TO Jazz Review: The Roots, June 29, Toronto Star Stage

Posted on by Mark in Concerts, Toronto Jazz Festival | 6 Comments

Toronto – If I had to sum up the show The Roots put on last Tuesday at Nathan Phillips Square in one word, it would be “Wow!”. If I had two words at my disposal, it would be “Holy Crap!” The band brought an energy that I haven’t seen in quite some time to an audience that was feeling every ounce of it, and sending it right back at them. No matter how you cut it, The Roots, The Roots, The Roots were on fire.

After recently releasing their latest album How I Got Over, you’d think the band would be playing a healthy dose of new material. It was refreshing to see that they were more interested in putting together a kickass live show. The influences of the night came from all over the map. From “Sweet Child of Mine” to “Jungle Boogie”. From a tribute to Fela Kuti (Nigerian Afrobeat), to some sweet Curtis Mayfield funk. The band demonstrated great versatility and managed the transitions oh so smoothly while keeping the energy pegged at 11 for the nearly two hour set.

No matter how you cut it, The Roots, The Roots, The Roots were on fire.

The Roots fuses intellectual lyrics and hip hop with elements of jazz and funk. The band was tight as they wove their way through their set with confidence and dare I say bravado. The live wires of the night were easily guitarist Kirk Douglas, a.k.a. “The String Assassin” and sousaphonist Damon Bryson, a.k.a. “Tuba Gooding Jr.”  They got down from the stage several times to get down and jump up with the crowd. The sousaphone was amazing. Seeing Damon play awoke a deep-seated longing within me that I didn’t even know existed: I want to be a sousaphone player in a hip hop band. I never knew such a thing was possible.

I’ve never given a show a 5 star review before. I was thinking about that in the tent. A great live show consists of a few key elements: the energy the musicians bring to the table, their talents and abilities, and the amount of love that the crowd is sending back to them. As I rocked out in the tent, it occurred to me that The Roots had all of that in spades. Live music just doesn’t get better than this.

TO Fringe Review: Fruitcake and The Dentist, June 30

Posted on by Brian in Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | Leave a comment

Toronto – So what’s most important in a one-person show? You could say any number of things regarding the script or the acting or what have you. I think that above all, you have to be a great storyteller to really make a one-man or one-woman show work.

There’s no greater example of this than Rob Gee’s Fruitcake – Ten Commandments from the Psych Ward. There’s some other elements to Fruitcake: ostensibly there’s kind of a plot about a night shift in a psychiatric ward with a “voice of God” giving out ten commandments like “thou shalt laugh at each other” and “thou shalt not kill…thyself…on my shift” that sort of introduce each segment. Really, though, it’s just Rob Gee telling stories, and the “commandments” part is secondary. Possibly it’s just in there because “Fruitcake – Rob Gee Tells Stories About Back When he Used to Work as a Psychiatric Nurse” is a pretty terrible title.

Anyway, it works because Rob is a great storyteller. He’s funny and amiable and just looks like he’s having a terrific time throughout, and he also has that sort of John Cleese-like ability to flail his long limbs around in way that makes everybody smile. The stories he tells are engrossing. There’s the speed freak and the rehabbing alcoholic who, as Rob puts it, had a real commitment to their habits. There’s the prank he and a patient pulled on a nurse on his first night who was terrified of giving needles. There’s the paranoid schitzophrenic who thinks he’s the subject of a massive experiment. And there’s the horrifying story of the man who boiled his hand, then cut it off with a circular saw because a voice in his head told him it would save a friend half a world away.

Rob manages to tell these stories with a level of humanity and empathy that’s hard to balance in tales of mental illness. He doesn’t feel sorry for these people, nor does he make the audience feel sorry for them. They’re real people, not so very different than you or me, just with a few more chemical imbalances in the brain. As Rob tells stories of helping them with their tenuous grip on sanity, and in some cases just trying to keep them from killing themselves that very night, there’s a lot of laughs, and some uncomfortable squirms. They’re great stories, told by a master, and it makes a show worth seeing.

Unfortunately, as good as Fruitcake was, it started late, and as a result I missed the start of my next scheduled show. Let this be a lesson: if you have less than five minutes to get from a play at St. Vladimir’s to one at the Helen Gardiner Phelan playhouse, you’re probably not going to make it, unless you really pound the pavement.

After killing time for about 90 minutes, only about seven people joined me to see The Dentist. It’s a show about the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her quest to learn exactly what it was he did when he was held at the camp at Auschwitz. This causes her to reflect on a dysfunctional relationship with a father prone to irrational rage and abuse.

I don’t know what it was exactly, but this show just didn’t click. I’ll grant that it might have been the lack of audience; it’s hard to get excited for a performance when there’s eight people in a room made for 112. Maybe it’s the translation; originally written in Hebrew, playwright and performer Razia Israely had the show translated and took English lessons to try and get it to work. In any case, on this night it wasn’t working: Ms. Israely’s performance was flat, she didn’t seem entirely comfortable giving the show in English, the music cues were occasionally off, and while the plot seemed like something you might enjoy if it were a short story, it didn’t make the transition from an ok story to a good stage show. This play has gotten good press at other festivals, like Edinburgh, so it’s possible that Wednesday was just a bad night and it’ll be better during the rest of the Fringe. A great storyteller could maybe get this one to work, and maybe Ms. Israely is that in Hebrew, or on other nights. But things were pretty rough on opening night, and I can’t recommend the show based on what I saw.

TO Jazz Review: Taj Mahal, June 27, Toronto Star Stage

Posted on by Mark in Concerts, Toronto Jazz Festival | Leave a comment

TorontoTaj Mahal brought his brand of traditional blues to Nathan Phillips Square last Sunday. Most of the city was busy processing the aftershock of all that G20 smashy smashy. It seems that after basking in the unfavourable global limelight, most Torontonians have in turn looked back out at the world and the picture out yonder ain’t much rosier. Things seem to be a big ol’ global mess. We’re leaking thousands of tons of oil into the Gulf every hour, and the global financial system is a lot less resilient or stable then our economist friends would have us think.

It’s easy to look at all of this and feel hopeless. Despairing at the fact that life unfolds in unplanned, unforeseen, and uncontrollable ways is what the blues are all about. To the crowd on Sunday night, it made all the sense in the world to let their sorrows air out with Taj.

The music was straight-up blues, no chaser. Taj alternated between electric and acoustic guitars, and occasionally some work on piano. I’m not sure if it was the after effects of the Herbie Hancock show from the previous night, but I just couldn’t get into the music. The blues at its best contains an x-factor that can be hard to reproduce and impossible to fake. It typically involves the musician taking an inner journey to some uncomfortable and personal places. That’s not easy to do on demand. I didn’t feel that the x-factor was present for this show, but that in itself seemed to make sense after the surrealism of the weekend.

Concert Review: Plants and Animals, June 24, Opera House

Posted on by sarahw in Concerts | 1 Comment

Toronto – Lately I’ve been on a serious Canadian music kick, read: enjoying many bands with nature-themed names (you have no idea how much this amuses me).

Plants and Animals’ freshman effort, Parc Avenue has been on my iPod for about a year, but not on very high rotation. To be honest they never really wowed me. My roommate is a huge fan and bought us tickets to their show at the Opera House last week.

I was pleasantly surprised with this band made up of only 3 members. Plants and Animals can be described as modernized classic rock (a mix of The Kinks and Coldplay is what first comes to mind). These guys have a pretty decent stage presence, they really rock out up there. You can tell P & A have been touring a while when the lead singer/lead guitarist and the bassist start to sync up their “moves” on stage, I found these rock star moves pretty amusing.

About half way through their set P & A brought out a guest saxophonist, apparently he was one of their high school friends (the name of the song escapes me and after The Acorn debacle, I won’t try to guess it). The sax was a great addition to the song and the guy really nailed his solo (sporting a neon green shirt, wayfarers and a matching neon headband) while hamming it up for his 5 minutes of fame.

Later on in the show they announced another guest, which turned out to be fellow Canadian Basia Bulat. She didn’t really do much per se, except augment a few songs with her Autoharp, maraca’s and some other random percussion tools. Regardless of her contribution, it’s cool when bands bring out surprise guests and it definitely adds another layer to the performance.

I have to admit P & A have moved to a more frequent rotation on my iPod and I am going to take a serious listen to their latest album La La Land.

Plants and animals – Tom Cruz by DerAndere