his appearance was a last-minute thing, so when he took to the stage the big room was nearly empty. At first I felt disappointed on Binney’s behalf.

He told the hardy little crowd that Montreal has been a second home to him for much of his life. He was playing with three musicians who come from elsewhere, have often played at the highest levels elsewhere, and now call Montreal home: bassist Walter Stinson, drummer Tommy Crane, and especially the French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, who was hired by McGill a decade ago and who has been drawing musicians who are willing to get to Montreal just to play with him.

“We’re mostly just going to improvise,” Binney said by way of introduction. “It’s a jazz festival, but nobody really improvises anymore.” “Nobody” is an exaggeration, but it would be accurate to say few bands improvise as much, based on as little prepared material, as Binney and crew did here. The tunes were often just a two-bar bass vamp, or a scrap of melody designed to cue other musicians to the intentions of whoever was taking the lead at any given moment.

Binney likes to weave electronics into a band’s sound, sometimes elaborate schemes from a laptop computer, sometimes echoes and delays from guitar pedals. Watching him from the back of a room can be disconcerting because he sometimes vanishes beneath the sea of heads. At those moments, he can usually be found crouching over his pedal effects, twisting knobs to control the weird sounds.

At one point he rose from his crouch to deliver a relatively orthodox, and entirely persuasive, performance of “Portrait of Jennie,” the theme song to a 1948 movie that’s become a jazz standard. Binney studied with jazz elders like Phil Woods and George Coleman a lifetime ago, and while he rarely hangs out in those neighbourhoods any more, he clearly doesn’t mind a return visit. Pilc, Stinson and Crane were just as ready to switch gears.

But it was the less familiar music, the shifting, rhythmically tricky, harmonically contingent stuff the quartet built from scraps of almost nothing, that dominated the night. At one point, a ferocious alto-sax solo from Binney drew a roar of approval from the audience. Which is when I realize the audience had grown big enough to roar.

I’ve seen music like this drive the timid from all kinds of rooms over the years. But this festival has a knack for drawing Montrealers who are made of sterner stuff. Over the first 40 minutes of the Binney set, more people showed up curious than the number who left confused. Pretty soon the room was packed.

Musicians who believe in what they’re doing play with a certain sound that, to some extent, transcends genre. Montreal audiences aren’t unique in responding to that sound, but they’re lucky to have had more exposure to it than audiences in a lot of other places. Word gets out.

When the room was empty, I had shared a few mournful words with Nasuna Stuart-Ulin, the photographer. Now that it was full, I sent her a text: “OK it got better.”

“Hah yup,” she wrote back. “Montreal style.”

In 2005 Kaaren and Julian Brown of Kingston, ON donated the $20,000 prize money for a new national portrait competition they had conceived. The goal was to encourage portrait art in Canada — paintings and drawings of human faces and figures, in a country whose art more often celebrates landscapes.

The Browns’ model was the Archibald Prize, an annual Australian portrait competition, at the time nearly a century old. Julian Brown, a retired chemistry professor at Queen’s University who eventually passed away in 2022, was Australian-born. The Browns had lived back in Australia for a while in the late 1960s, and followed the surprisingly acrimonious controversy the Australian competition sometimes generates. Just the sort of thing to shake up cultural life in Canada, they thought.

It turned out that in Canada, creating a durable new arts institution was easier than getting people to argue about it. The Kingston Prize has been awarded biennially, except during COVID, for nine competition rounds since 2005. A tenth round is underway. The competition’s digital archives now contain nearly 300 paintings and drawings, of consistently high quality and stylistic variety.

I’d never heard of it before. By 2023, having missed a competition year and with the competition’s co-founder Julian Brown dead, organizers were wondering whether to shut the Kingston Prize down. Instead they had a different idea, the competition’s board chair, Jason Donville, told me in an interview: spread the word and aim for renewed interest.

The first result of that decision is a book, The Kingston Prize: Canada’s Portrait Competition, published in March by WORK BOOK and Goose Lane Editions. It contains every portrait that’s made it to the competition’s final round since the prize’s inception. I found a copy by chance at my neighbourhood Chapters. It’s one of the most impressive Canadian art books in recent years, and a happy counterpoint to the other big 21st-century story in Canadian portraiture, the persistent failure to launch a national portrait gallery.

(A note about the illustrations in this post: You’re well advised to read this post on your laptop or desktop computer, where you’ll find it at this link, and where you’ll be able to click on each photo to expand it and view it in greater detail.)

Jason Donville, the Kingston Prize’s board chair, is a hedge-fund manager from Toronto. By 2023, when he got involved, the prize was running out of steam. “The mayor of Kingston was indifferent to it,” Donville told me. “Agnes Etherington” — The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University’s art gallery — “had no interest in associating with it.” The 2023 exhibition of competition finalists was held at the Firehall Theatre in Gananoque, population 5,000, a 40-minute drive from downtown Kingston.

“And yet this was this wonderful prize,” Donville says. “The town of Gananoque had done a really good job.”

The goal of the book — which you can buy from the publisher here, or in most good bookstores — was to boost awareness of the competition outside Kingston and, uh, Gananoque from nearly zero to something more sustainable. It’s obviously a goal I find worth supporting, which is why I’m telling you about it. All the illustrations from this post depict Kingston Prize winners or finalists over the years.

There’s a startling vitality to the paintings and drawings in the Kingston Prize book. The competition is open to “any Canadian artist who depicts a Canadian citizen or permanent resident in a portrait based on a real life encounter.” There is no requirement that the subject be a person of any particular notoriety, and I recognized only two or three of the faces I saw. The three-member jury — usually an artist, somebody affiliated with a gallery, and somebody involved in arts education — is given no information about the artists who produced the works.

Two things struck me about the competition as I perused the book. First, it’s great to learn that Canada has people living in it. The main English-Canadian art auction houses move a breathtaking number of landscape paintings in a year, most from the early 20th century and many of them gorgeous, but at times you really need to keep an eye out to find any evidence of human habitation. Here’s the most recent online auction from Cowley-Abbott, and the latest from Heffel. It’s said that Canadians have long been hewers of wood and drawers of water, but Canadian art at times seems designed to remind everyone that the wood and water don’t need any Canadians to hew or draw them.

The Kingston Prize, on the other hand, brings us many dozens of paintings like this one, from 2011 finalist Steven Rosati, depicting Trevor W. Payne, the founder of the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir. The skill involved in producing this nearly photo-realistic portrait is obvious. But so is the care in the painting’s composition and background. I gasped as I turned the page to this painting.

I don’t want to hold up technique as the only virtue. But in an era when it’s cliché to claim that artists don’t know how to draw a circle, the technical command on display here is often formidable.

Other artists are going for other effects, or looking in other ways. Here’s a gallery of some other finalists that stood out to me.

The other striking thing about this homage to Canadian portraits is that it exists. Another project in Canadian portraiture hasn’t been so lucky.

Last week the Toronto Star published an op-ed by Gail Lord, Canada’s leading museum consultant, calling for the creation of a National Portrait Gallery for Canada. Lord makes the best case for the project, putting it in the context of renewed Canadian nationalism, the elbows-up backlash against Donald Trump (who forced out the director of the US National Portrait Gallery) and even the Canadian gallery’s potential as a fast-track infrastructure project.

The project for a physical Canadian portrait gallery has, as Lord notes, a website that lists a sturdy board of directors. It also trails a 20-year tale of woe. In 2006 the project seemed reasonably close to fruition. A site, the former US Embassy across Wellington Street from Parliament’s Centre Block, had been selected. But Stephen Harper became prime minister and decided he wanted a national museum to be somewhere else besides Ottawa. The search for a new locale took years and led nowhere, except to passionate debates about whether it was at all acceptable for national institutions to be located outside a country’s capital city. (Spoiler: It’s fine, and common in other countries.) I think it’s fair to wonder whether Harper wanted a portrait gallery at all.

By the time Harper wore out his welcome and Justin Trudeau brought the Liberals back, the notion of a portrait gallery seemed, in some circles, unbearably stuffy and old. The old US Embassy was given another vocation.

The portrait gallery website seems to cede the argument about whether a building full of portraits of appeals-court judges and privy-council clerks would be worth it: none of the virtual gallery’s virtual exhibits has featured any member-by-right of any Canadian political or class elite. Probably this is a good thing. Whom are we kidding? If a Canadian portrait gallery had opened in 2006, surely a large number of the portraits in the collection would have been removed by now, as interpretations of Canada’s past change.

I need to emphasize here that the Kingston Prize organization does not have any position on the worthiness of a national portrait gallery, and was never meant to offer competition against any such project. Theoretically the two projects — physical gallery, biennial competition — could easily both exist in the same country. They do in Australia and Britain, sometimes circling in close orbit, sometimes ignoring each other. The comparison I offer here is entirely mine.

But it may be instructive to think about why a national portrait project has existed, almost completely ignored by the country’s political decision-makers, for 20 years while the idea of a physical place for Canada’s portrait art founders endlessly.

Surely it’s because the questions that inevitably bedevil a gallery project — where should it be? And who deserves to be in it? — have basically been ignored by the Kingston Prize. The artists decide who they want to paint. Juries decide who’s been painted well, with varying amounts of attention to why the subjects were chosen.

As for where the paintings will hang — well, with proper philanthropic or corporate or government support, the answer could be “anywhere.” Albeit probably only briefly — the portraits don’t belong to the Kingston Prize organization, so they scatter to their creators or new owners after every competition round. Jason Donville and his board are hoping that this year, and in years to come, the display of finalists might be in someplace bigger than the Firehall Theatre in Gananoque. He’s working on it. (He would even consider renaming the prize after a generous-enough donor, something that is possible because the Kingston Prize’s creators were too self-effacing to call their brainchild the Brown Prize.)

The finalists’ works might even hang, for a few weeks every two years, in a national portrait gallery, someday. But absolutely nothing says they would have to, and in the meantime, to put it gently, that’s a hypothetical situation.

You could wait forever around here for a mandate. Julian and Kaaren Brown created their mandate instead, and now we have hundreds of Canadian faces, painted hundreds of ways, that we wouldn’t have had without their initiative.

More information on the Kingston Prize here. Submissions for the competition’s 2025 edition opened in March and will remain open until Sept. 1. In theory, you could enter a painting. The value of the first prize has risen to $25,000. Details are here. Details on the Kingston Prize coffee-table book are here.

Overture and cadenza

Lots of people know Rik Emmett better than I do, but in case you’re not one of them, I should probably set the table for today’s story by showing you what he used to do at the peak of his commercial success.

Those were the days when Emmett was the guitarist and lead singer for the Toronto hard-rock trio Triumph. Here’s Emmett a few days before he turned 30, playing his trademark guitar solo on the tune “Rock & Roll Machine” at the US Festival outside Los Angeles in 1983:

What can you say about a performance like that? Maybe that Emmett was a hell of a guitarist and an epic ham; that a lot of people were delighted to hear him play; and that for years before and after that show, Triumph was performing on dozens of nights a year for crowds whose size would routinely run to tens of thousands. Sometimes they’d share bills with Foghat, Mountain or Molly Hatchet. More often they’d draw those crowds on the strength of their name alone.

Triumph had 18 gold and nine platinum albums in Canada and the United States. They’re on Canada’s Walk of Fame. There have been more successful bands, though not many. There have been more illustrious guitarists, though not a lot with Emmett’s flare for theatrics. But Emmett and his bandmates had a great run.

That was a long time ago. But Rik Emmett is still playing. Here he is the other day in his attic studio in Burlington, ON, playing a tune called “Swirling” for me and, by extension, for you.

In many ways he’s a better guitarist now than he was in stadiums. At 71 he’s appealingly comfortable with himself and the instrument that allowed him to make his way in the world. Well, with the class of instruments: I counted nearly 40 guitars in his studio. The collection used to be much larger. Guitarists like guitars, what can you do.

“I’m five foot eight and shrinking,” he told me. Arthritis slows but doesn’t stop his fingers. He loves telling stories about the road. He told me a couple, about a wonderful jazz guitarist and a band from Scotland, that I won’t repeat here. He’s retired after many years teaching the music business at Humber College. It’s six years since he stopped his manager from soliciting concert gigs, although he can still be coaxed onstage on a case-by-case basis.

I visited Emmett because in March he released an album called Ten Telecaster Tales. He also released a book called Ten Telecaster Tales, which amounts to 200 pages of liner notes for the album. I have taken a very belated personal interest in the Fender Telecaster guitar, one of the most legendary families of electric guitar in the history of music. A sidearm favoured by Springsteen, Keith Richards and countless others. So I had questions for Emmett. As soon as we got this federal election behind us, I headed to Burlington to talk to him.

Eli’s loft

Rik Emmett’s house is a block or two further from the surprisingly gorgeous Lake Ontario waterfront than the fanciest houses in Burlington, but when his wife Jeanette wanted an extension on the back, she encouraged him to build whatever he wanted on the next floor up. Of course he wanted a studio. He calls it Eli’s Loft. Eli is the merry-go-round horse that hangs on one wall.

“He wasn't originally Eli. He's a carousel horse that used to hang in our old house in Mississauga,” Emmett explained. “And then one day I was looking at him, and I went, ‘No, you know, Elijah was the prophet in the Old Testament. He’s the only guy that got to go to heaven when he was still alive. According to the story, he got in a golden chariot that was on fire, and off he went.’”

This was artist logic, which as everyone knows, helps less if it gets too logical. This horse was his company for his creative work, which is kind of like a golden fiery chariot, at least on a good day. So the horse became Eli the Wonder Horse, short for Elijah.

As a practical matter, Eli’s contribution to Emmett’s continued success is modest. “I sit here alone by myself, working away. And every now and then I look up and I go, ‘What the fuck should I do?’ …He just kind of looks at me, laughing at me. ‘You figure it out on your own.’ That's how it works.’”

A similar process led him to call his newest guitar Babs. The name is partly an acronym for “butterscotch and black” — the colours of the custom instrument’s wood stain and its black plastic pick guard, which protects the wood from flying guitar picks or fingernails. It’s also partly a tribute to Barbra Streisand, who has also sometimes been like a fiery chariot.

Babs is not, strictly speaking, a Telecaster, because it was not manufactured by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation of Los Angeles, CA. But one of the things that surprised me when I started studying the history of electric guitars, six months ago, was that companies’ ability to trademark or patent the shapes of their instrument lines seems limited. So just about anyone can make a guitar that looks like a Tele, and even drop big hints that it’s a lot like a Tele — typically by marketing it as a “T-Style” guitar, hint hint — and the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation will, apparently, not send lawyers.

Babs is a custom job, built to Emmett’s specs. It started with hand-wound pickups built by Mike “Smitty” Smyth of MJS Custom Pickups in Mississauga. “Pickups” sit under a guitarist’s picking hand and translate the vibration of metal strings into electric current that will drive amplifiers. Smitty makes good pickups, apparently.

The rest of the guitar — swamp ash body with hollow chambers inside for lightness, maple neck — was built by Garren Dakessian of Loucin Guitars in Oakville, who makes guitars for a bunch of prominent guitarists..

Babs is light, but when Emmett sits with the guitar on his thigh, which is how he usually plays these days, the strings are at a height he likes. If his guitar had looked like a Les Paul — one of the other legendary families in rock guitar and the model he used in the 1983 video above [UPDATE: Swing and a miss, Wells. See the discussion of Les Paul-like guitars in the comments below] — the strings would sit a little lower. Less intuitive.

The early Telecasters were blunt machines, easy to manufacture, easy to service. Their modern descendents keep some of that directness. I’ve heard them called “wood with a piece of wood.” They’re almost inexplicably versatile, workhorses for blues, rock, country and jazz artists alike. They faithfully transmit to the amp whatever their owner’s hands do. Sometimes almost too faithfully, letting the world hear your weaknesses, like truth serum with strings.

Emmett’s custom guitar is carved with more eye for detail, and it’s a bit of a hybrid — the neck’s shorter then on a Fender, so it’s like Les Paul length at Tele height. Staccato notes from Babs don’t bark or twang in the way that makes Telecasters popular among country musicians, who sometimes call the effect “chicken pickin’”. It’s mellower, like its owner.

“When I'm getting older and deciding I want to try to combine fingerstyle, jazz, classical, flamenco — I want one guitar. I want a holy grail. One guitar to rule them all.” He intones this last bit, gives it a Lord of the Rings topspin. Re-reading his book later, I see he was quoting himself.

What does he play on Babs? This and that. One of the first pieces was a commission. A documentary filmmaker had set a film about in-line skates to a kind of gallumphing quasi-classical tune called “Bourrée,” recorded in 1969 by Jethro Tull. But copyright for recorded music is something lawyers do enforce, so the documentarian asked Emmett for a new piece that would hit all the beats of the forbidden Bourrée. That became “Swirling,” which you heard above.

Replacing a Bourrée, which is based on a 400-year-old French dance rhythm, got Emmett thinking about other old forms — “allemands and gigues and passacaglias” — and soon he had a growing collection of pieces that seemed new and timeless at once. He played another one for me, called “Slinky.”

This was turning into a coherent project. A man and his guitar; everything that led to this moment; and how it sounds now. He asked his editor at ECW Press, who had already published a book of poetry and a charming memoir from him, whether the album-and-book-length-liner-notes project could be a thing. Now it is.

Like late-period art from a lot of serious creators, the music on Ten Telecaster Tales is beyond genre. It’s its own thing. It’s charming, intricate, quiet but — taken across the arc of 10 very different pieces — quite ambitious. If I could reduce the immense cultural appeal of the guitar down to a single claim, it’s this: in the right hands, a guitar can do anything. And Rik Emmett’s hands are still good.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome: an autobiographical pause

Early in our interview, I told Emmett I ignored Triumph in their prime, which was roughly my high-school and university years. I even told him I was more of a Rush fan, which if there were such a thing as fighting words in Canadian rock, surely those would be it. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious argument against interest: the interview was unlikely to go better if I told my interviewee I sat out the prime of his life. But as I suspected, it didn’t go worse, because a guy who spent a decade filling stadiums didn’t need my ass occupying a seat in any of them.

But by the end of 2024, the instrument at hand — guitars in general, and specifically the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation Telecaster — had worked its way so far into my head that I began to make rash decisions.

I didn’t touch a guitar with musical intent until well into middle age. I was a minimally acceptable student of classical piano in middle school, then a better trumpeter in high school. I even considered a career in music. I’d have been some kind of jazz trumpet player, I suppose. It’s very much for the best that I found things I could do better.

But an electric guitar plugged into an amp? No thanks. Guitars, with six strings tuned in two groups, confused me. And as a weapons-grade band nerd I didn’t understand how a guitar could be a serious instrument if some of my friends who had no musical credentials could play the things by ear and rote.

By late 2024, however, I found myself thinking about guitars a lot. Part of it was a burgeoning fascination with the music of Julian Lage, a former California child prodigy whose jazz is based on a deep familiarity with the instrument’s Americana roots. (Rik Emmett name-checks Lage early in Ten Telecaster Tales.) Part of it was my growing interest in a bunch of singer-songwriters, especially Donovan Woods, who seemed lucky to me because he can carry his band around with him in his guitar case anywhere he goes.

Then, three weeks after Donald Trump won re-election and before we all put our elbows up, my wife and I visited Nashville.

We saw Vince Gill and Amy Grant at the Ryman Auditorium, and if I don’t know much about guitars I know even less about country music, but Vince Gill was so obviously a masterful guitarist that even I got it. And we attended a Monday lunchtime songwriters’ round at the Listening Room, one of a bunch of clubs dedicated to these informal showcases for up-and-coming songwriters.

It seemed everyone in Nashville had a guitar. What was my excuse? A week after we got home from Nashville I bought a Telecaster.

Progress has been slow. It’s true what they say about old dogs. At first I couldn’t hit the correct string even half the time. Why do they put them so close together? And, as every rookie guitarist knows, the first few hundred chords hurt your fingers.

But I know vastly more now than I knew then. Sometimes, for a few bars at a time, I can even play things that sound like music. The best thing is that I hear any music with a guitar in it differently now, because I’ve glimpsed — barely glimpsed, but still — all the thought and care that goes into it. So when I saw that Rik Emmett has been thinking about Telecasters too, I scheduled a talk.

The Triumph chapter

Emmett’s 2023 memoir, Lay It On The Line, has nearly two dozen chapters. One carries a pointed title: “The Triumph Chapter.” As in, the only chapter about Triumph you’re going to get. He did a bunch of things before Triumph and a bunch after, although when I pressed him for stories about the after-Triumph part, he corrected me gently: “You never really leave Triumph.”

Things were frosty with the other guys for a while after Emmett left in 1988. They’re fine now. They do events, they visit sometimes. This weekend a tribute album will be released, with artists including Lawrence Gowan, Dee Snider and Nancy Wilson singing Triumph tunes. The guys are doing some promo work around that, although, since I don’t live in that world, my interview request had nothing to do with it.

Triumph was a business proposition. The older guys, drummer Gil Moore and bassist Mike Levine, hired Emmett. “It was a professional relationship between three partners right from the get go,” Emmett said. “It wasn't like we were kids together, dreaming dreams…. This [was] going to be our attempt to crack the big time.”

They preferred to play smaller venues as headliners rather than bigger ones as an opening act. At least the fans would remember they’d been at a Triumph show. The band liked playing in the U.S., because the same two hours of work would get premium pay, thanks to exchange rates on the greenback. They cheerfully accepted and acknowledged corporate sponsors. Gil Moore had an elaborate crowd-control barrier built for the band’s concerts — not just to keep the fans off the band, but to keep the fans safe from the band’s elaborate pyrotechnics. Then Triumph found they could lease the barrier out to other touring acts when they weren’t on the road. A nice bit of countercyclical revenue, free money while the bandmates were home with their families.

All this money allowed Emmett to build his parents a home, belatedly assuaging their concern about his career path. And as calculated as the business decisions were, he still feels good about the music.

“There's nothing that I do in my life where I don't go, ‘How can I make this be something where I'm proud of it,’ you know? Where there's some some integrity to what I'm doing.” It’s what he taught his students at Humber: “Values and qualities have to be in everything.”

He even believes he helped focus the band’s sense of itself.

“They called the band Triumph. But there wasn't anything really triumph about it, the way that they envisioned it — until we had songs like ‘Lay It on the Line’ and ‘Hold On to Your Dreams’ and ‘Fight The Good Fight’ and ‘Never Surrender.’ Now there was this integrity to what the band was trying to be, and it helped set us apart from the other bands that were like, studs and leather and Harleys on stage.”

Quitting the band wasn’t a rebellion against commercialism. At first he’d have been fine with more commercialism. But he was pushing 40 and grunge was happening, and the market couldn’t sustain him at stadium scale. So he’s spent 35 years playing what appealed to him, which changes over time. It no longer requires pyrotechnics. Enough old fans, joined by new fans, are always happy to hear it.

Near the end of our interview I asked Emmett when he first knew music was his calling. His answer surprised me.

It happened when Emmett was playing football for Bloor Collegiate, showing real athletic promise. “I got blindside blocked by a guy from Danforth Tech. He tore up my right knee. And, you know, no more ACL, badly stretched MCL, cartilage damage.” His sports career ended right there.

He already had a terrible acoustic guitar, of the sort that fall randomly into kids’ lives all the time. Pretty soon he was at Long & McQuade on Yonge Street, putting down $250 for a proper Telecaster. Plus as much for an amp. Plus a union card from Local 149 of the American Federation of Musicians, so he could sit in with his friend’s uncle’s polka band.

All of this was serious money for a teenager in the early 1970s. For young Rik Emmett with his bum knee, it was a capital investment against future earnings. He had no interest in suit-and-tie jobs, and if he couldn’t play with the Argonauts, he’d just find a different path into stadiums.

It didn’t work out too badly at all.

Rik Emmett’s book Ten Telecaster Tales (ECW Press) is for sale in good bookstores. His album Ten Telecaster Tales is available on all the big music streaming services. I won’t be playing anywhere near you anytime soon.

Here’s complete video of my interview with Rik Emmett, from my Youtube channel. Like and subscribe what you find there for more video content.

By July of 1951 Charlie “Bird” Parker was in a period of artistic consolidation, modest commercial success and accelerating personal catastrophe. He was several weeks shy of his 31st birthday and already the world’s most influential jazz musician, an alto saxophone of astonishing grace and invention. His imitators and disciples numbered in the thousands. A growing body of recordings dating back to 1944, which generations of musicians would learn note by note, have ensured that the armies of the faithful would never shrink.

He had less than four years to live. Parker had been addicted since his teens to heroin or, in its absence, whatever he could get. It ate him out from inside. When he died in early 1955 the doctor who signed his death certificate would overestimate his age by nearly 20 years.

But in 1951 he was glad to be home, visiting his mother Addie in Kansas City. A drug bust in New York City had ended better than it could have — a suspended sentence — but his cabaret card, a condition of employment in the Big Apple’s jazz clubs, was suspended. In Kansas City he could rest and dip in and out of an astonishingly vibrant local music scene before trying his luck again in New York.

One night at a party at bandleader Phil Baxter’s house, Parker played seven pieces, accompanied only by a bassist and drummer whose names have since been lost to the record. Somebody switched on a wire recorder. It captured 28 minutes of surprisingly good audio. The material was simple enough. Parker would kick a tune off, improvise with maddening ease through a few choruses, and when he’d had enough, end without warning on a six-note figure drawn from the Sunday movies:

But the presence you get from these recordings doesn’t have a lot of equals in the Parker discography. You hear one of the great minds in this music in three dimensions, the air above and beside and behind him as well as the space he occupies, as he goes through what amounted to proficiency exercises to keep his game up.

The Phil Baxter recordings, never previously released, are the highlight of a significant album that came out just before Halloween on Verve Records, Bird in Kansas City. I’m a little surprised it hasn’t received more attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t be: So much music receives so little attention. But there was a time when fresh tracks by a relaxed Charlie Parker in his prime would have drawn significant coverage. I wanted to tell you about it because of the music’s intrinsic value, and because of the role in its release that was played by a Canadian, Ken Druker, who’s played a central role in bringing a series of previously-unheard jazz performances to public attention.

Druker is Senior VP (Jazz Development) at the Verve Label Group in New York City. I knew him a lifetime ago when he was working for Verve in Montreal and hosting a jazz show on CKUT, McGill’s radio station. In recent years he’s been Verve’s resident vault miner, making a series of significant recordings by long-lost jazz legends public: Stan Getz in New York, Louis Armstrong in London, Ella Fitzgerald in Berlin, John Coltrane in his favourite studio with his greatest band at the peak of their powers.

Because so much of jazz is improvised, each performance is different from any other, and any new recording offers an insight into the artist’s creative process. “The element that sets these recordings apart from most every other Parker recording available is how relaxed Bird sounds on these tracks,” Druker said when I asked him about the Kansas City release. “It makes sense. He’s at home amongst friends and, in the case of the Baxter recording, playing in the basement of a friend’s home. In addition, the rhythm section players don’t solo and there are no other soloists waiting to jump in as soon as Bird ends. He has as much or as little room as he likes on each song and it lends these recordings a certain sense of ease or lightness that’s unique in his discography.”

The Parker release — rounded out with some earlier informal recordings at the Vic Damon studio and some previously-unheard 45s that featured Parker as a soloist with pianist Jay McShann’s band — are a handy reminder of the importance of Parker’s Kansas City roots. The border town between Kansas and Missouri was a hotbed of early jazz. Count Basie, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Hot Lips Page and dozens of other figures came from Kansas City or stayed there for extended periods. In his extensive liner notes, Druker’s co-producer Chuck Haddix, a Kansas City historian and archivist, describes the ferment of Kansas City in the 1930s: as many as 50 clubs at a time operated in a 12-block area between 12th and 18th streets. Bands would play dances until 2 am, then the after-hours sessions would roll until well after dawn. It was an inherently competitive situation for hundreds of musicians.

Charlie Parker was silenced as a teenager when Basie drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at the floor of the Reno Club to announce that Parker wasn’t ready. He retreated to his mom’s house and practiced from morning to night, logging what Malcolm Gladwell would later call his 10,000 hours, and when he went back into the clubs, no player anywhere could match him for quick-witted harmonic ingenuity.

But it’s not just that he rose from this soil, it’s that in important ways he never left it. For all the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of the “bebop” language he developed with Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and a few others, Parker stayed close to the music’s home virtues, as practiced in his home town for crowds that expected to dance and carouse. He never stopped playing the blues, swinging hard, and leaning into the pretty notes in a melody.

It’s the fact that everything on the new release was recorded in Parker’s hometown that made it worth putting on the market, Druker said. The album isn’t just a display of extraordinary virtuosity, it’s a story about a legendary man’s roots and life.

“The question as to whether a particular newly-discovered recording needs to be released is a key element of my job,” Druker said. “The first issue is whether the musical performance captured is noteworthy or sheds light on the musician’s artistry. In the case of artists like Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, I’ve yet to hear a performance that doesn’t meet those criteria.

“So then you consider the recording quality—and there can be a fairly wide range of what’s acceptable. You would always like a pristine, professional recording whenever possible, but that’s not usually what we’re working with. In the case of something like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle, I would hardly call the original recording pristine. But because of the unprecedented opportunity to hear the A Love Supreme suite played live in its entirety and with an expanded band that included Pharoah Sanders, we balance the importance and quality of the music itself against the recording quality (which, in the end, is always ameliorated by the Herculean efforts of our audio engineers).

“That, then, leads to the third consideration: Is the ‘story’ of the recording something that can help attract listeners and add character to the entire project?” In the case of the Parker recordings, which show the music’s pre-eminent creative force in a period of relative calm, that’s definitely the case.

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Music of 2024

It’s almost the end of the year and I haven’t put out a list of my favourite recordings of 2024. I’ve been writing about music for as long as I’ve been writing about anything, and taking stock is a way for me to decide what I found significant, lasting or especially promising in the year’s recordings.

There’s more jazz here than in recent lists. It was a good year for jazz. But other genres sneaked onto the list too.

In no particular order:

1. Vanisha Gould, She’s Not Shiny, She’s Not Smooth (Cellar Live)

2. Samara Joy, Portrait (Verve)

Two of the leading figures in the current renaissance of jazz vocals. You’re likelier to have heard of Samara Joy, the Bronx wunderkind, just turned 25, who won the Grammy for Best New Artist a few years ago. It takes guts, given that trajectory, to make an album as rich and complex as this. Arrangements come from the members of a new eight-piece band. A lesser vocalist would get lost in these charts; Joy soars over them.

Vanisha Gould is less known, less glamorous, but she has lots to say and she’s impatient to say it. This is the New Yorker’s third album in two years, and it best showcases a tough, matter-of-fact songwriting style that reminds me of Nina Simone and Carmen McRae. If Gould’s young peers aren’t already covering her songs, they soon will, or should.

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Daniil Trifonov, My American Story: North (Deutsche Gramophon)

The Russian-born pianist has grown up in the U.S., and he’s been taking notes. Trifonov is a virtuoso soloist and a charismatic force on a concert stage, but what makes him a leading figure in classical music is his cheerful eccentricity. This double-album survey of American literature makes choices nobody else would: Gershwin’s Concerto in F, John Adams and some nicely spiky Aaron Copland, sure, but also movie music, jazz transcriptions from Art Tatum and (less successfully) Bill Evans, and a meaty new concerto from Mason Bates. The basic argument: a society as big and wild as America needs to be tackled in big and wild ways. Back in the monoculture days, an album like this would have rocketed across the headlines. Now you needed me to tell you about it.

Patricia Brennan, Breaking Stretch (Pyroclastic)

Evidence that there can still be something new under the sun. Mexican-born and classically-trained, Brennan approaches the vibraphone for its textural possibilities in a large ensemble that strikes me as a kind of underground all-star band: Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon on saxophones. Brennan’s compositions recall the music Dave Holland and Steve Coleman were making in the 1980s, but like them, she’s working on her own terms.

Kurt Elling/ Sullivan Fortner, Wildflowers Vol. 1 (Edition)

They decided to make the album one night, booked a handy studio and by the following week it was out. It’s nominated for a Grammy, if that means anything. Elling is my age, and he should maybe be settling into some sort of congenial semi-retirement, but instead the Chicago singer has been jumping into one remarkable new partnership after another for nearly a decade: Branford Marsalis, Danilo Perez, and now this. Sullivan Fortner is the pianist everyone’s talking about this year. Usually he plays with Cécile McLorin Salvant, but his endless inventiveness and careful ear make him popular with any singer who can get him. Here he and Elling play standards and a Mumford and Sons tune, because why not. McLorin Salvant drops by for one song. It’s all so casually, offhandedly brilliant. A masterpiece by midnight.

Grace Bowers and the Hodge Podge, Wine on Venus (Grace Bowers Music)

The Nashville-based blues-rock guitarist — think Clapton or Santana, then realize those comparisons aren’t wildly out of place — just turned 18. She shreds convincingly on her Gibson, of course. But what kept me coming back was the generosity of this debut album and the band it showcases, especially the way Bowers shares the solo spotlight with a second guitarist, left-handed Fender slinger Prince Parker.

Caroline Shaw, So Percussion, Rectangles and Circumstance (Nonesuch)

It’s 11 years since Shaw became the youngest winner of a Pulitzer Prize for composition. She’s made it clear since then that she’s the real deal, distinctive and engaging. She worked with Kanye West, but don’t hold that against her, and she wrote the music for that very smart Fleishman is in Trouble miniseries. Here she joins with the percussion ensemble So Percussion for a suite of art songs that should appeal to a broad audience. The best whatever-this-is since Philip Glass’s Songs From Liquid Days? Maybe.

MGMT, Loss of Life (Mom+Pop)

The ’80s called. They want their brilliantly crafted synth-pop back. And they can’t have it.

Julian Lage, Speak To Me (Blue Note)

The most ambitious album yet from the most accomplished and well-rounded American guitarist since John Scofield and Pat Metheny. As I’ve written before, I hope Lage keeps pushing the boundaries of his considerable talent, but this is a hefty down-payment on wonders yet to come: Lage plays more acoustic than electric, augments his trio with skronking saxophone and Kris Davis’s ornery piano, and takes as many esthetic cues from alt-rock — via producer Joe Henry and Lage’s wife Margaret Glaspy — as from anything jazz. This is the kind of album people used to make when anything seemed possible. It still is.

Two guys from Sarnia meet in Toronto.

“Where did you live?” I asked Donovan Woods.

“Bond Street.”

I was not expecting this answer. “I lived on Hollands Avenue,” I said.

The two streets are a block apart. I’m 14 years older than Woods and I left town young, but we would surely have been neighbours at least briefly.

“No fuckin’ way,” Woods said. “What number?” 

I told him. We grew up in the same block, a block apart. His best friend grew up across the street from me, or at least from my parents after I left for university. “We could see each other’s bedrooms between the houses.”

Each of us asked detail questions to nail the geography down. “So, there was the park, and then there was the first house after the park…” Woods said.

“…We were the second house,” I said.

“That’s fucking wild. That’s like 90 feet from where I grew up.” Woods, a singer-songwriter of considerable repute who now divides his time between Toronto, Nashville and the road, took a moment to consider the surprises life serves up.

“Great toboggan hill back there,” he said at last.

It’s true. My house was on a string of properties that jutted partway into a nice big park that was mostly grassy field, but Parks and Rec put a single low-slung hill there when I was a kid. You could run up the hill, roll down it, or in winter, ride a plastic sleigh down it. This multiplied the neighbourhood’s recreation options.

“My friend once drove his mom’s Dodge Grand Caravan up that hill,” Woods said. All right. Now we were getting somewhere.

“So we had this friend named Greg, who has died since. But he was really into his Jeep, and he would drive up that toboggan hill to prove how awesome his Jeep was. And then my friend Wes was like, ‘My fuckin’ mom’s Grand Caravan could do that.’ And he drove his mom’s minivan up it, with, like, five of us in the back of it. And it locked up at the top, and we started sliding sideways. We were all leaning over to make sure it didn’t roll. It was inches from rolling his Mom’s minivan down the toboggan hill.”

This was an excellent hometown story. I offered another data point. “Do you know that Kim Mitchell song, Patio Lanterns?”

“Yeah.”

“Because apparently he lived near Bond Street, and there was a house on Bond that had patio lanterns.” 

Mind blown, Woods pushed back. “No. Really? I’d heard a story about that, but I didn’t know it was Bond Street.”

To be fair, I have never had any hard evidence about the location of Kim Mitchell’s patio lanterns. “Well, the thing is, any house in Sarnia that had patio lanterns, you would tell yourself, ‘That is Kim Mitchell’s.’” 

“Well, they may well have been,” Woods allowed.

We spent a few more minutes mapping the contours of our now-shared childhood reality. NHL players who once lived nearby. The eternal, pointless and mostly harmless fights between kids at the public elementary school we both attended and kids at the Roman Catholic school next door, which no longer stands, although the end came peacefully.

Eventually I asked about music, and the rest of today’s post will read a bit more like an interview with a singer-songwriter. But here’s the thing about Donovan Woods, whose new album is superb even by his usual standards and whose tour will bring him to 16 Canadian cities and 10 in the United States before Christmas: For a second there, it got pretty scary in Wes’s mom’s minivan on the toboggan hill.

In eight or nine albums, depending how you count them, and an EP since 2007, Donovan Woods has become a fixture in Canadian music, a singer-songwriter who favours quiet miniatures on simple themes: Life, love, missed opportunities, family. He’s built roomy. He plays the guitar and sings in a small, high-pitched voice with a note of confession. His between-song patter is incongruously hilarious. Every year he ranks the Great Lakes, with never any explanation for changes from year to year. This year was a good year for Lake Huron.

A lot of people haven’t heard of him. Among those who have, some work themselves up to a level of devotion that still surprises him. Sometimes people show him lyrics he wrote that they’ve tattooed on their bodies. I mentioned to another Ottawa-based journalist I was going to Toronto to interview him: she gasped and threw her hands up to her mouth, as though I had announced some important and beautiful news. “I would not be able to keep my shit together,” my colleague said.

When he was a kid in Sarnia, Woods’s sister knew he would never be good at sports, because look at him, so she told him he’d need another skill to meet girls. “Really good advice,” he says now. He took guitar lessons for half a year from Terry Titian, who played and sang in every bar in town and some outside, and who is since deceased.

“I immediately started making up songs. I did it kind of compulsively. I didn’t play them for anybody, but I made up a lot of things.”

At the University of Guelph he started in political science and then switched to English and theatre studies. Maybe he could be an actor. “I guess I just wanted to feel I was special enough to be famous.”

He didn’t play music for people or money until he moved to Toronto. He’d play open mikes and songwriters’ circles at The Central on Markham Street or C’est What down on Front Street. Very close to zero of the people in those venues would have been there to hear Donovan Woods sing.

“When I listen to those songs now, I can hear — you know there’s that David Byrne book where he’s like, the history of music is the history of the places where it was played? I can hear I’m writing songs only to serve that purpose. Only to serve quieting people down in a bar, and proving that I can play the guitar and that I can sing. They all start with a sort of flourish of guitar, and the first verse is a big huge note that’s quite long so I can prove that I can do what I’m doing. They’re not about anything. They’re just a showcase of skills.”

Eventually you move past rhyming exercises and crowd control. “In that period, I would have written the first songs that made some sense. One of those was ‘My Cousin Has a Grey Cup Ring,’ which is about my dad’s cousin.”

“Of all the things I want in life,” the song goes, “Well he's got a car, and a beer, and a wife/ And he's not jealous of the way I sing/ But I'm jealous of that Grey Cup ring.”

“That was kind of the first song I made that had a narrative, that made sense and was linear. I thought, ‘OK, this is good. I can play this for people.’ But it would have been 20 years of writing songs before I had one that I thought was good.”

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Today he is a prolific songwriter. He works with a lot of songwriting partners. He writes songs for other singers. I get the impression it’s as much social as business, like grabbing a coffee. Woods wrote “Man-Made Lake” with Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies. He edits other people’s songs. From the way he talks, he sounds unsentimental about it and hard to impress.

On the radio, or on streaming or however the universe delivers musical surprises these days, he sometimes recognizes his songwriting partners’ styles. While Christie Vuong was taking photos for this article, Woods barked out a few lines from a Luke Combs tune, “Beer Never Broke My Heart.” A real banger. The way the lyrics define the rhythm — “Lawng — Nehck — Ahce — Cowld — Beer never broke mah Hahhrt” — sounded like his colleague Jonathan Singleton. And indeed Singleton did work on the song.

This business of collaboration is one of a few ways a gap appears between the feelings a song can evoke — an intimacy, a recognition, a moment of truth and honesty — and the fact that the song is a construct. It’s a thing you make that stands in for a feeling. “Man-Made Lake” inserted one of Ed Robertson’s childhood memories inside one of Woods’s childhood locales, so it describes a feeling neither of them actually had growing up.

“You couldn’t fact-check these songs. And the people they’re about, they would not even agree to the characterizations. I’ve had people recognize themselves in songs. They’re always mad.”

But if you do it well — if you learn your technique and you edit yourself and you listen to the sounds in your own head — you can make a thing that sounds like the truth. Even if it gets there by an odd path. “Do you know the Bob Dylan song, “Isis?”

Barely. It’s on Dylan’s 1976 album Desire, the second track, after an opening song called “Hurricane” that is so astonishing I usually just listen to “Hurricane” again.  

Woods reminded me the story of “Isis.” “He gets married to someone and then he has to go rob a grave with a guy. And then somebody dies and then he steals jewels from a pyramid and he goes back…”

He finally abandoned the plot summary. “To get the feeling of what it feels like in a dead-end marriage with somebody who doesn’t love you, you have to tell a story about robbing a pyramid with a guy who dies in a sandstorm. For some reason, exaggerating something is more true than the truth. Because the truth is stunted and boring. Particularly as a man, you’re not able to communicate the sadness or the frustration of the feeling that you’re having.”

It’s true, I said. What usually happens when you’re a man and you’re sad is that, instead of robbing a pyramid, you go home and you eat soup right out of the can.

Woods nodded. “And you sleep on a couch, and you don’t talk to anyone for a long time. You can write about that, but — and I don’t even write much of the stuff that’s tremendously exaggerated. But something has to be happening in a song.”

I asked: For a guy who wrote hundreds of songs before he performed one, and who enjoys very little about the trappings of the music business, is performing the point? Or is performing just this thing you have to do so you’ll be allowed to write more songs?

“It’s a little bit of both. It’s so true: you don’t know about a song — and often you don’t even know what it’s about or what it does — until you do it in front of people. Talking about this contains artists’ language that I always hate to use, but there’s an exchange of energy between people. Some songs hold. Others just sort of float off, and you know it immediately. Then you can say, ‘Well, I didn’t play it well enough,’ and you can try again. And you may be right. But more than likely, if something floats off, it’s [because it’s] not quite good enough.” 

So audiences are like a test medium, the agar in a petri dish that helps you determine whether you’ve written something that will thrive? Indeed, he said. He’s scheduled some Ontario shows next year for the sole purpose of audience-testing new songs to see if they work right.

“I feel lucky every time a new one is good. It’s so hard to write a good song. Like, an unassailable song? I think I’ve probably done it four times. I might have four songs that no one in the world could say shit about. You could say you don’t like it, but you can’t say it’s not good.”

Which songs?

“I think ‘Portland, Maine’ is pretty much unassailable. I think that song ‘Next Year’ — you could say that’s not your thing, but it does the exact thing it’s supposed to do. And I think ‘Back for the Funeral’ is probably one.”

Here are those three songs in order. “Back for the Funeral” is on the new album, and we’ll talk some more about it.

“Your hometown’s just the first place you don’t understand/ And your family’s just strangers you know like the back of your hand.” That’s a good lyric.

I’ve been trying to meet Woods since 2022, when I started listening closely to his albums and I thought the Sarnia thing would be a good hook for a story. We were going to meet in May 2022 in Ottawa, but I had to cancel. I had to go home for a funeral in Sarnia. My mom’s.

Parallel lives, once again. “Sorry to hear about the funeral,” Woods messaged me at the time. “I was just in Sarnia a couple weeks back for a double funeral Saturday: 11am and then 1pm.”

One of those funerals became the basis for the song “Back for the Funeral.” Greg, the guy who used to drive his Jeep up the toboggan hill, died, and it wasn’t clear whether he meant to. “There was no clarity.”

“The sick part” of double-funeral day in Sarnia, Woods says after a brief pause, “is that it was really fun. We all got to see each other. We got to go to two events. We all went out afterward. And then we all got COVID.”

“Back for the Funeral” pops out from the other tracks on Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now, Woods’s latest album. He’s been talking about the album on his social-media channels as a bit of a breakthrough. The reviews have suggested similar things. “A masterclass in vulnerable storytelling,” one said. The cover illustration is a photo of Woods bringing the cake out for his wife’s 40th birthday.

He buys the notion that this album is different from the ones before it. “The last couple, whether consciously or not, I was trying to become successful. And on this one I’m not. I’ve stopped.”

What led him to concentrate on the material instead of on the effect it would have?

“I just had a hard couple of years.”

His main songwriting collaborator, Abe Stoklasa, died, in a way that permitted multiple interpretations, like Greg the Jeep guy from home. “At the time he died I hadn’t spoken to him in a number of months because he was upset at me.

“And apart from that, I just had a big reckoning. It occurred to me that I was not doing life correctly.” He’d gone through a divorce, snowballing musical success, a new relationship, remarriage. About the bad stuff that preceded the good stuff, he said, “I don’t think I ever grieved or… just did that properly. What I ended up with was a public-facing person — and then who I really was. I was just not living values.”

As he was sorting through all of this, Stoklasa died, last November. “And I just thought, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ I started to do a lot of therapy. I just felt so unwell.”

If you’re lucky, talking to a therapist gives you some ability to observe your own reactions with some objectivity, as well as some tools for talking about what’s going on inside. “Men need therapy so intensely. I wish they weren’t resistant to it. We’re not great at things! Even just articulating pain, like saying, ‘I am sad that my friend died.’”

The album title came up while Woods was spending time with a friend who was also in therapy. Practice calling your feelings by their names, good and bad, they’d both been told. “One time he was like, ‘Things were never good if they’re not good now.’” That went straight onto the next album cover, precisely because it’s a jarring sentiment in a world where everything feels like it’s coming apart.

Was it weird to be working through all of this internal stuff while he was touring and performing? Sure, but it also reminded him of the importance of making the effort. Because anyone who lives in the public eye has to be careful not to mistake the more dramatic moments for any healthy version of real life.

“It’s a really nice feeling to come out on a stage and have people react the way your colleague did, to have people gasp upon the sight of you,” Woods said. “I mean, it doesn’t get much more affirming than that. But I think it knocks your homeostasis out of whack, to a certain degree.

“That level of kindness, when it’s given to you — I mean, most people don’t usually receive a roomful of people applauding them. Maybe at your wedding? And then maybe never again? So to even receive that is pretty weird. So to have it as your baseline for being appreciated, and then you go home and you’re just irritating to your spouse — you’re out of whack, a little bit.”

The solution, or the elements of a resolution, lies in learning to live your life instead of hiding from it, or wishing for another life. At a certain point in your life, that kind of serenity comes a little more easily.

“I’ve crested the hill of going-concern-ness. My ceiling is visible. Everyone can see what it is. It’s this. It’s this. The rooms are big enough. Nothing much beats a room for 700 people with 700 people in it. The returns are diminishing after that.”

Donovan Woods performs Thursday at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, ON. A fall tour, with stops from Cape Breton to Victoria to Nashville, will follow. Details of the tour are here.

1. Ask Me Now

I’m not sure what people have against piano benches this season. Within a few hours on Friday night at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, I saw two pianists, separated by 43 years in age and by a comparable stylistic distance, but who both devoted much of their concerts to standing upright over their keyboards.

I think they were even channeling different influences. Joey Alexander, a 20-year-old Indonesian who last played Montreal when he was 13, seemed to be trying to get closer to the deep impressionism of Keith Jarrett, who would often fiddle endlessly with the height adjustment on his bench before departing altogether from its comforts. Jean-Marie Pilc, a 63-year-old Frenchman who has been teaching for nearly a decade at McGill University, seemed to draw his permission, if little direct influence, from Thelonious Monk, who would sometimes get up from his piano to dance during his bandmates’ bass or drum solos.

Alexander is doing everything right for a musician his age. He checks out a wide range of stylistic options, hires more experienced bandmates and gives them plenty of leeway, resists the urge to fish for applause with cheap dazzle. But it takes time to integrate influences and find a voice. Pilc has been on that road for three times as long as Alexander has been alive, and the old-man ills that sometimes accompany experience — complacency, fatigue, the narrowness that comes from digging deep ruts — are not close to catching up with him. So of the two pianists, as I raced from venue to venue at the 44th edition of the world’s largest jazz festival, it was Pilc who stood out more strongly in my memory.

Pilc was playing the Dièse Onze, a very good basement jazz club on St. Denis Street, with two Americans, bassist Sam Minae and drummer Jerad Lippi. In a video on his Instagram page, Pilc says, “I think wisdom is very overrated. I prefer childishness.” He combines formidable technical resources with a child’s wide-open attitude about the possibilities of playtime.

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Pilc’s departures from contact with his piano bench came in two different ways. Sometimes he and his bandmates would build up momentum with simple fragments of melody and groove, repeated through long crescendos to a concluding crash, and Pilc would find himself launched past the top end of the keyboard as if against his will. Other times he would stand straight and spend long seconds considering the keyboard from above, arms at his sides, like an army general pondering a battle map.

Or a kid planning a Minecraft campaign. That may be the better analogy, because Pilc and his colleagues like to build out a tune in directions none seemed to anticipate. A four-note accompanying figure might shift from background to foreground and then be pressed into service as a central theme for the next few minutes. A bass solo might begin before the bassist knew to plan for it. Long vamps could extend any part of a tune’s structure, or act as a pontoon bridge to another tune. I’m pretty sure I know when the trio started playing George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” but I have no idea when they stopped, because after a while it was just something else. It was barely “Summertime” even while it was “Summertime.” Some time later it was the Miles Davis tune “Nardis.” The number of stops along the way was indeterminate.

A note about navigating this long post: All photos are by Hasan Shaaban, an extraordinary photographer with long experience covering combat in his native Lebanon. He was a Massey journalism fellow in 2023-24 and now lives in Montreal. If you’re reading this on my website, click on any photo to see it nice and big.

The post’s title and all the mini-chapter titles are the names of jazz compositions, either standards or pieces by the musicians discussed here. Sometimes one of my goals when writing is just to please myself.

There’s no paywall on this post because I want the musicians to be able to see what I wrote. But if you are glad somebody is writing seriously about music as well as politics, I always encourage you to consider becoming a paid subscriber:

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2. Deluge

The surprise is that a massive cultural and social event like the FIJM still finds room for intimate moments of discovery like Pilc’s club gig. If I’m honest, I’m no longer entirely sure why I still seek such moments out and write about them. All I know is that I have been writing about this music for as long as I’ve been writing about anything else, and it still feels good to spread the word.

If music criticism weren’t already dead, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal might finish it off. The thing is too big to assess, or even to experience in any comprehensive way. The festival rolled into Montreal’s downtown core this year the way it always does — with a crash, like the parted Red Sea roaring back after Charlton Heston lowers his arms in The Ten Commandments. Montrealers, by now well used to the spectacle, seemed more pleased with their fate than Yul Brynner’s legions were with theirs.

I counted 28 concerts or other events in the program on only the festival’s first day. There would be nine more days like it. I threw everything I had at that first night and still managed to hear only five concerts, or enough of them to leave with an opinion. Which means I missed five times as much as I heard.

At the dawn of my career, at the Montreal Gazette, we had five writers assigned full-time to splitting up and assessing each of the festival’s paid indoor concerts for the next day’s paper. Festival season would kick off with a five-hour “planning meeting” at our favourite wine bar in mid-June. A month later, after the last notes faded, I would hang my liver on the shower rod to dry out and toughen. (A decade after I left the Gaz I stopped drinking, retiring my liver like a Habs jersey.) These days the paper publishes advance articles about a few festival shows ahead of time but carries no reviews. The French papers run very few. Copy deadlines are earlier, newsroom staffs smaller than they were.

3. Familiar Flower

It felt deliciously old-fashioned to return to Montreal with a pen and notepad for this year’s festival. The first concert of a festival always feels special, a communal baptism in rhythm and tune. Montrealers, who have been to dozens of summertime concerts if they’ve been to one, fall into familiar rituals, lining up early, scrambling for the best seats. This year my festival began with Jordan Officer, a local stalwart of the hollow-body electric guitar. The venue was Studio TD, a two-storey club on Ste. Catherine Street huddled close around its stage. At 150 seats, Studio TD is one-eighth the size of Le Spectrum, the legendary club that used to sit across the street and that it has to some degree replaced, but a night there still feels like an occasion despite the smaller dimensions.

Officer used to anchor the Susie Arioli Band, a venue for the poised delivery of courtly old jazz songs. On most nights Arioli, a light-voiced and unassuming singer, and Officer were the whole band. They parted on cordial terms and he’s been leading his own bands for more than a decade now. In 2020 he released three albums simultaneously, titled Jazz, Blues, and Country. He works at the confluence of those mighty rivers, never a dazzling picker but comfortable in his skin. The night marked the release of a new album, Like Never Before. Introducing the material to an audience that’s heard him many times felt like a conversation that resumes after years as though it had never paused.

Later on that first night another guitarist mined similar stylistic territory in a band with the same guitar-bass-drums instrumentation. Julian Lage, born in California 36 years ago, was a child prodigy who’s grown into a commanding presence. There’s as much Duane Eddy and Les Paul in Lage’s sound as classic jazz, a mythic American twang. Casually dressed and congenial behind an eternal three-day beard, he is for my money the most impressive guitarist to come along since the Berklee trinity of Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Bill Frisell rose in the 1970s.

Montreal audiences sure love a visiting guitar hero. The two guys sitting next to me at the Lage concert chatted excitedly about effects pedals until the house lights went down. Each time a chorus from Lage became a lesson in tension and release, the pedal guys would tremble with excitement, quickly reaching an almost mitotic level of physical agitation.

This was the second time I’ve heard Lage in concert and I will make sure it’s not the last. But I suspect when the sums are added it will stand as one of his weaker outings.

For five years he has led a trio with the Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder and the drummer Dave King, a beefy guy in a work shirt and a knit cap whose close interaction with Lage gives the band much of its unity and personality. The trio’s stock in trade is tuneful, loose-limbed original compositions that teeter enticingly in extended harmonic turnarounds before landing satisfyingly on the tonic. But that playbook feels more limited through overuse than it did the last time Lage played here in 2022. Lage’s extraordinary new album, Speak To Me, produced by the singer-songwriter Joe Henry, reads as a conscious decision to chart multiple paths toward fresher ground: acoustic guitars, larger ensembles, classically influenced complexity or alt-rock simplicity. Lage brought some of the album’s tunes but little of its freshness to Montreal. He’s too good to disappoint altogether, but his breakthrough performance will have to await a future visit.

4. Forget Everything You’ve Learned at School

Any event this large is a choose-your-own adventure. Most festival-goers wander through the downtown streets around Place des Arts, where assorted outdoor stages offer constant variety with no cost and no entry quiz. There’s not even much reason to know who you’re hearing. You just move toward the sounds you like and away from the rest. There are concession stands and the people-watching is epic. Only a few committed jazzheads approach these weeks the way cinephiles strategize for TIFF. I’m a strategizer. One of my goals was to hear two of the more intriguing young trumpeters of the age.

Adam O’Farrill brought his quartet Stranger Days from Brooklyn to what’s billed as the Molson Pub, an aluminum-frame tent covering part of a concrete floor across the street from Place des Arts. (Times have changed: when I lived in Montreal, Labatt had a lock on the jazz festival franchise.) The Molson Pub is where a lot of the festival’s straight-ahead jazz happens, while the sounds of louder goings-on from other stages bleed through the walls of the tent. It works surprisingly well. The crowds are a pleasant mix of aficionados and people who didn’t have anywhere else they needed to be.

O’Farrill and his brother Zack, the drummer in Stranger Days, are sons of Arturo O’Farrill, the Afro-Latin big-band composer and educator I wrote about in December. They often perform in their father’s ensembles, and they share with him a set of musical interests that extend well beyond Latin jazz. In fact Stranger Days doesn’t particularly sound like the father’s bands at all. It’s a tough two-horn quartet, with Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone and Walter Stinson on bass. O’Farrill throws lots of little curve balls in his compositions, scraps of unison melody to end or launch a solo, cues for the band to switch rhythms. The overall effect is of a band that’s always concentrating. Free but not particularly interested in abandon. Those who like it, like this New York Times reviewer, like it a lot.

So did the audience. During a long exchange of four-bar phrases between O’Farrill and Del Castillo, the audience started roaring its approval after each of O’Farrill’s contributions. He’s an agile trumpeter with a tart edge in his sound. He’s listened to a century’s worth of hall-of-fame trumpeters but he wears their influence lightly, so you never know what he’ll play next. The critic Whitney Balliett once called jazz the sound of surprise, a label I’ve long found almost entirely useless. But what the hell, sometimes it’s the sound of surprise, and the crowd for Stranger Days ate it up.

Across the street in a plush-seat room at Place des Arts usually reserved for theatre, one of O’Farrill’s influences had concerts on two consecutive nights. Ambrose Akinmusire is 42, from Oakland, California. He’s a couple of years past the end of a contract with Blue Note Records that produced a succession of elaborate albums with ensembles of various sizes and makeups. The through line in all of it was Akinmusire’s lush, gorgeous trumpet sound. He once told an interviewer that he spent his formative years trying to make the trumpet sound like a French horn. This is impossible, but judging from the result, it was worth trying.

The string of concept albums on Blue Note ended, and these days Akinmusire plays in more intimate settings, often trios or duets. In Montreal he played his first concert solo, just him and his trumpet. I didn’t attend, but the night permitted Hasan Shaaban to take the eerily beautiful photo that’s at the top of this post. The next night I showed up to hear Akinmusire play duets with British bassist Dave Holland, who’s 77 and has been a ready partner for musical adventurers since he joined Miles Davis’s band in 1968.

I’m going to say it was a swing and a miss. Akinmusire’s scrappy 2017 live album from the Village Vanguard was called A Rift in Decorum. This concert was mostly decorum. Tempos were slow or absent. Both men read from sheet music that seemed unfamiliar to them. Holland’s extraordinary musical intelligence was in play, and that sound Akinmusire gets from his horn remains compelling, so the concert had its moments. But the collaboration never lifted.

I’ve spent many nights in rooms like that. I’m increasingly comfortable with leaving them. Does music really need tempo or a defined objective? Of course not. Does that seat really need my ass in it? Same answer.

5. Give Me A Reason

Between the smaller venues where I spent most of the weekend and my hotel is the Place des Festivals, an esplanade covering a full city block west of Jeanne Mance Street. It’s the clearest of many signs that nearly half a century of summer festivals have physically shaped Montreal’s downtown core. Without much prep time, the Place des Festivals can easily hold 40,000 people to watch a concert on what, during the jazz festival, is called the Scène TD, the city’s largest outdoor stage. Video towers carry images from the stage to the folks at the back. The crowd size can double if the act onstage is big enough and people don’t mind getting cozy.

Music on the Scène TD is more often jazzy than jazz, but it’s usually at least interesting. Besides, pleasing crowds is its own challenge, and bands fail often enough. Walking westward on Saturday from what I thought was my last jazz festival concert of the year, I paused to watch Dominique Fils-Aimé take the big stage.

Montreal-born from Haitian parents, Fils-Aimé brings a sultry voice and warm personality to a succession of meticulously crafted albums. Her first three releases, from 2017 to 2021, form a trilogy that explored the roots of Black American music: blues, jazz and R&B. Her latest album, Our Roots Run Deep, launches a new trilogy on more personal themes.

Anyone who conceives her albums in sets of three must be ambitious. Can she deliver? I’ll say. (This brief video gives you a sense of her work.) Guitars, keyboards, percussionists, a backup vocal choir and a trumpet soloist gave her a lot to work with. She managed not to be overwhelmed by everything else that was going on onstage. The crowd — not one of the largest this park has seen, but that will change when she returns — was rapt. Music doesn’t always have to be about leaving everything to chance, and sometimes the point of a jazz festival isn’t how much jazz is in it, but whether it’s festive. On Saturday, it was.

• The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal runs through July 6. Most concerts are free. Here’s the program. Good luck navigating it if you’re a newbie. In a lot of ways the best strategy is just to go.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 in D isn’t on many lists of his greatest works. He wrote it in 1788 when he was 22, visiting Paris with his mother on a job hunt that would not end well. He designed the piece to be crowd-pleasing. It begins by pounding four times on the tonic note, the most satisfying sound in a scale, and it doesn’t get much subtler after that.

But it’s characteristic Mozart: the way it develops its themes, the play of long and short notes, the bright surface and myriad details, could only be his work. For a quarter of a millennium, orchestra players have needed to know how to play stuff like this. So for the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s purposes on Friday morning, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Alexander Shelley, the Ottawa-based orchestra’s music director, waved his conductor’s baton to stop the musicians in mid-stream. He addressed the woodwinds and brass sitting at the back of the orchestra, behind the string players. They were holding notes longer than the strings when everyone played the same phrase, he told them. It’s “one of the things that you could pick up on more quickly —without it necessarily being said from me,” he said mildly. It would help, he added, if they “use a visual cue, please, from Yosuke.”

Yosuke Kawasaki is the NAC Orchestra’s concertmaster, the lead violinist who sits at the conductor’s left hand. A concertmaster’s playing sets the stylistic tone for every other player in the orchestra. At least it does if they keep an eye on him.

Normally Shelley would not have to remind anyone to notice the orchestra’s lead player. But this is an unusual month at the NAC, the 55-year-old Ottawa performing-arts campus with a superb resident orchestra.

The orchestra’s annual Mentorship Program is underway. It’s a three-week rehearsal and performance lab for accomplished young musicians who are just starting their orchestral careers. This is the program’s third year. Each spring the orchestra briefly doubles in size, as each veteran player is matched with a young visitor looking for tips on how to navigate the complicated transition from school to a career in music.

“There’s no real substitute for being on the ice with professionals,” Shelley told me after the Friday rehearsal during a brief interview. (I was impressed: Shelley is an upper-class Brit who spent most of his career in Germany before he became the NAC Orchestra’s music director in 2015, but he’s since become fluent in hockey metaphors.)

“There’s a tricky gap between finishing your studies and sitting in a professional orchestra. You’re expected to know a lot of things that you actually end up learning on the fly in the job. And this is supposed to fill that out.”

As a bonus, the mentorship program also fills the orchestra out. The NAC Orchestra is smaller than a lot of first-tier orchestras, often fielding 60 musicians or fewer. This has its charms, but it puts a lot of big late-19th-century and 20th-century repertoire out of reach. But lately, reinforced by the young mentees, the orchestra has been playing two big programs each spring. A Mahler symphony in 2022. Strauss and Holst last year. This week the beefed-up orchestra will perform Ravel’s music for his ballet Daphnis et Chloé. Next week, another Mahler symphony.

The Mahler week is sold out. A few tickets are available only for this week’s program. The orchestra’s audience is starting to realize it’s a good idea to come out while the mentorship program is underway.

The mentorship program’s first week is a kind of boot camp. The orchestra rehearses a bewildering amount of standard repertoire in closed sessions, for rehearsal’s sake, without performing any of it in concert. For Friday’s sessions the musicians prepared parts of works by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. The plan was to cover all of it in a two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal with a single short break.

I wanted to see and hear how the lore is passed down. I asked NAC staff for a seat onstage, surrounded by the orchestra. A chair was procured for me, behind the second violins, with clarinets and flutes to my left, harps to my right, percussion behind. This was my view:

I’ve watched a few conductors rehearse orchestras over the years. Shelley is always impressive in this setting. Orchestra rehearsals are always on the clock. There is never enough time. A conductor needs to keep everyone in a decent mood, reach a shared understanding of how best to serve the composer’s intent, and nail down dozens of details, pages apart, in pieces that will sometimes last an hour in performance. You have to be tremendously efficient.

In a clever promotional video the NAC produced last month in which Shelley critiques movie conductors (Kate Blanchett in Tár, Bradley Cooper in Maestro), he offers some rehearsal philosophy. “When you’re in front of an orchestra of 100 people, these are all absolute experts in their particular field. When you stop them, you have to say something that is really productive, really specific and really clear, and is going to add value to the whole experience. And that, frankly — above and beyond knowing how to control an orchestra with your hands — is the most daunting prospect.”

He’s really good at it. Over the past decade I’ve learned more about how to run an office meeting from watching Shelley rehearse than I did in any office. It’s no surprise that the mentorship program includes two early-career conductors who watch Shelley and sometimes take the podium under his counsel: Soo Jin Chung from Vancouver by way of Juilliard, and Armand Birk from Victoria via Tanglewood.

They both showed real skill. Shelley simply pushes far more information out than they do, with hands, shoulders, a raised eyebrow, a smile or grimace. At one point during the Mozart he pointed at the French horns, then at his eyes, in a universal I-need-you-watching gesture. Not sure they got it, he waved to them with his left hand before their next entry, all while keeping time with his right.

“Great. Thank You!” Shelley said at the end of the first run-through. “Okay, working back…” He flipped pages in his score, looking for spots to fix or tighten.

Immediately, Kawasaki, the concertmaster, turned around and told the first violins: “Play more at the end.” He paused to consider. “A little more. At F.” Leah Roseman, who was working for the day as principal second violin (and who has become a prolific podcaster on music and creativity), turned to give similar counsel to her section. Throughout the string section, veteran NAC Orchestra musicians interpreted and elaborated on the advice for the young mentees sitting next to them.

The productive chatter calmed as Shelley started working on short sections. To the strings, about a burst of short notes rising to a held note: “The challenge, I think in this phrase, is to have the rhythmic precision — but then to let the second measure blossom.” He sang what he had in mind. To the brass and winds, urging them to accent every fourth note in a passage that was already loud: “It’s going to feel ridiculous to you, but then” — he gestured over his shoulder to where an imaginary audience would have been listening — “it'll cut.”

At the rehearsal’s half-hour mark, Shelley tucked away his Mozart score and the musicians started working on the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lighthearted uptempo chase music, written a half-century after the Mozart. Sections of the orchestra that didn’t get to lead anything in the earlier piece now did: the distinctive bitter mid-register violas, then the flutes. At one point the clarinets came in, all over the place, like porridge. Sean Rice, the orchestra’s excellent second clarinetist, chuckled, knowing Shelley would come back to tighten the phrase up. He did.

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At the break, I chatted with some of the NAC Orchestra musicians. Many were a little on edge. They love the chance to meet new young colleagues. I’ve rarely met a good musician who doesn’t teach in some capacity and take it seriously. But this mentorship program isn’t a lark for the experienced pros.

They have to prepare scads of music for these packed rehearsals, then more music they don’t often perform for the concert weeks. And the presence of the mentees, who aren’t privy to the stylistic conventions any orchestra adopts through long years together, means absolutely nothing comes as easily as it usually does. “If we were playing this stuff in a concert tonight, and we sounded like this, I would not be happy,” one of the string players told me.

It’s not a hassle. The mood around the NAC always brightens when the young guest musicians are in town. But it’s work. “It's really like working a different muscle for us NACO musicians,” flute player Stephanie Morin told me later. “We really have to listen and try to think: ‘Okay, what is it that's making this feel differently than when we do it together [in a normal week, without the mentees]? And what advice can I give this person, in like a one-minute space of time, that's gonna maybe create a light-bulb moment?”

Friday morning’s rehearsal would see the orchestra, mentors and mentees, work on a couple more pieces. The Legend of the Kalendar Prince, from a suite of music Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that was inspired by the Thousand and One Nights, was composed a full century after the Mozart. Here, at first, the orchestra all but disappears: melody and atmosphere are carried by a succession of soloists in tag-team fashion. Violin, then bassoon, then oboe, each backed by a harp, before the orchestra finally enters. Later, cello, more oboe, flute, French horn, all playing melodies inspired by the Middle East. Each of the solo parts was played by a young mentee, while the more experienced player in the next chair listened closely.

In concert, it’ll be a mix of NACO pros and visiting mentees in the solo roles. “The orchestra knows that those concerts are about us attaining the highest artistic level, the level we would expect of ourselves if there were no mentees,” Shelley told me later. “So that's where we set the bar. We don't say, ‘Oh yeah, it's okay if it doesn't sound great.’ That's not what we're doing at all… These are proper concerts. We’re live-streaming them. The stakes are as high as they can be in music.” He caught himself and made a self-deprecating of-course-it’s-just-music recovery — “You know, what’s going to happen if something goes wrong?” — but the stakes any good musician feels before a concert are high indeed.

Shelley’s original four-year contract as the leader of this orchestra’s fortunes was extended twice, to 2023 and then to 2026. At that point he’ll have been music director for 11 years, the second-longest tenure in the orchestra’s history. There’s been no announcement about what will happen then.

One thing he’ll have done, in part through this mentorship program, is to help spread word through the industry about this very fine orchestra with an awkward name in an out-of-the-way corner of the classical-music world. Three times now, dozens of promising musicians have visited Ottawa long enough to learn from their NACO peers. They’ll take the news about everything they heard and learned with them when they go home. That’s by design.

“This is an extraordinary orchestra,” Shelley told me when I had finished spending the morning pretending to be part of it. “I wish, still, that it was more widely known internationally. We've been working really hard to try and do that. And we're making progress. But, you know…

“I’m a deep believer in the fact that the only kind of happiness and fulfillment that anybody's ever going to have is in the integrity of their own decisions about the world. So, you know, whether you're famous or not, whether the orchestra is really well-known or not, ultimately is noise. The true satisfaction comes in the integrity of our work.”

The National Arts Centre Orchestra, augmented by guest participants in the orchestra’s Mentorship Program, will perform this Wednesday and Thursday, and next Wednesday and Thursday, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Tickets remain for only this week’s concerts.

Thank heaven for small miracles. For their last Sunday-night gig at Birdland before Christmas, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra packed the joint.

Situated on West 44th Street in midtown Manhattan, Birdland is a big club, 200 seats around cabaret tables and an indeterminate further number of patrons layered around the bar. O’Farrill and his musicians have played there, in one configuration or another, on most Sundays since Bill Clinton was the president. Familiarity would have had plenty of time to breed contempt, or at least apathy, by now. But O’Farrill and his 16 musicians keep finding new things to write and play. So the crowds keep coming.

The early set on December 17 began with an extended solo from alto saxophonist Adison Evans over a parade rhythm from the drums on “Iko Iko,” an ancient New Orleans R&B tune. The rest of the hour was devoted to original compositions and standards from the Latin jazz repertoire. “Vaca Frita,” a piece O’Farrill wrote in tribute to a garlic-laden Cuban beef dish, was followed by “Rumba Abierta,” an arrangement of an old Mario Bauza tune written by O’Farrill’s father, the late big-band composer Chico O’Farrill. Solos from all hands were long, the performances loose and casual. Arturo O’Farrill played traffic cop by crashing out two-fisted cues at the piano, or turning on his bench to gesture to the trombones.

One trumpet player, Bryan Davis, is from England. Another, Rachel Therrien, is from Rimouski, Quebec. Keisel Jimenez, on congas, is Cuban. Evans, the alto saxophonist, is only a few years out of Juilliard and has since spent much of her time playing in stadiums behind Beyoncé, JayZ and Nicki Minaj. It takes a village to raise a roof.

It’s honourable work to fill a club on a weekly basis for decades on end. But if that were all Arturo O’Farrill was up to these days, I would not be writing about him. I went to hear him, and I interviewed him before my trip, because it is becoming clearer that at 63, O’Farrill has become a leading figure in American music. And because his music is about the ways cultures interact across the Americas and across oceans, it is becoming increasingly germane to the current moment. O’Farrill writes music for and about people who have come a long way, or whose routes are blocked by geography or politics. He is writing and performing a soundtrack for an age of migration. He has won six Grammy awards, but he deserves attention beyond the steady recompense of a worthy craftsman.

I began to re-evaluate him when I realized that, for the third time in as many years, he had delivered one of the year’s most remarkable albums in any genre. And the three albums didn’t really even sound like the same guy had made them.

Two of these recent albums are easily described. I will take the long way around to telling you about the third, because it’s turning into the story of a life.

The most recent album of the three that perked my ears up is Legacies, a set of rich improvisations that showcase O’Farrill as a pianist, either solo or with a whip-smart young rhythm section of bassist Liany Mateo and drummer Zach O’Farrill, the pianist’s son. For many listeners it’s forced a re-evaluation of O’Farrill’s merit as an instrumentalist. Turns out he’s not just a composer who can poke out the odd piano solo the way some people type. He is, as the reviewer for Down Beat magazine put it, “one of our greatest living pianists.”

Legacies is O’Farrill’s second album for Blue Note, the legendary record label that still retains a measure of cultural clout in an age of exploded markets and attention spans. The first was 2021’s …Dreaming in Lions…, a pair of dance suites for a 10-piece ensemble that O’Farrill wrote for Cuba’s Malpaso Dance Company. If Legacies is about unconstrained improvisation, …Dreaming in Lions… is about discipline in composition and performance. It’s understated, almost courtly. It nods politely at the minimalist classical compositions of composers like Steve Reich. Clearly written to leave dancers plenty of room to shine, it still rewards repeated close listening. But it lingers afterward as a kind of mystery.

“I have been chaotic for many years,” O’Farrill told me earlier this year on a Zoom call from a tour stop in St. Louis, when I asked him about his deeply varied repertoire. “I never have known how to stay in a lane. In many ways, that's been the strength of my career. And it's also been the bane of many critics. Where do I fit? Am I this, am I that, am I Latino, am I White, am I Black? All these things. Is my music jazz? Is it Latin? Is it contemporary classical? I don't really see the division. That's my problem.”

Fortunately it wasn’t a problem for Don Was, the defiant Detroit eccentric who has been Blue Note’s president for a decade. “When I bought …Dreaming In Lions… to Don Was I was flabbergasted that he enjoyed it,” O’Farrill said. “And even more amazed that he put it out. There are actual pieces on …Dreaming in Lions… that don't have any improvisation — gasp! I mean, Duke Ellington did that, but, you know, it's not part of the accepted language of jazz today.

“When Don said, ‘Well, why don't you go into your roots as a musician, and do a straight-ahead jazz album?’ I was blown away. …I love waving my arms in front of a bunch of musicians. I also love sitting down to the piano and not worrying about 20 people.”

He grew up as the son of a legendary big-band arranger, the Cuban-born Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill, who wrote in the 1950s and 1960s for Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and others. It was Chico O’Farrill’s band that started the long Sunday-night run at Birdland. Arturo was born in Mexico City, moved to New York City at 5, and eventually inherited his father’s band by degrees, first as Chico’s pianist and HR department, then as his successor after Chico died in 2001.

But Arturo has told reporters that growing up, he felt “tremendous ambivalence” about his father’s musical legacy and environment.

Latin jazz, or Afro-Hispanic or Afro-Cuban or Afro-Latin jazz, rose to prominence in the 1940s as a hybrid of Cuban dance music and American big-band music, popularized in the first instance by a singer named Machito and his brother-in-law, trumpeter Mario Bauza. They taught Cuban rhythms to the leading jazz players in New York City, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. At its best the new hybrid expanded the music’s rhythmic possibilities the way bebop had broadened its harmonic vocabulary. Gillespie always said incorporating those rhythms and structures into jazz was the thing that made him proudest.

But big bands and the music of the Cuban diaspora have often been easy to dismiss as party tunes for socialites. From Desi Arnaz to Lou Bega, mambo and salsa music has often been lightweight and unserious. It sure seemed that way to Arturo O’Farrill, who studied classical piano performance at a succession of East Coast conservatories and whose early role models in jazz had nothing to do with congas and puffy shirts. He wanted to play like Herbie Hancock, and his first prestige gig was with Carla Bley, a leading experimentalist who hired him when he was 19 for a gig at Carnegie Hall and kept him in her band for most of the ’80s.

Eventually, he realized that he wasn’t taking a break from seriousness when he played his father’s music and that of his father’s peers. The layers of superimposed rhythm and metre that require an Afro-Latin band to hire extra percussionists provide all kinds of opportunity for a writer or soloist to screw up. So this music offers plenty of what every musical egghead yearns for: a hundred chances a night to reconcile freedom, complexity and risk.

“It's funny because the big band is such a sedentary institution when it's used as a museum organization,” O’Farrill told me. “But when you look at Thad Jones and Duke Ellington and Chico O'Farrill, when they started writing big band music, it wasn't sedentary. They started writing music that was all over the place… To me, this is the opportunity to take a sedentary setting and explode it in wild modernistic ways. And I've enjoyed that. I enjoyed that so much.”

Shortly after Chico died, Arturo O’Farrill was rehearsing for a concert at Lincoln Center with that institution’s resident jazz big band under the direction of the legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The formidable musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra couldn’t manage to nail the phrasing. Soon after, Marsalis asked O’Farrill to take the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, as it was then called, into Lincoln Center as a constituent organization under Jazz at Lincoln Center’s organizational umbrella. The affiliation lasted for about half of the 1990s and offered O’Farrill things he couldn’t get anywhere else: administrative help, plush seats, admiring audiences and peer pressure from one of the most ambitious figures in jazz.

The only thing missing was money. “Wynton was very much the gentleman about it. He sat me down and said, ‘Look, we didn't have a business strategy for you. We didn't have a real philosophical strategy.’ I said, ‘Wynton, did we somehow not — did we fail somehow?’ He said, ‘No, you brought great honor to the House of Swing.’ It was an amicable parting. I took it badly at first. But to be honest with you, to this day, I stay in touch with Wynton. I think he's a huge hero.”

In 2007, back out on his own with neither a father nor a blue-chip cultural institution to catch his fall, O’Farrill started making the decisions that have led, a decade and a half later, to his current position of cultural eminence. “I said, ‘Why can't I do this on my own?’ So I created a nonprofit called the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance.” [The name change, from Afro-Cuban to Afro-Latin, reflected a greatly expanded range of diaspora influences, from Puerto Rico to Mexico to Argentina to Brazil and beyond.]

“I went into a local public school — a dangerous one — and said, ‘Can we teach here?’ I went to my bartender, my local bartender, and borrowed $40,000 dollars to have a performance season. And every year I said, ‘If I meet these goals, I'll continue.” And we kept growing.”

Today the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance pays 47 teaching artists to teach the music of the Afro-Hispanic diaspora in 21 New York City schools. O’Farrill was won six Grammys and two Latin Grammys. The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra tours internationally and has collaborated with many of the leading dance and theatre organizations in the United States.

“And behold, we are building,” O’Farrill said. A group of developers and community associations in East Harlem, the largely Latino neighbourhood of Manhattan known as El Barrio, have come together to build 19 storeys of affordable housing in a building to be called Timbale Terrace. In the kind of zoning swap that many cities promote in a bid to anchor social-development projects in neighbourhoods where there’s a lot going on, O’Farrill’s association will run a cultural and educational space on the first two floors of the building, under the name Casa Belongo. The development weathered a heavy spell of NIMBYism from neighbours who weren’t sure they wanted social housing in their neighbourhood. But the project’s chances of making it into the real world seem to have firmed up in recent weeks.

Casa Belongo? What’s the second word mean? “It has several different derivations, that word. It can mean a spell, it's African, it's Afro-Cuban, it's Spanish, it's a lot of things. But the most important part of that word to me is ‘Belong.’ We're not including. You already belong. We already belong. You and I belong to each other. There's no invitation necessary.”

I have always had a soft spot for leaders and creators who, whatever they thought they were doing, discover they are in the business of building their community. “All I wanted to do was play piano like Herbie Hancock,” O’Farrill said. “All of a sudden, we're teaching kids, we're doing community work, we're doing preservation. And it's a huge thing. It's a huge attempt to create a sense of belonging, for all of us in this music. You don't have to be this or that to enjoy this music. It really does belong to all of us and the culture. All of us. It's part of Canadian culture. It's part of South American culture. It's part of American culture.”

As his ambition has expanded, O’Farrill has blown the doors right off his band’s guest list. He has collaborated with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and pianist Vijay Iyer, whose family roots are in India, and with hip-hop turntablist DJ Logic. Listening back to his recordings as I began to assess his work, it was clear to me that O’Farrill’s 2014 album The Offense of the Drum stands as a kind of manifesto of expanding musical possibility. It features Iyer on piano, Spanish flamenco singer Antonio Lizana, and a rap by Chilo Cajigas about Puerto Ricans’ contributions to American culture:

It sometimes happens that, as an artist’s understanding of his materials expands, his social ambitions grow in pace. Which brings us to the album between …Dreaming in Lions… and Legacies.

At first listen O’Farrill’s 2022 album Fandango at the Wall In New York, which won his latest Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album, is much more of a party than his other recent recordings. It’s loose, festive, a kind of jam session between the Orchestra and some traditional Mexican musicians. But sometimes the background story behind a party matters, and in this case it matters quite a lot.

In 2018 a member of O’Farrill’s board sent him a New York Times article about an odd, inspiring annual ritual that has been taking place at the border between San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico. Every spring since 2008, that spot has become the venue for the Fandango Fronterizo — roughly, the “border jam” between musicians on either side of the border. The common musical idiom for these events is son jarocho, a string-based folk music from the rural Veracruz district in eastern Mexico.

The complication here is that the international border at this particular spot is defined by a tall fence. Even the approaches to the fence are heavily patrolled. The gauge of the fence has increased, its mesh tightened, over the years, so it’s harder for the players on either side to even see their opposite numbers on the other side. “It was very powerful,” Jorge Castillo, the librarian who developed the Fandango Fronterizo, told the Times. “The only thing that can cross besides the birds and the winds is the music.”

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Reading about the border jams, O’Farrill told me, “I thought this was the most elegant artifice I've ever heard of in my life to actually use the elements — the fencing, the chicken wire, the attack dogs, the patrol guards, the automatic weaponry — to use those elements themselves, the very elements of separation and terror, to celebrate humanity and unity. I thought that was the most amazing, amazing thing I've ever read about.”

So O’Farrill assembled some trusted collaborators to reach out to Castillo. “We asked permission to perform there and to perform alongside these musicians, and to bring guests.” Castillo and the committee that runs the Fandango agreed. The following May, O’Farrill showed up with his band, recording equipment and a documentary film crew. The result was the first Fandango at the Wall album and an HBO special (so far unavailable on Crave).

The In New York in the new album’s name is a reflection of the next step in the project, which was to fly all the participants from San Diego and Tijuana and recreate the party in New York City.

Look, who’s fooling who. The Fandango Fronterizo captured the attention of the Times and a performing-arts group from Manhattan because in 2018 the political climate was increasingly fraught. The U.S. president at the time, Donald Trump, had made a massively beefed-up border wall one of his campaign themes. One gets the distinct impression O’Farrill has strong opinions about all this. He prefers not to speak Trump’s name if he can avoid it. But he has no manifesto to offer and no particular interest in deepening political divides. The whole point of the Fandango project, he said, is to bridge divisions.

“While there is a need for borders, there's no need to villainize immigrants, no need whatsoever. That is an aberration of the human principle, let alone the American principle upon which this nation was founded. And so in a way to do this in a non-political setting — just celebrating music and tradition — was a stroke of genius. And that's because of these people. Their ingenuity is that they don't concentrate on the politics, they concentrate on the culture and the framework of art and life and love and all the things that we really hold dear to ourselves.”

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Was any of it lost in translation when they performed it in New York instead of at the border?

“You know, it's funny, son jarocho is not a performance-oriented activity. One of the most beautiful things about son jarocho is that everyone's invited to pick up a jarana and play along.” So the visitors from Tijuana, themselves playing in a musical tradition from another part of Mexico, were comfortable playing it somewhere else with new people.

All of which suggests that the Fandango project needn’t stop its nomadic, redemptive journey at New York. At a time when migration has become a defining story of our time, in the United States, Canada and beyond, perhaps there’s room to repeat a simple, even festive reminder: that people don’t really leave everything behind when they leave everything behind. They bring their humanity with them.

“My dream with Jorge, this project -- I don't know what organization I need to apply to, but it would be a dream of mine, to perform this at the Guantanamo border. At the Canadian border. The demilitarized zone between the Koreas… I bet you there are places where this could easily take place where it could be done with great, great, great, great meaning. Great purposefulness. And it would resonate throughout the world.”

As I began to grasp the scale of O’Farrill’s musical ambition, I started to wonder why he hadn’t yet won the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, or landed one of its annual no-strings grants for creative Americans, the so-called “genius grants.”

But the ways of the MacArthur Foundation are mysterious, and a grant doesn’t make for much of a party. Meanwhile this newsletter is read by people who run some of Canada’s largest performing-arts organizations, and by others who work at one of the capital city’s larger embassies. If musicians from Tijuana and Veracruz and San Diego have already convened under the Brooklyn Bridge to celebrate our essential shared humanity…

…perhaps they could meet again, farther North, to perform with musicians of a hundred diasporas who live and work in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver or Ottawa. Just off the top of my head, I know a nice spot across the river from Ogdensburg, NY. And now I also know a six-time Grammy winner who has begun to hope that from his seat at the piano, he might help change the world.

Tony Bennett died on Friday at 96. In 1990, when I first saw him perform at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, I was not yet 24 and I had no idea how much I didn’t know. My review from that concert for The Gazette was so snotty I’ll spare you excerpts. Old guy in a suit, what does he know, was the general attitude. He was seven years older than I am today.

A year later, correction arrived in the mail. In those days record companies would send boxes of CDs to large newspapers; I had swindled my way into a half-time side gig as the paper’s jazz writer on top of my news-writing duties, and the Bennett compilation Forty Years: The Artistry of Tony Bennett landed on my desk. In some ways, Bennett was easier to appreciate if you could only hear him. Stripped of patter and routine honed in a thousand concert halls, what remained was an extraordinary voice and a seriousness that defeated skepticism.

That compilation ended with a song from what was then Bennett’s latest album, Astoria: Portrait of the Artist. “When Do The Bells Ring For Me” is an oddity, a single chorus, three minutes of crescendo, written by a not particularly illustrious Manhattan cabaret singer named Charles DeForest. To me it’s a nearly perfect song.

In 1997 Bennett was back singing at Place des Arts. He was on the back foot; his regular drummer, Clayton Cameron, was unable to make the gig, so Bennett had called Lewis Nash, a superb jazz drummer, to sub in. They spent the night watching each other, Bennett feeding cues, conducting with a glance or a shrug, Nash catching and orchestrating the hints. The interplay between them made it obvious how much musical skill Bennett had, chops and insight beyond what the road usually required.

At the end of the night Bennett called up a young singer from Nanaimo, a terribly nervous 32-year-old Diana Krall, who sat at the piano while he held a microphone for her. They sang a duet on “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” “The way your smile just beams,” Krall sang, staring into his eyes, “The way you sing —” She caught herself. “You don’t sing off-key.” They would perform together many more times, as would Bennett with kd lang and Lady Gaga. To me, Bennett’s endorsement of another singer was dispositive: if he thought she deserved his company, that settled a debate, if any room for debate still remained.

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I interviewed him once by phone. We talked about art — he was an enthusiastic hobby painter, usually views from his hotel rooms in oils. I mentioned I’d be talking next to Jim Hall, the wonderful jazz guitarist. Bennett shifted gears from amiable to excited. “You’re going to talk to Jim Hall? Could you please say hello to him from me? Tell him I’d really like to play with him.”

In jazz and American popular song, a “standard” is a song that was, usually written for a Broadway show or movie and has become part of the music’s shared vocabulary. Bennett mostly sang standards, of course – ‘I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Sing You Sinners,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” “But Beautiful.”

Of course the word has another meaning. Standards are the expectations a serious person brings to their work. Bennett was in and out of fashion but he stayed in style because he had high standards to the material he chose, the musicians he worked with, and the way they approached their work. As he moved further from Astoria into the world, his work reflected more clearly the influence of the finest jazz musicians — Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Count Basie. You could hear Holiday in the way he bent vowel sounds especially.

I last saw him in New Orleans in 2009. He was in superb form, better than the time before. His longtime pianist Ralph Sharon had retired, to be replaced by an efficient but rhythmically boxy cabaret pianist, but Harold Jones, a veteran of the Count Basie band, was in on drums at the age of 69. As if Bennett was determined that by God, somebody in this band would know how to swing.

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I loved him very much. Here are five albums that make it very clear how serious Tony Bennett was about his standards.

Cloud 7, 1955.

Bennett was five years into a career as a hitmaker when he released his first full-length album in 1955. A surprisingly understated and coherent affair, as though he was already sure enough of more hits that he could afford to pursue less sensational effects. On ballads and mid-tempo swingers, Bennett, still in his 20s, is still green, but the album wears better than much of his ‘50s output.

The Beat of My Heart, 1957.

An astonishing album. Bennett and his new pianist, a low-key but encyclopedic Brit named Ralph Sharon, decided to build an album around the finest jazz drummers. Once again it’s hard to imagine a less commercially-motivated move. Enter Art Blakey, “Papa” Jo Jones, Candido and others on what amounts to an album-length manifesto on the drum’s role in American music. What’s more: Bennett was clearly using his privileged position at the top of the hit parade to get himself close to musicians who could school him in performance practice. One way to last is to remind yourself you’re still a student, long after people have started to treat you like a big deal.

Sings for Two, 1961.

Fourteen years after this duet session with Ralph Sharon, Bennett would release the first of two duet albums with Bill Evans, incontestably a more significant pianist than Sharon. Everyone else will recommend The Tony Bennett/ Bill Evans Album and Together Again to you, and you should absolutely check them out. But I keep coming back to this earlier album, on which Bennett and his longest-serving musical partner deepen their interplay. Sharon nails the tempos down with watchmaker precision, solos briefly with fine ear for melody, and rolls out the red carpet for the boss.

At Carnegie Hall — The Complete Concert, 1962

Pluperfect young Bennett, in a great hall with a belting big band, performing the set list that would be the basis for his work for the rest of his life. Yes, including “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” This concert was recorded 10 days before his studio performance of that song was released. It would be his biggest hit. Columbia slammed this album out, getting it to market only a month after the concert, an unbelievable hurry that reflected the kind of sales potential they knew they had on their hands. The whole thing is self-recommending, but listen to “Lost In The Stars” to hear the depth of feeling Bennett could command.

The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern, 2015

His last great album, with the trio led by pianist Bill Charlap, with whom Bennett had been performing occasionally since the 1990s. Again, as always by this point, that Billie Holiday glow. “I’m old fashioned/ I love the moonlight,” Bennett sings over Peter Washington’s walking bass, tying the “o” in “love” into a bow, like a gift to Billie. Nobody has a silvery touch on piano like Charlap. A summit meeting, a summation, a challenge and pep talk to anyone else who will ever try to perform these standards to these standards. Here’s a video from around this time. The way he sings, “I love you.” My God.

I’ve sent you a lot of words over the last few weeks. Here are some photos.

Performers and audiences in Ottawa over the last couple of years have noticed somebody new chronicling the city’s concerts and club dates. Curtis Perry, an Ottawa high-school teacher and freelance photographer, began working with a few local performing-arts organizations. I noticed him when the National Arts Centre Orchestra posted his photos on their Facebook page after one of the orchestra’s quirky “WolfGANG Sessions” concerts of contemporary chamber music. Later, this spring, he photographed an Ottawa Writers’ Festival panel on which I was a participant. One way to describe his photography is that it’s more vivid than your memory of the event.

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Perry’s colours are vivid — he uses Fujifilm GFX and X digital cameras — but what’s striking is the intimacy of his images. He has a degree in musicology. Somewhere along the way he learned about the form and pacing of a concert — where musicians stand, how they move — so he knows where to be to get the best photos. The extraordinary photo of Noise Hotel guitarist Eric Montpool, above, is an example. That’s a 24mm lens. The guitar would almost have been touching it.

On Saturday, an exhibition of Perry’s concert photographs, In The Moment, will open at Red Bird Live, a live-music space and café in Old Ottawa South. Here are some of the photos from that show. Click on the photos to see them even bigger. Better yet, if you’re in Ottawa, go to Red Bird Live and see them on walls.

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I’m amazed by news that the new director of the National Gallery of Canada will be Jean-François Bélisle.

In important ways the appointment of Bélisle, who had lately been running the art museum in Joliette, northeast of Montreal, is a repudiation of a management style that had rocked the Ottawa-based national art museum. Expect nobody to admit it, but Bélisle’s appointment is also a direct rebuke to the NGC’s board chair, Françoise Lyon, who last week was still defending the mess of the last year as “necessary.” Her resignation would be surprising but appropriate.

Longtime NGC watchers who had been deeply concerned about a string of management dismissals and absurd consultant tabs were sounding relieved on Wednesday.

“Much relieved,” Marc Mayer, who was the Gallery’s 10th director and CEO from 2008 to 2019, told me in an exchange of text messages. In November Mayer was calling the upheaval at the Gallery since his replacement as director by Sasha Suda, a “major Canadian cultural tragedy,” but in Bélisle he sees signs of hope.

Bélisle has “run a museum before, which is huge for this ageist and anti-experience government, is a serious guy who wants to succeed the old fashioned way, and is well liked,” Mayer said. “A little more experience in a big museum would have been great, but a priority for me is that the director be Canadian. We are such a complicated country with equally complicated culture(s). Jean-François perfectly bilingual, a good listener, and knows what he doesn’t know. I think it will work out.”

And from Tom d’Aquino, the founder of both the Business Council of Canada and of the National Gallery of Canada Foundation — the longtime connector of big money to the Gallery, who had been estranged from the Gallery’s management since Suda’s arrival — there was this tweet:

Today’s news represents the dénouement of one of the most heated and consequential debates in Canadian cultural politics in years.

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If you’ve seen jazz played the way it’s often played — meekly, apologetically, more than a little approximately — then seeing Caity Gyorgy go about her work is a bit of a revelation.

The singer grew up in Calgary and lives in Montreal. But I caught up with her at the Old Firehall Arts Centre in Ancaster, a tidy suburb of Hamilton, ON. At 24 years old, she’s a marvel of panache, bantering easily with an audience of about 100, leading a quartet briskly through a mix of standards older than her grandparents (Shiny Stockings, September in the Rain, Darn That Dream) and her own clever originals. The latter are sometimes contemporary in theme, but they’re resolutely timeless in style. It’s not obvious which songs in a Gyorgy set are new and which are old. “I never used to smile at strangers,” one of the new ones goes. “I never once looked up from my shoes/ I never used to wonder why the world just seemed to pass me by/ I never used to care till I met you.”

Delivering lyrics or improvising scat solos between her guitarist and bassist, Gyorgy (it’s pronounced “George;” we’ll get to that) has a clear, light voice, a precise ear for rhythm and an effortless charm. She’s adept at writing vocalese — lyrics written to fit the intricate rhythms of a classic instrumental solo, a favourite technique of the 1950s novelty act Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

In short, she’s a talent. She’ll be playing for new audiences, and a growing fan base, on a 24-city Canadian and U.S. tour this summer that will start in Niagara-on-the-Lake this Sunday and stretch from Victoria to Halifax.

And though I was writing about jazz long before I moved to Ottawa, if you’re disinclined to take my word on this sort of thing, recent events have conspired to commend Caity Gyorgy to wider attention. In March she became only the second singer to win jazz vocal Junos in consecutive years. The first was Diana Krall.

I asked Laila Biali, herself a Juno-winning jazz singer and the host of the CBC Radio program Saturday Night Jazz, about Gyorgy. She wrote back: “To win one Juno on the first go is huge; but to then pull in a second just a year later — well, that elevates her to the ranks of Diana Krall and Michael Bublé, which is where she's headed. Mark my words.”

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She sent a second email a few minutes later. “Also, I just adore her. She really is one of the most generous and sweet souls I've encountered in this biz.” The two singers have worked together. Here’s Biali and Gyorgy on Pennies From Heaven:

The Old Firehall Arts Centre is, as advertised, an old firehall that has been converted into an arts centre. I interviewed Gyorgy before her gig in the green room upstairs from the main-floor performance venue. She spoke quickly, a little less sure-footed than her stage persona, but still no shrinking violet.

Was she surprised to win Junos in Toronto and again in Edmonton, in 2022 and again in 2023? “To win twice and consecutively? Yes. To be honest, because I was nominated again after winning, I didn't think I was going to win. I didn't think I was going to win last year either. But last year I ended up winning. And this year I thought, ‘Well, I think my project's really strong, but I won last year.’ And also my category was really stacked. I love all of the albums that were nominated with me. So I was genuinely shocked. I'm like, ‘Oh my god.’ What was going through my head when I was walking up to the podium was, ‘Twice. Like, two in a row. Holy shit.’ I couldn't believe it.”

According to legend, the Juno award category for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year was created so Diana Krall could win more Junos. The Nanaimo-born singer was already a big name by the late ’90s, with crossover success well outside the jazz market. But her first four albums, competing against instrumental albums in catch-all jazz categories, didn’t win a single Juno in the 1990s. A new vocal-jazz category, beginning in the year 2000, fixed the problem. In the category’s first eight years, Krall won six times.

All it took to achieve this result was to create the category. I’ve been a Juno judge in instrumental categories. Judges aren’t even told who the other judges are. Collusion, or even just comparing notes, is impossible. It’s just that once the category existed, Krall in the busiest years of her career became a nearly automatic choice. In more recent years, the list of vocal-jazz winners has diversified nicely. Winners have included Holly Cole, Ranee Lee, Kellylee Evans, Laila Biali and Dominique Fils-Aimé.

So diversified has the country’s portfolio of prize-worthy jazz singers become, in fact, that after Krall’s early winning streak, no other singer had ever won the vocal-jazz Juno in two consecutive years. Until Gyorgy won her second in March.

One measure of the speed with which things have started to happen for Gyorgy is that both of her winning albums were, in whole or in part, student projects. The 2022 winner, Now Pronouncing: Caity Gyorgy, was a five-song EP recorded as her final project for her Bachelor of Music degree at Humber College. The 2023 winner, Featuring, is a more ambitious affair, a baker’s dozen of songs with a different instrumental soloist on every track. Several were recorded at Humber before she moved to McGill University in 2020 for her Master’s degree.

The title of Now Pronouncing refers to one early career stumbling block: her name, which covers an impressive chunk of the alphabet in a short distance but which is pronounced “Katie George.” Her great-grandparents moved from Hungary in the early 1930s and settled at East Coulee, a mining town just outside Drumheller, AB. Gyorgy was born and raised in Calgary.

Who wants to be a jazz singer in this day and age, anyway? How ever did she get into it?

“I started dating a jazz drummer,” she said matter-of-factly. This was in high school. “I was super into a lot of Motown music, soul music. I was listening to a lot of Otis Redding, Martha Reeves, the Supremes, Etta James…. But I started seeing this boy and he was really into jazz. I thought, well if we're going to have something to talk about on our dates, I should probably listen to some of the music that he's listening to.”

This sounded easy in the abstract but proved daunting in reality. On one of their first dates, they went to Turn It Up Records, which hadn’t yet closed in Calgary’s Marda Loop neighbourhood. The boy recommended a very early Miles Davis record, Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949 and 1950. “It was one of the reissues, still in plastic. So it was like 40 bucks. That was an expensive record. I was working part time. Like, it was a lot.” She paid up, took the record home, found it mystifying, much as I had many years earlier when I heard my first Miles Davis record.

“Finally, I ended up listening to a bunch of singers because my dad got me a compilation album of jazz singers from Starbucks. Then I heard Ella [Fitzgerald] and Sarah [Vaughan], Abbey Lincoln, Carmen McRae. That was the best introduction for me.”

The drummer was Jacob Wutzke. Today they’re engaged. He is often her drummer, and he has become a regular performer in jazz clubs in Montreal. They went to Humber together, a year apart, and then to McGill. At the Old Firehall he provided crisp accompaniment. On one tune, he played a solo introduction that reflected close study of the drumming style of Art Blakey, a contemporary of Miles Davis’s.

Do instrumentalists look down their noses at singers? “Of course. There's sort of an attitude towards singers, and towards women in general… that we are guilty until proven innocent. So we have to prove that we can improvise. We have to prove that we can sing a melody and not get lost in the form. We have to prove that we can lead a band. When we do that, it's typically fine. But I’ve found that I’ve been constantly needing to prove myself. It gets exhausting.”

The effort does seem to be paying off, including in the esteem of her elders. “I am so proud to call her my friend and former student at McGill,” says saxophonist and composer Christine Jensen, who is a guest soloist on Featuring and who left McGill last year to teach at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in upstate New York. “We worked a lot on process with her repertoire, and about taking risks and really going for it as a player, musician and vocalist. I love that she somehow is presenting retro form with poignant lyrics that are current, thought provoking and full of humour. She delivers and tells a story that captivates me.”

For audiences that aren’t used to it, scat singing — strings of nonsense syllables that let a singer improvise like an instrumentalist — and vocalese can sound off-putting. Is she tempted to cut down the vocal gymnastics? “I just do what I want, to be honest,” Gyorgy said. “I really like doing it. I find it super fun. I think it's a part of the music. If I can use my voice as an instrument, why not? And then i'm not just standing there for five minutes in between everyone else’s solos.”

Not too long ago, a young musician with a solid reputation among peers, on a rare Juno winning streak, would be getting some media attention by now. The Montreal papers would be on to her first, and then maybe the Globe. A wire-service story would pop up in the local paper ahead of half the stops on her tour. That world has essentially gone away. Gyorgy makes her splash where one can these days, in the weird mayfly world of social media. She has over 113,000 followers on TikTok; individual videos sometimes get over 1 million views, including this one, with studio footage of Gyorgy recording her original song My Cardiologist.

It was through TikTok that she was contacted by Postmodern Jukebox, a U.S. collective that records retro versions of current pop hits. Every week they post a YouTube video of a song by the White Stripes or Lady Gaga or Katy Perry, performed in the style of Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Gyorgy’s 1940s-style version of Taylor Swift’s song Love Story with Postmodern Jukebox is closing on 800,000 views…

…and she toured with them for weeks in November and December. Vegas, Texas, up to New York City, sleeping on a rolling bus, playing plush-seat venues filled with thousands of fans who couldn’t have named anybody in the band. “I had costume changes, hair changes, sometimes makeup changes, like if I wanted to change lip color, and it was just such a production. I've never done that before. Everything was very, very meticulous. Which is cool. It's not what I do. I love improvising, adding sections, engaging with the group in a way that's spontaneous.”

Even if she wasn’t the tour’s raison d’être, it was a taste of a kind of big time. Such glimpses are coming more quickly now. Between the Old Firehall gig and the publication of this article, Gyorgy went on a two-week tour of Japan. She is already releasing singles from her next album, a set of duets with Calgary pianist Mark Limacher. She has plans for the one after that. One of her earliest albums, from before the Juno streak, contains a track that generates enough plays on Spotify to pay for a latte every day. Which, given the pittance Spotify pays in royalties, is a lot of plays. “So it’s my latte song.”

Caity Gyorgy will be performing at many of Canada’s jazz festivals this summer, including Victoria, Calgary, Saskatoon, Montreal and Rimouski. Details on her website. Her albums are for sale on Bandcamp; Now Pronouncing and Featuring are available on most streaming services.

As for portrait photographer Duane Cole, a portfolio of his work is on his website.

The notion that Canada constitutes a community whose attributes extend beyond its tax rate, its weather forecasts and the latest ledger of offences inflicted and endured has always rallied too many detractors and too few champions. The champions took a heavy loss overnight when Peter Herrndorf, one of the people I admired most in this world, died at the age of 82. No Canadian devoted himself to building and celebrating Canadian culture for as long as Peter did, with as much passion and good humour, and with so many spectacular results.

As the CBC’s VP for Television in 1982, he backed a 35-year-old producer named Mark Starowicz in extending the corporation’s national newscast to an hourlong package — The National/ The Journal — and moving it from 11 pm to 10 pm. This was a huge bet that people could be made to care about serious things, and as a teenager I followed the exploits of Knowlton Nash and his new co-hosts, Barbara Frum and Mary Lou Finlay, avidly. The Corp has sometimes needed reminding that it has to lead in journalism or it will fall behind. Nobody gave it a mightier push than Herrndorf and Starowicz. At TVO, Ontario’s public television channel, Herrndorf coaxed a young anchor named Steve Paikin away from the CBC in 1992, where Paikin became one of the country’s most trusted television journalists in what would once have seemed its least promising venue.

But it was Herrndorf’s work at the National Arts Centre that marked his greatest success as a cultural-industry turnaround man. The little cluster of performance spaces on the Rideau Canal was running on fumes when he got here. By the time he retired in 2017, the NAC had reclaimed its role at the centre of multiple Canadian cultural conversations — with an influence extending far beyond the capital. Theatre in Montreal and Stratford, Winnipeg and Halifax have benefited from the NAC’s renaissance. Dance companies in Vancouver, Toronto and Edmonton have built some of their best shows in collaboration with the NAC. Bands have known the NAC as a second home on their climb to fame.

Quite incidentally, Peter Herrndorf was a friend and mentor who helped guide me a dozen times in my own career. My podcast began as an item on his wish list a decade ago. That I stayed in journalism instead of finding some money gig is, in part, down to encouragement from Herrndorf when I was wavering badly. You can’t do this work — any work, I suppose — if people don’t believe in you. Peter was always in the believing business.

The National Arts Centre was worn out when he became its CEO at 58 in 1999. A centennial project (planned for 1967, opened in 1969 — not a great omen, that) driven by a persuasive advocate from old newspaper money, Hamilton Southam, its creation had been bankrolled by Lester Pearson’s government at a time when everything seemed possible for the fast-growing Canadian federal state. Within a decade that can-do spirit was ebbing. By the 1990s the NAC felt like White Elephant on the Rideau. It had had seven CEOs in a decade and had cut back most of its activities.

Herrndorf was recruited by a savvy new board chair, David Leighton. They offered the feds a deal: Hold funding steady, and the NAC would increase revenues by attracting more philanthropic giving, and by increasing ticket sales and other earned revenue.

To the NAC’s artists and staff, Leighton and Herrndorf offered a simple new vision: lead again.

In Sarah Jennings' definitive book Art and Politics: The History of the National Arts Centre, Herrndorf says that on arriving in Ottawa he took inspiration from Hamilton Southam's original vision of an NAC with national scope and a desire to lead in artistic creation. "It was a big, ambitious, meaty, quite romantic vision,” he told Jennings, “and that was very appealing to me."

In the first strategic plan developed under his guidance, in 2001, Herrndorf described the NAC’s decline. “We became complacent. We stopped being a centre of creativity.” When Parliament cut the NAC’s budget line, “we had neither the instincts nor the skills to become more entrepreneurial.” The remedy, he wrote, lay in “re-establishing our track record and our record as a creative force in the Canadian performing arts.”

The English- and French-language Theatre departments started creating more original productions and cementing partnerships with other arts organizations across Canada. Biennial “Scene” festivals brought performers from each of Canada’s regions to Ottawa in extended multidisciplinary showcases. The NAC Orchestra increased its roster of musicians, toured more often in Canada, and in 2015 became the home for music director Alexander Shelley, a Brit who has been one of Canada’s strongest advocates for performing new music and educating young musicians.

The NAC is far more beautiful and functional now, thanks to a major architectural expansion that was opened in 2017 by then-Prince Charles. The NAC is now home to an Indigenous Theatre component that gives Indigenous creators a permanent home. Creating that new institution within the NAC was a typically daring Herrndorf idea. When he retired, his farewell dinner was an Indigenous Theatre fundraiser.

And arts projects right across the country have benefited from the National Creation Fund, a $20 million venture-capital fund — entirely funded by major donors and designed to be spent down over several years rather than kept inert as an endowment — that gives new plays and other projects the resources they need for workshopping, redrafting and improvement before they meet their audiences. The list of projects the Creation Fund has benefited is vast.

I used to love my occasional lunches with Peter at the NAC’s canal-side restaurant. He’s the one who invited me to give pre-concert talks about the musicians the Orchestra would be performing, and post-concert interviews with the musicians onstage. He loved indulging in political gossip over lunch, but for my appearances with the Orchestra he didn’t have the faintest interest in hearing me talk about anything except music. He asked me to join the search committee that ended up naming Alexander Shelley as the Orchestra’s music director. And he had one more project he wanted to encourage: a “smart talk” component at the NAC, modelled after the Munk Debates he enjoyed attending in Toronto. For the longest time we couldn’t make it work, but he was delighted when I began interviewing newsmakers at the NAC soon after his retirement. Those interviews became the template for my podcast and public interview series today. In recent months we had been exchanging emails about getting him out to attend one of those interviews. I last saw him at a fundraising gala at the NAC in November.

Herrndorf never forgot that the A in NAC stands for Arts, not Administrators. He was here to help creative people create things. He was born in Amsterdam and grew up in Winnipeg and to him it was just automatic that you could be as interested in new things, and in the whole historic sweep of human creation, in either place. I’d been asking him for advice less often in recent years, but when I need to decide how to proceed, I still often ask myself what he’d have done. The people who worked with him for years at the NAC and elsewhere will be terribly bereft by his loss, but to him it would have been obvious what to do next: more, better.