Stewart Goodyear brings Beethoven marathon to Luminato (video)

Stewart Goodyear brings Beethoven marathon to Luminato (video)

4 June 2012 No Comments

By Anya Wassenberg

Stewart Goodyear and the Beethoven Marathon
June 9, 2012 at Koerner Hall
Part of the Luminato Festival

Thirty-two sonatas, 103 movements and more than 10 hours of playing — “marathon” is an appropriate word for the feat taken on by Toronto-born pianist Stewart Goodyear for this year’s Luminato Festival. In a single day, he’ll play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in the order that they were written.  “This set is a retrospective of Beethoven’s art from the early 1790s to 1821,” he explains.

It’s an undertaking few have attempted before in history, but to hear him talk about it, it’s the natural result of a passion for Beethoven that took hold very early in life.  His father passed away a month before he was born, leaving behind a legacy of music in the form of a collection of LP records, including modern classics like Jimi Hendrix and two boxes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky that Goodyear would listen to over and over. While his repertoire as a professional has been varied, that early love of Beethoven runs deep. “I always thought of the sonatas as a set,” he explains. “I’m fulfilling a childhood ambition.”

Growing up in Toronto in the 1980s, Goodyear’s focus on classical music came as something of an oddity. “In my neighbourhood, people were listening to Culture Club, Sting,” he remembers. “I thought I was the only one listening to this music, or who even knew about it. That changed deliciously when I went to my first classical concert.” As he watched famed pianist André Watts, he knew that he wanted to be up there on stage performing — a revelation that came to him at the age of four. He credits his family for encouraging those childhood passions. “They knew I loved it and supported me every step of the way.”

More than a typical performance, a marathon concert requires extraordinary preparation. “Besides preparing pianistically, I’m preparing stamina wise,” he says. Diet and exercise are crucial to his physical conditioning. When it comes to the playing, his regimen also goes beyond the usual exercises and repetition. “I’m zoning out so that my fingers know exactly what they’re doing, so that the playing is organic,” he says. The music has to take over. “It really does possess me. I feel like I turn into a different beast.”

Goodyear is looking forward to the challenge and eager for the audience’s energy.  “The excitement of the audience will dictate my response,” he says. It’s also an experience he’s hoping to repeat. “I hope to do this marathon everywhere.”

Stewart Goodyear has recorded some of the Beethoven Sonatas on the Marquis Classics label (and those CDs will be available for sale at the event).

Malian singer Khaira Arby wows Toronto fans with her jazzy Saharan sound

Malian singer Khaira Arby wows Toronto fans with her jazzy Saharan sound

11 May 2012 No Comments

By Anya Wassenberg
With a regal presence on stage that belies her diminutive stature, Malian singer Khaira Arby wowed the crowd at Lula Lounge in Torontop  on May 8 with a long set of her own brand of jazzy Saharan music. Because of the troubles that have engulfed her native country since the coup earlier this year, there was some doubt that her North American spring tour would even get off the ground, but as presenter Alan Davis noted in his introduction, if there was ever a time for her to spread her positive message to the rest of the world, that would be now.

Her brand of music is mesmerizing, with its hypnotic layering of rhythms and melodies over a heavy bass line. It often sounded like there were more melodies and rhythms going than what was being created by the five musicians on stage, which included two stellar guitarists who traded off  lead guitar.

Arby’s music is both traditional and modern — imagine rock guitar riffs and bluesy melodies over churning, time-honoured West African polyrhythms, and throw in  a dash of funk for good measure. Her young band is super tight with a flair for showmanship that makes their virtuosic playing look easy. Her voice is as strong and compelling as her stage persona.

Underneath all that great music are the lyrics that have often had a great impact socially in Mali. Women’s issues are often at the forefront of Arby’s music, including a song where she speaks out against female circumcision. In the song Waidio, she dares to assert a women’s right to pursue her own happiness — a radical view in her very traditional society.

Arby has become an inspiration and a role model for Malian women. In a country where women don’t enjoy the kind of autonomy that they do here in North America, she divorced her first husband when his controlling nature interfered with her musical career. This is something virtually unheard of with women of her generation. She paved the way for others to follow, and modernized the role of the female praise singer as much as she’s modernized the music itself.

Hailing from a village not far from fabled Timbuktu, Khaira sings in the languages of the Malian desert, including Songhai, Tamashek and Arabic. While she’s been a star in her native country for decades, her first international release (Timbuktu Tarab) came out in 2010. Her current tour continues in the U.S. through May.

Oil and Water: Shipwrecked in Newfoundland

Oil and Water: Shipwrecked in Newfoundland

26 April 2012 One Comment

Oil and Water
Written by Robert Chafe
Factory Theatre, Toronto
Continues to May 6, 2012
Tickets: Factory Theatre

Reviewed by Anya Wassenberg

Oil and Water is an ingenious play that intertwines three storylines to bring focus to the unique – and true to life – history of Lanier Phillips, an American who was the only black sailor to survive a naval disaster off the coast of Newfoundland in 1942. Its success rests solidly on the compelling acting of an ensemble cast and inventive staging, along with the inventive music of Toronto composer Andrew Craig.

There are several layers to the innovative play that unfolds in various ways; at times the play’s three storylines drift into each other, at others they happen simultaneously.

One of the threads brings to life the disillusionment of black men who thought the navy was their ticket to equal opportunity based on merit. Instead they found a narrow world even more encumbered by prejudice than the segregated South of the WWII era. Phillips is embittered, stuck shining shoes and working in the mess hall with no hope of advancement. He and the only other African American sailor sleep below decks and aren’t so much as allowed to eat with their white fellow sailors. He’s accompanied by the spirit of his great grandmother, an African slave who counsels and tries to protect him.

Then the worst happens. The USS Truxton runs aground in a violent storm off the coast of Newfoundland. The two black sailors are stuck on the sinking boat after the lifeboats leave and seemingly against all reason, Phillips jumps into the freezing waters. He’s one of only 56 survivors of the original crew of 146 who washes up on the rocky shore near St. Lawrence, Newfoundland.

What awaits him is the selfless compassion of the people of the town who go in search of the survivors and lovingly wash off the oil slick from the disabled ship that covers them. To his surprise, Lanier is accepted as an equal by the good-hearted Newfoundlanders — who’d never seen a black man before — and is welcomed as a friend.

Another storyline looks at the Newfoundlanders stuck between the sea and the mines as a way of eking out a hard living. The people of St. Lawrence stand out for their wry sense of humour and simple compassion for others in tough circumstances, which leads them to naturally go out of their way to help the shipwrecked sailors.

The third storyline is equally true to history. It looks at an older Lanier Phillips and his daughter set against the violent school riots that erupted when the city of Boston first desegregated their schools in 1974. There is a real sense of authenticity not only in the script, but in the portrayals of these characters and the lives that, under normal circumstances, would never have intersected.

The script is infused with bright spots of humour and poetry. “This is the curliest hair I’ve ever seen!” exclaims Violet, one of the women who tends to Phillips. “Like a little lamb.”

Andrew Craig’s music provides a dimensional accompaniment to the action on the stage, and combines the sweet harmonies of Newfoundland’s traditional music with that of African American spirituals.

The actors remain on stage throughout the entire performance — when their character is not in the scene, they stand off to the side or back and provide the musical accompaniment. Their humming or singing, sometimes solo and sometimes in gorgeous harmony, underpins virtually all the action in the play. Another unique musical element can be heard in the characters’ varying Newfoundlander and Georgia accents.

Lanier Phillips left St. Lawrence with a smile on his face — even though the Navy put him on a separate bus by himself to get him back to base. In real life, as in the play, it was a brief, two-day experience that changed his life forever. He realized that racism is something that is taught and therefore can be changed, and he became a civil rights activist who marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. He continued to speak about the incident until his death recently in March 2012.

Bombino’s desert blues reflects the struggles of the Tuareg people

Bombino’s desert blues reflects the struggles of the Tuareg people

10 April 2012 No Comments

By Anya Wassenberg

Bombino
April 12 at Lula Lounge

“Sun is burning in the desert. There is no rain in the desert
To live in the desert, we need to have a strong morale
We live in the most beautiful space and the hardest space for life” (from the song Tenere)

Sometimes, music plays a much bigger role than making your commute more pleasant or giving you the beats to let loose on the dance floor on a Friday night. For Omara “Bombino” Moctar and the Tuareg people of the Sahara, it’s the soundtrack to a way of life. “It’s a way to fight and to reclaim things,” he says.

The Tuareg are a nomadic people who inhabit various areas of the Sahara desert in Northern Africa, related ethnically to the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria. Traveling the desert for 4,000 years on camels — more recently in 4 x 4s — they are known as herders and fierce warriors, who historically fought against both colonialism and the strict application of Islamic rule.

Bombino’s life story runs parallel to the Tuareg’s conflicts and the development of the hypnotic and compelling blues we think of now as Tuareg music or desert blues. He was born into a nomadic tribe in 1980 in Tidene, near Agadez in the country of Niger. The latter city was a key stop along the traditional trade routes in the Sahara that connected the Mediterranean area with West Africa.

One of 17 brothers and sisters, he was enrolled in school as a child but refused to go at first. He went to live with this grandmother, a common custom in their matriarchal culture. Young Tuareg boys are called “arawan n tchimgharen” or “grandmother’s children” — it is considered an honourable term.

Drought in Mali and Niger, where many of the Tuareg live, came in 1984, decimating the region’s livestock and forcing many Tuaregs to leave the region, often settling in Algeria or Libya. Lack of government aid in both Mali and Niger led to the beginnings of the rebellion, and music – along with the guitar they’d recently discovered – played an integral role in spreading the word about the armed revolt and its goals among the Tuareg people. Their style was called ishoumar after the French word “chomeurs” meaning the unemployed but the term soon became synonymous with the rebels and their movement.

The first Tuareg rebellion began in 1990 in both Mali and Niger as they launched attacks against government and military targets. The government fought back and drove many people into exile, including Bombino, who fled with his father and grandmother to Algeria. It was there that he got his personal introduction to the guitar.  “Everything began in 1991,” he remembers. “I was living with my family in Algeria during the rebellion. Cousins would come by with guitars.”

When his cousins left their guitars behind, he taught himself how to play in imitation of what he’d heard. “Every time I watched TV, I’d see American or European groups playing.” He lists Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits as early influences. Bombino worked for a time as a herder in Libya and practiced as he watched his flocks.

When Niger became a democracy in 1992, he moved back. “I started to play in front of other people in Niger,” he says. Bombino joined the Tuareg political party and began to develop his craft at the same time, taking guitar lessons and joining a band. That’s where he got his nickname (a variation on the Italian word for baby) — as the youngest and smallest in the group.

Bombino began to work as a professional musician and recorded his first album, gaining some recognition from a Spanish documentary. In 2006, he went to California and ended up recording a single with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones (It appears on the 2008 album by Tim Riese “Stone’s World: The Rolling Stones Project Volume 2″).

SIA brings the tragedies of war to life

SIA brings the tragedies of war to life

30 March 2012 No Comments

By Anya Wassenberg

SIA
Starring Jajube Mandiela, Brendan McMurtry-Howlett and Thomas Olajide
Directed by Nina Lee Aquino
Continues to April 15 at Factory Theatre

The lost, discarded air of the Buduburam Liberian Refugee Camp in Ghana is captured in a spare set littered with discarded bottles, a partial wall of plastic bottles, one single chair and a few tires stacked on each other. The lost and conflicted lives of its inhabitants are fleshed out in a clever script and strong performances from the three actors in this interesting and revealing play.

Brendan McMurty-Howlett is Nicholas Summers, a young and reckless Canadian on the last day of his trip to save Africa. After a final drunken celebration, he’s at first puzzled, then horrified as it dawns on him that his friend Saa Abraham (Thomas Olajide) is securing him to a chair and won’t let him leave.

He knew of Abraham’s past as a child soldier under a former rebel known as “The Butcher” (a monster reminiscent of the currently infamous LRA leader Joseph Kony), who’s on trial at The Hague. It’s that trial Abraham is looking to derail by kidnapping a white man – for reasons that only become clear over the course of the play. Sure enough, the kidnapping of a North American brings the press and military intervention, although things don’t seem to be going according to plan.

The complexities of the situation are revealed bit by bit in a script that’s well paced and blends humour in the first half then gradually ramps up  tensions. Two story lines unfold with Abraham in the middle of both, one with Nicholas and another with his younger sister Sia. They intersect only at the end, when the meaning of Abraham’s actions become crystal clear.

It’s a talky play, with the action limited to a single location, but the words carry a weight and intensity that do justice to the stories they tell about Abraham and his sister and the terrible fate that befell their family when the fighting came to their Liberian town, leaving their father dead, Sia raped and left for dead and Abraham forced to join the soldiers. Stripped of his own humanity, he becomes just another one of the perpetrators in the end.

The acting is what lights up this dark story. McMurtry-Howlett does a nice job of portraying the naïve Canadian boy, raised on the do-gooders creed by his parents. He veers between disbelief, delirium and desperation, neatly portraying the combination of essential goodwill tainted by a damningly superficial understanding of the situations or what he was actually there to do. “I don’t know if I helped anybody,” he admits. Olajide’s Saa Abraham is a complex character, at once tortured by his past and yet still capable of casual cruelty. “I fought for the devil that tore my country apart,” he laments. Jajube Mandiela gives us a convincing portrait of the brash 11-year old Sia; all the more heartbreaking for her youthful courage.

SIA is a play about the tragedies of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. It integrates a little history lesson on Liberia and the consequences of its bloody and decades long civil war. What I found most telling — though there was a little shuffling about during the lighter first half of the play, the audience grew completely silent and still during the latter part as it reached its climax.

SIA is presented by Cahoots Theatre www.cahoots.ca

Dance: Jasmyn Fyffe’s Interlock

Dance: Jasmyn Fyffe’s Interlock

15 March 2012 No Comments

By Anya Wassenberg

Jasmyn Fyffe Dance presents Interlock
A DanceWorks Co-Works Series Event
Performances continue to March 17, 2012
Winchester Theatre, Toronto

Jasmyn Fyffe is emerging as one of Toronto’s most interesting dancer/choreographers and Interlock, a DanceWorks Series Event, is more proof of her talents.

The evening features six works, among them the premiere of uncover a solo dance created for Fyffe by Toronto choreographer Karen Kaeja. It is dramatically lit and begin rather ingeniously on an air mattress as it’s inflating; the noise the only accompaniment to Fyffe’s movements. The timbre of the sound changes oddly with her movements; it’s strange – but effective. Fyffe has a powerful and expressive presence on stage, always watchable. At the end of the solo piece, she sinks back into the mattress as it begins to deflate.

Fyffe choreographed or co-choreographed all the pieces with the exception of that solo, and her work hits the right notes both artistically and in terms of sheer entertainment value. The pieces have moments of athleticism and high energy. However, Fyffe is also not afraid of more contemplative elements and moments of stillness, using the shapes of postures and bodies along with movement.

Crumpled Juxtaposition is an intriguing duo piece by dancer/co-choreographers Fyffe and Kyra Jean Green. They make a striking pair in a dance that was inspired by commonalities they discovered in their choreographic language, including a fluid quality and crumpling motions.

The  performance ends with the crowd pleasing Pulse, a riff on the romantic music from 50s and 60s, including The Flamingos’ I Only Have Eyes For You and other songs by the Shirelles, Percy Sledge and Nina Simone. The dance begins with a bespeckled, sweater-vested crooner and develops into a lip-synching dance party with members of the audience on stage.

As both a dancer and choreographer, Jasmyn Fyffe’s work is strong and compelling. She’s a young artist whose body of work is developing in a style all her own.

Concert Review: Angélique Kidjo at Koerner Hall

Concert Review: Angélique Kidjo at Koerner Hall

14 March 2012 One Comment

By Anya Wassenberg

Angélique Kidjo cut a diminutive yet striking figure on stage at Saturday’s crowd pleasing show at Koerner Hall in Toronto. By the end, she had the house on its feet dancing to a lively performance lit up by her irrepressible energy and rich voice.

The crowd gave her a very warm reception from the opening, as she sang a traditional song while the band slowly filtered on stage. From her traditional vocal techniques of her native Benin, she flowed effortlessly into a smooth Afrojazz number; it was this versatile range that characterized her show. Kidjo’s voice is warm and powerful, and supple with a husky edge at just the right moments.

The show featured her varied repertoire, from sophisticated polyrhythmic jazz to swingy and melodic pop-flavoured tunes. Her back up band, consisting of bass, drum kit, percussionist and guitar, are polished and tight, contributing multi-part harmonies to her strong vocals. “If you feel like singing, do it. If you feel like dancing, do it too,” she said. With that invitation dancing bodies started to stand up from the second song.

Kidjo has a personable stage presence. Between songs she shared stories about her upbringing, like when she was shoved on stage at age 6 and caught the bug for performing. “I’m going to sing till I die,” she said to applause. When she’s not performing or recording, she devotes much of her time to various charities, and many of her songs are infused with the social messages that are near and dear to her. They include access to education for all the world’s children and supporting the ambitions of African girls.

These messages were wrapped in buoyant and melodic jazz with flashes of a singing West African guitar. In one, she became a simmering French chanteuse, and she described another song as based on a traditional rhythm she translated loosely as “the wind that breaks glasses”.

The crowd loved her and she loved us back by singing and dancing through the aisles. After that, she invited the audience on stage and it was soon packed with dancing bodies. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and had the rest of us on our feet too. Kidjo ended the night with a classic West African style jam and  came back for two encores. It was Ms Kidjo’s debut at the three-year old Koerner Hall and not likely to be her last.