By Barbara Bruederlin

You know you’ve got a pretty special collection of musical artifacts when you get the Laurie Anderson stamp of approval on national radio. When the revered multi-media artist spoke glowingly about her recent tour of the Cantos collection to Q’s Jian Gomeshi, those fortunate few who has been part of the intimate and interactive tour were all nodding vigorously in agreement.

It was gratifying to hear Laurie, speaking on CBC radio, chat so enthusiastically about her Cantos experience. It seems she was especially taken with the Optigan. As she marveled at the 1970′s tape machine and as she tinkered with the other unique and rare artifacts on display, the stories began to flow.

”Laurie Anderson is a wonderful story teller and it was a thrill to see her weave her unique perspective, experiences and stories through our Collection,” says Candace Elder, Cantos Programs Officer. ” Laurie Anderson fans were treated to an intimate journey through a brief history of music, interspersed with a treasure trove of stories from this vibrant and creative mind.”

Being the spellbinding storyteller that she is, Laurie kept the small gathering hanging onto her every word with her eloquence and her quirky recollections. The members of the tour were mesmerized.

Candace recalls the afternoon spent with the engaging and personable artist: “Laurie shared her thoughts on the modern day compression of audio in comparison to the way the wax cylinder transports you back in time, into the room in which it the music recorded; the experience of babysitting Steve Martin’s Theremin and how it hauntingly occupied a corner of her living room; her fascination with the Optigan, its “built in sadness”, and how it has inspired some of her own vocal disc creations; and how the vocoder was initially designed, not for music, but for spying.”

It was an afternoon that those in attendance will not soon forget.

Allison Brown: How’d You Get That Awesome Gig?

Occupation: Traveling Folksinger/Freelance Music Writer

Location: Windsor, Ontario

First Job: The Only White Girl in a production of “The Wiz”; seriously… it was a summer job, it was a government funded program, we all got paid… I played a munchkin, an old lady stuck in the tornado, and one of the wicked witch’s flying monkeys.

Best Job: Grooves Records, London, Ontario

Greatest Professional Challenge: Actually making enough money to live, creative challenges, writing songs that haven’t already been written…

So, how did you get this awesome gig anyways? I started singing for audiences in High School when I was about 14, following that I ended up getting into folk music in my early twenties when I had a chance to explore the record collections of various boyfriends. I started doing solo shows, and started to book shows as a duo with my cousin Erin Gignac all over Southern Ontario. There have been a couple times since then where I took a few months off from gigging, but its been pretty consistent since then.

I just recently started Freelancing at CBC Windsor 97.5fm, they needed more women’s voices on the air for the morning show “The Early Shift”, which didn’t have a music or arts columnist. I also write for www.OurWindsor.ca, doing features and reviews of music in the Windsor/Essex area. Also recently got back on the campus radio airwaves on CJAM 99.1fm from the University of Windsor; I host “Border City Roots” from 5pm to 6pm on Monday evenings.

What do you like best about your job? What I like the best about performing, booking, managing and promoting my music is its flexibility. Nobody is breathing down my neck making me work except me; and sometimes I take breaks from gigging to concentrate on new music, and other times I book lots of gigs to keep me busy in the spring and summer. Another amazing aspect of the ‘job’ is meeting interesting and inspiring people on the road and hearing their stories. Also collaborating with other musicians is a major perk.. lots of great stuff.

Any special skills required? I think there is a ‘triple threat’ system at play in folk music especially as a solo songwriter; and rarely artists have all three, including myself. If you’re a striking, versatile vocalist with outstanding songs that really get inside the audience, and can accompany yourself extremely effectively, then you’ve got most of what you need. Stage comfort, charisma with the audience and the media, and a keen self-motivation as far as the marketing and business aspects of music are also important. That’s a lot to juggle and most of us fall short on at least a few…

Favourite experience on the job: This is a tough one to answer… but this summer I did have ‘the best hour and a half of my life’ at Live From The Rock festival in Red Rock up near Thunder Bay where I got to jam out all my favourite songs in a workshop with Harlan Pepper, Amanda Rheaume, Marc Charron and my accompanist “Uncle” Dan Henshall… that’s definitely my favourite from this summer.. The best experiences for me are always at folk festivals in workshops where you get to share the stage with other artists. Epic festival jams – that’s always the best.

Advice for people who want your awesome gig: If you really want to make music, especially folk and roots music, an integral part of your life, you do really make a lot of ‘regular life’ type sacrifices. I’ve had to design every other part of life around what I’m doing musically, and that’s a big risk financially; make sure it’s really what you want. Re-evaluate if anything about music becomes un-fun, or seems like it’s not worth it to you. If you don’t really love it, it won’t love you back. Give great performances every time and don’t ignore the audience, no matter how large, small, loud or quiet. Be dedicated to it, and open to learning new things about music and the business part of it all, and play your face off. Play a lot of gigs; but not for free… make sure and get paid something for the majority of your shows and if there’s ‘causes’ you feel strongly about for sure do the odd fundraiser. Put a value on your performance and raise it as you develop.

Favourite CDN Music Venue: Aeolian Hall, London Ontario

Favourite Record of the Moment: Being a radio host I have about a zillion favourite records; mostly Canadian, but oddly over the past month or so I’ve been addicted to Dylan & The Band’s Basement Tapes Volume II ….!

CORE’s T’was the Night really was all that.  Over 75,000 people attended the private after-hours shopping night to benefit the United Way’s Because initiative and the National Music Centre.  Fashionistas, foodies and music lovers  alike shopped, noshed and boogied.  T’was a night to remember.

Occupation:  General Manager, Calgary Folk Music Festival

Location: Calgary

First Job: Eaton’s warehouse, Winnipeg

Best Job:  Variety music producer CBC Calgary

Greatest Professional Challenge:  Building the new Festival Hall in Inglewood.

So, how did you get this awesome gig anyways? Part of my duties at CBC had been producing Simply Folk, a national folk show which allowed me to attend and record at festivals around Canada and the world. I had left CBC and was freelancing when Terry Wickham who was working with the Calgary Folk Music Festival called and asked if I would be interested I coming on staff in January of 2000 to work with Kerry Clarke, the artistic director. The Festival had a rainy bad year in 1999 and had a small debt to pay off.

What do you like best about your job?  Working with a great staff and over 1,600 awesome volunteers that magically transform Princes Island Park into a self sufficient musical town of 12,000 for four glorious days in every July.

Any special skills required? Patience, willingness to listen, and a love of people and musicians.

Favourite experience on the job?  Walking around the main field and  watching the crowd enjoy the closing main stage artist perform, especially the night Kris Kristofferson performed in 2006.

Advice for people who want your awesome gig: I won’t be there forever but if you can’t wait, start your own event – that’s how all of them started.

Favourite CDN Music Venue:  Prince’s Island – the Calgary Folk Music Festival site.

Favourite Record of the Moment: Ragged Kingdom – June Tabor & Oysterband and Long Live the King – the Decemberists

When the friendly folks at the National Music Centre Project asked our team to participate in their latest fundraising efforts we responded with some seasonal enthusiasm. It is a sure sign that the holidays are upon us when you find yourself constructing local landmarks out of quantities of baked goods and sugar. This Edible Eddy project is a way to bring some funds and awareness to the New Music Centre’s goal of restoring the beloved King Edward Hotel to former glories. It’s going to be quite the comeback.

We are lucky to have Deeter Schurig on our team, who has studied architecture and has experience designing theatrical sets. He responded to this challenge as any good architect would and fired up the computer aided design software. The technology behind the construction doesn’t end there either; the latest techniques in transferring pixels to icing were also employed to tell our story about the transformation of Calgary’s arts and cultural landscape both then, now and tomorrow. 

The Eddy is not the only grand old king in our city. The other Eddy resides in South Calgary and is also undergoing a transformation. King Edward School, with the help of the Calgary Foundation, is on its way to becoming an arts incubator (here is an impressive fly through of the vision). To further infuse Dickens (see title), the ghost of Eddy(s) past and the ghost of Eddy(s) future have informed this gingerbread construction while the ghost of Eddy(s) present wants to bring you sweets while you support these projects.

We all want new Eddys for Christmas. You can support the New Music Center by donating online or by coming out to their fundraising event: The CORE ‘Twas the Night on November 30th.  Cantos will be debuting the Edible Eddys that night, you can vote live at the event on our edible eddy and enter to win a $250 Shopping Spree to The CORE. You can help us be the top by voting for us through Cantos’ facebook campaign. 

See their full gallery here: http://calgaryartsdevelopment.com/content/tale-two-edible-eddys

The swank red bow that festoons the King Eddy is certainly eye-catching. It’s even more impressive when you consider the expertise and the finagling that was required to attach it to the historic building.

Wrapping Calgary’s Home of the Blues in a big red ribbon may look like a Cantos Christmas elf prank gone mad, but there was actually method to the seeming madness. Signalling the launch of the All I Want for Christmas is a New King Eddy campaign, the bow draws attention to the unique nature of the fundraiser which aims to refurbish the hotel, allowing it to take its rightful place as the cornerstone of the new National Music Centre.

The wind may have been nippy during Tuesday’s launch, but the sun was shining and the hot chocolate steaming as dozens of gingerbread noshers packed onto the sidewalk in front of the King Eddy. While the Cantos House Band played and we all shopped for Christmas presents among the limited edition Long Live the King tees and King Eddy tree ornaments, the King Eddy campaign began.

Not only can you donate to the King Eddy fund yourself, but you can easily become a fundraiser as well. It’s simple and fun. Just head to www.nmc.ca/kingeddy to see how you can amplify the love.

Recently, Leeds chanteuse LeeSun made the trek across the pond to record her new album in Calgary.  We’re thrilled that many instruments from Cantos’ vast collection were featured in the recording of Prime, including our vintage Rhodes keyboard on almost every track, plus our B3 Hammond and grand piano on about half the tracks.

We asked LeeSun about the creative process, Derek Zoolander, and recording at Cantos.  Here’s what she told us:

Local ska project JK and the relays (of which I
am a member) has released it’s new EP ‘Timebomb’ which is available online here. Check it out! I’m sure a full length album will come out sooner or later.

I wonder if they shared a taste in music as closely as they shared a passion for human rights and women’s suffrage?

Perhaps they debated the merits of swing jazz, that sassy musical upstart that was starting to sweep the continent. Maybe some of them preferred country music, listening to the Carter Family or Jimmie Rogers on one of the many Canadian radio stations that were beginning to proliferate. I would imagine that at least one of them played piano, lived in a home that boasted an upright which had been passed down through the generations. No doubt the piano bench was filled with sheet music, regimental marches that had become so popular during the war, or patriotic songs like “Maple Leaf Forever” or “Johnny Canuck’s the Lad”.

I can really only speculate what music Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Henrietta Muir Edwards liked to listen to. Regardless of the personal musical preferences of the Famous Five, however, their groundbreaking achievement will be commemorated with a home-grown musical tribute on the anniversary of the day that Canadian women were declared persons in the eyes of the law.

In 2000, The Ballad of the Famous Five, composed by Calgary singer-songwriter, Carolyn Harley, was used in a national TV programme celebrating the unveiling of the monument to The Famous Five on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. On Tuesday, October 18, on the 82nd anniversary of the passing of the Persons Case, Carolyn will perform The Ballad of the Famous Five at the Famous Five monument in Olympic Plaza to honour those five Alberta women whose righteous passion initiated this case and changed Canadian life forever. Starting at noon and continuing every 15 minutes, Carolyn will dedicate her performance to each of the Famous Five in turn. Also in attendance will be Nancy Millar, Calgary author of the book The Famous Five: Five Canadian Women and Their Fight to Become Persons.

Come down to Olympic Plaza for this musical tribute to a moment in Canadian history. Wear a hat and stay for a chat.

drumming

Cantos Music Foundation was thrilled to be at  Calgary Science School as we particpiated in their first annual Forging Connections conference on October 5 & 6. Forging Connections is a two day workshop where every student in the school, grades 5-9, made connections between art and science. A year in the making, Forging Connections brought together scientists ansd artists active in their field to collaborate with each other on a topic that would give Calgary Science School students a hands-on opportunity to understand how the two disciplines are inter-connected. It also gave us a chance to meet some of the sound pioneers in our community and work with them to deliver student-friendly programs. Brandon Smith delivered 18 thirty minute presentations over the two days! We allowed kids to explore their senses to  compose music with electronic instruments  and djembes. Students also worked with dance instructors and kinesiologists to explore the movements of bird in flight and visual artists and mathematicians to make 3-D objects. They explored camoflouge, color perception and light through biology and watercolor painting and improvised in drama while examining the impact of color, lenses and lasers on optics. It was a busy two days, Brandon nearly lost his voice , but all the  kids went home exhausted and asking good questions! Thanks Calgary Science School for inviting us and donating the honorarium to the National Music Centre Project!

Brandon helps out Grace "on Bass"

Just look at all that tolexed hotness.....

Ecxiting news this week for fans of vintage amplifiers! And, really, who isn’t? An absolutely pristine collection of mostly Garnet amps (also a Garnet-built Mann amp and a Fender Twin) was generously donated by Mr. Brian Mills of Calgary, who is a huge supporter of the National Music Center project. The Garnet amlifiers are a perfect adition to the collection, not only for their great sound but also for their historic value and relevance to Canada’s music story.

Ask any tube amp buff about Canadian built amps and the 2 names that are likely to pop up are Traynor and Garnet. Garnet amps in particular played a major role in developing the 60s Winipeg rock sound. Many early hits by the Guess Who, BTO, Neil Young etc. feature the sound of Garnet amplifiers. In fact, BTO’s name and logo came from a Garnet amp called the Big Time Operator. (Garnet’s amps all had pretty sweet names!) Randy Bachman liked the initials and asked Gar if he could use them. Gar consented, and thus they became Bachman Turner Overdrive. Garnet amps are still prized to this day although only one of their products; the ‘Herzog’, is currently available as a re-issue. The Herzog was developed for Randy Bachman and is THE sound of ‘American Woman’. The concept was born when Randy Bachman took a small guitar amp and plugged it into a larger one to overdrive the inputs and get a creamy, fuzzy sustained sound. (This was before fuzz pedals became common) The problem was that this un-intended and unorthodox use would inevitably fry the amps in the process. Gar’s Herzog design allowed this technique to be done safely and easily. Our Garnet collection includes a Hertzog, as well as a standalone reverb unit. You can see them stacked on top of the pile in the top photo

Randy Bachman with the Herzog

The company was founded by Winnipegian Thomas Garnet Gilles better known as ‘Gar’ Gilles. Gar Gilles started playing Trombone in his youth after switching from piano. In high school he started his own musical group; the Gar Gilles Jump Band. In the late 1930s they toured around western Canada and northern Ontario. Besides being musically inclined, Gar had quite the knack for putting together amplifiers and fixing things. His first home-made creations were PA systems built for his band to amplify the muted Trombone, vocals and guitar. Many clubs at the time had only one microphone if any PA at all, so some of the establishments Gar played in ended up adopting his equipment. Later in the 1960s Gar founded his company which produced many different amplifiers, speaker cabinets, PA consoles etc. When transistor technology began to be widely used, Gar Gilles resisted; insisting like many others that tube – based amps sounded superior. Due to increased competition and production costs, Garnet ceased its mass production in 1989. Gar Gilles continued to repair and build custom amplifiers until his passing in 2006. Gar Gille’s story and legacy are just the kind of thing the National Music Center is all about. AMPLIFYING the love sharing and understanding of music!

The Guess Who play Winnipeg Stadium with Garnet amps and PA

The 6th annual Folk Boot Camp at Cantos is a three day workshop series running in partnership with the Calgary Folk Music Festival. Folk Boot Camp at Cantos offers a unique chance to learn from the festival’s favourite guitar heroes and songsmiths. Festival artists teach a dozen of the willing among the Foundation’s collections of rare and curious keyboards & electronic instruments. Folk Boot Camp at Cantos is geared towards musicians that have a basic grasp of their craft and want to supplement their own studies with guidance from some of the world’s finest musicians.

This year six workshops were presented featuring some of Canada’s best recording artists:

Self-taught bluesman Matt Andersen focused on the beautiful marriage of guitar and vocals

Mighty Popo provided the basic grounding for Eastern and Central African guitar

Juno award winning Joel Plaskett shared his songwriting genius for penning infectiously catchy pop songs

Vocal workshop with Winnipeg’s powerhouse vocal harmonies of Chic Gamine

Songwriting with Canadian icon of roots and traditional music, David Francey

The fine songwriting talent of East Coast songstress Catherine MacLellan

Folk Boot camp also featured a lecture series open for the public to attend, as well as boot camp registrants. This year’s presentation featured a conversation with Vernon Reid, the leader of the pioneering multi-platinum rock band Living Colour. His focus was on the ongoing journey with the guitar that has brought about a unique perspective, treating the instrument as a symbol, an object, and most importantly, a fascinating point of human contact.

Lisa Davies HIGH FIVES Marketing Director Camie Leard!

This past August we conducted the High Five Design Competition, a social-media fueled design-inspired contest for our new run of limited edition merchandise.  It was a close race but Lisa Davies’ connection the brand and her amazing use of social media led her to winning first prize of our competition. Her three designs will be featured on the latest run of limited edition NMC t-shirts!

The winning designs.

Here is a bit more about Lisa Davies!

Occupation: Designer, Illustrator, Art Director (co-owner of DUO and Nation Toys)

Location: Calgary

Greatest Design Challenge: Getting wrapped up in the details and logistics of an idea. Creativity does much better when the red tape is absent.

The gig: Appetite for design, good friends and inspiration got me the gig. School helped too

The Design: I love the idea that the NMC logo can adapt to so many variations of musical instruments. It has an incredibly simple yet strong connotation to music and I thought I would fun to bridge that idea visually.

Favourite Venue: Mac Hall Ballroom (upstairs) has my vote yet smaller less mainstream venues can be magical too.

Favorite Record of the Moment:  Deerhunter – Microcastle is on high rotation right now along with an honorable mention to Calgary’s own (and now defunct) band Women. Oh is that 2? 

I recently had the opportunity to do a week-long tour with the band JK and the Relays doing the opening sets for ‘The Slackers‘, a ska/reggae band from NYC. I had heard of them before, but after last week I can say I’m definately a fan now. The shows were in Banff, Red Deer, Edmonton and, of course, opening and closing the tour in Calgary. All of the shows were alot of fun – especially The Vat in Red Deer where the Slacker’s sax player Dave Hylliard and I had a spontaneous piano boogaloo jam until they booted us out. I got one of their 7″ singles as a lil’ souveneir of this fun week. It’s a cover version of “New Year’s Day” by U2. I think it works quite well as a reggae song, but then again so does Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” which The Slackers also do a great version of. The B side is a dub version following the fine tradition of Jamaican reggae singles. Check it out!

In early August, Cantos collaborated with young pianists at the Calgary Piano Institute, a week-long summer piano camp offered by the Mount Royal Conservatory for students ages 6 to 18.  The camp is an action-packed five days of lessons, group masterclasses, practice time, technique and musicianship classes, duets and performance experiences.  The older students had opportunities to practice and perform their Baroque era repertoire on a harpsichord on loan from Cantos.  The harpsichord Cantos provided is a 1972 William Dowd French double-manual harpsichord built by Bill Garlick (the curator of one of Cantos’ founding collections) while he was an apprentice to William Dowd from 1970-72. It’s modeled after a Pascal Taskin instrument from 1769 which is located at the University of Edinburgh.
Along with the harpsichord loan, Cantos’ piano technician, Anne Phillips, provided a presentation for the students with some background information about keyboard instrument history and the Cantos collection, and facilitated some harpsichord exploration with the students, comparing harpsichords and pianos.

Marianne Bleile, coordinator of the Calgary Piano Institute had this to say about the experience:

 The response to the harpsichord experience was fantastic!  It was the highlight of the camp for many of the students and most students requested the return of the harpsichord in their final feedback forms.  The harpsichord itself was beautiful and it gave the students a whole new experience.  It was highly valuable in that they each had the opportunity to practice it on it several times through the week.  It was not just a “tinkering” experience, but held a long lasting educational value.  Three of the senior students were selected to play on it during the final recital, including a cello (viola da gamba)/harpsichord Sonata.  Most of the parents had never seen a harpsichord before! 

The presentation was a perfect introduction to the harpsichord.  Students indicated that the information was interesting and age appropriate.  Although most knew something about harpsichords, the material presented was new to them and generated discussions throughout the week.  Thank you for your time and preparation.  This is clearly an event that we would like to repeat in future editions of the Calgary Piano Institute.  It is my hope that the Calgary Piano Institute maintains a close, positive, and productive relationship with the Cantos Music Foundation.

As September slides in to take August’s place, the Cantos Street Sounds noon-hour piano performances on Stephen Avenue also fade into sweet summer memory for another year.  Michelle Gregoire’s jazz performance on Thursday August 25^th capped off a stellar line-up of Calgary keyboard talent including Lorel Plett, Steve Fletcher, Chris Maric, Katarzyna Borkowska, Brandon Smith, Mountainview Festival Musicians and Ingrid Mosker.  Interested in tickling the ivories for next summer’s noon-hour concert series on Stephen Ave?  Contact Candace Elder, programs officer, at elderc@cantos.ca.

The melodious sounds of the noon-hour music series attracted lots of attention as did the striking good looks of the new one-of-a-kind art-case busker piano that the musicians played.  The National Music Centre branded piano features artwork by local artist Landon Scott, depicting images of Canadian musical icons Oscar Peterson, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Hank Snow and Glenn Gould.

Sir Ken Robinson has become an arts education superstar thanks to his TED talk which, on You Tube, now has almost 3 million hits. The topic? ”Do Schools Kill Creativity?”  It is a loaded question. Teachers, school systems, parents, administrators, budgets, time,culture, classrooms: there are as many ways to place blame as there are factors that determine creativity.  But one thing that has been proven is that learning to think like an artist helps students understand topics more clearly.  At Cantos we see it every day.  Our education philosophy builds on educator Howard Gardner’s  theory of multiple intelligences to indicate that arts education — including the visual arts, dance, music, and drama — enhances a student’s ability to acquire core academic skills. Study in drawing, for example, can improve complex reasoning, writing, and reading readiness, partly because the critical and creative faculties required to generate and appreciate art transfer cognitively to future learning experiences, and partly because the arts make learning fun. A student personally invested in his or her work will be far more likely to care about it.

During our full day Good Vibrations program, teachers can “Choose Your Own Cantos Adventure” and many pick sketching to enhance the work they are already doing in the classroom. Cantos Educators offer sketching techniques so that studnets can feel comfortable recording their findings in an accurate, detailed and readable way. By sitting down with a sketchbook in front of an instrument of their choice, students of all dispositions become absorbed by the object. One of my education mentors, Franklyn Heisler, used to say “it takes a lot of slow to grow”. Sketching teaches focus and concentration and allows students to make their learning visible to themselves; expressing their individual curiosities. Student drawings are an excellent entry point for inquiry among the class and teachers can use them as assesment tool for understanding. Student drawings are always suprising; it is wonderful to see through the child’s eyes and discover what they felt was most significant about their experience. Sometimes they even draw us!

As Brandon Smith, one of our lead Educators, can attest to, student drawings often give us a new perspective on the collection we work with everyday:

“It always impresses me when I see the amount of detail that goes into some of these drawings.  As interpreters we inevitably pour our personalities into the work that we do.  For me that usually means some portion of the sketching component in our Good Vibrations program ends up in the electronics gallery.  Of course, most kids want to draw the big wall of speakers or the electric guitar (big surprise there) but every so often someone will draw something like this that’ll put a big smile on my face.

Any guesses what it is?  The caption says “thing”, but this is in fact an EMS VCS-3.  You can clearly see the Joystick, patch-pin matrix and voltmeter in their proper places.  Here’s the real thing for comparison:

Not too shabby!  I wonder what those kids will draw next!

Joint Post by Kate Schutz and Brandon Smith.

Here are some highlights from the Summit Jazz series that took place at Cantos this year.  This was in partnership with Carsten Rubeling, a local musician and teacher who I happened to connect with at an art opening.  He had just moved back to Calgary after studying in Germany and after telling him all about Cantos, he got very excited and took the initiative to create a jazz series, open to all ages and based on various eras of jazz.  This year, he produced three concerts: Bebop and Beyond, Latin Rhythms, and Jazz Futures.  The series proved to be very successful, featuring some of Calgary’s finest local jazz.  Now a huge supporter of Cantos and the NMC, Carsten is now on his way to study jazz in New York City, however, due to the success of the series, Rubim de Toledo will continue the series this Fall and Carsten promises to come back to Calgary and bring all that jazz with him.

Cantos is pleased to welcome a new addition to our Music@Noon programming:  Reggae Lunch’n'Learn, a monthly lunch hour presentation sharing the history and evolution of Reggae in partnership with Reggae Fest.  Featured on the first Thursday of every month, the Director of Reggae Fest, Leo Cripps, shares his enthusiastic outpouring of all things Reggae, filling listeners with facts and stories on the history, impact, and influence of Reggae music on culture, society and other musical genres.  The fabulous tastes and aromas of Jamaica are brought to you by Casual Catering by Sylvia, providing a fabulous Jamaican infused dinner for a low price.   Although October marks the last of the Reggae Lunch ‘n’ Learn series, we hope to partner with other festivals in similar presentations throughout the year.

Cantos also had the pleasure of providing an information booth at ReggaeFest and other festivals, sharing stories about our collection, programming and the National Music Centre project.

Okay, this is the last you’ll hear about the Korg M1 for a while…I promise! I just had to post this because I’ve been really into this tune lately, which my friend Jay Stanley sent me. In my previous post about the M1 I half-seriously stated that these M1 sounds might become cool again. Turns out I was right! Indie rock/folk outfit Bon Iver just came out with a self titled album this year which features this track Beth / Rest that has really grown on me. Right from the get-go plain as day you hear the M1 patch “Pad Piano” (which is actually on the expansion ROM card originally paired with the M1) accompanying the warm synth pads and reverb-drenched, auto-tuned vocals. Its a nice reminder that every once and a while someone will use that effect tastefully. The smooth Kenny G saxophone and everything…..by all accounts I should hate this song based on principle alone….but I don’t. The lesson here, I guess, is that the sounds themselves aren’t cliche – just the way that they’re used and abused.