Digging Roots delivers a transformative show

Global – Blues
Digging Roots
Farquhar Auditiorium University Centre

Reviewed by Andrea E.

A small but welcoming crowd waited for Digging Roots, self- described “political power of sound,” March 10, 2013, on the University of Victoria campus. The sparse stage was defined by a simple sound-image relationship: Yamaha drums, a few mikes, scattered speakers, and an old, beige mid-size vintage Fender amp plugged into a ukulele. So let’s throw away labels, genre-corrals and attempts to homogenize sound for the ease of the people who were not there. You simply missed a culturally transformative show. (It was unfortunate that Art Napoleon had to cancel due to a family emergency.)

Lead singers ShoShona Kish and Raven Kanatakta, now living in Barrie, Ontario,  define themselves as “humans before they were musicians.” Their first song, “All Night,” with smokin’ pedal-effected guitar riffs led immediately into the spiritually aware “Plant the Seeds.” Drummer Paul Ridden took the song three-quarters of the way through with his shift to tribal memory-based drum that moved back and forth with Kanatakta’s sound-shearing, and then percussive, guitar. Third song was the aptly named “Sunshine,” and led to a song the crowd loved Kanatakta’s explanation, “It’s what happens when you are raised in a ‘colonial-country-gospel’ world. Well, you just can’t two-step right with your loved one, hence the name of the song, “Clumsy Lover.” CCR and Hendrix were in the venue at times, and it was impossible not to think of a sunny, windows-open afternoon somewhere on the Rez.

“Lonely” just didn’t sound, well, lonely, and was likely the weakest song in that set–it’s not lonely when four musicians are singing cross-layered harmony and playing back and forth. “Stay” lifted the mood into a bright, light sound. Set by rolling ukulele, and bass player Trevor Miln’s lyrical echo, back and forth–brilliantly written song. Raven unplugged somewhere around here, and moved through the auditorium, circled the crowd, brought everyone into the heart of the night. Kish and Kanatakta then started a call-and-response reverb to everyone, and garnered the crowd’s rising response.

The second set, after sweet “Tall Grass,” delivered the most powerful song of the night: “Going Back,” an ode to Raven’s grandfather Walter who taught him to play guitar influenced by Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, transformed itself into what Raven calls “country-gospel-blues.” Then Janis Joplin’s ghost seemed to take a hold of the mike with ShoShona in “Cut My Hair,” a song inspired by her Great-Auntie Mary’s residential school experience. The song evolved in layers with somber fugue-like drums, eerie pedal effects, and razor-sharp guitar riffs. Totally hair-raising. The crowd loved the Louise Riel inspired “Wake Up and Rise.”

Digging Roots has been booked for the Harrison Festival of the Arts, July 6 to 14.  Love Drive, the group’s next self-produced album, will be out this fall.

Andrea E., aka Country Heart, is a fourth-year UVic writing student who lives for any sound with a twang or a slide in it. You can hear Country Heart on CFUV later this spring.

 

Elgar receives delicate, balanced performance

The Victoria Symphony Orchestra
Concerto for cello in E minor by Edward Elgar
Soloist Zuill Bailey
Royal Theatre

 Reviewed by Konstantin R. Bozhinov

Cello soloist Zuill Bailey described the Concerto for cello in E minor  as a monumental twentieth-century work that rivals the great Dvořák cello concerto. Bailey, just as Edward Elgar did almost a hundred years ago, compared the concerto to the “baby stages” in our lives, namely infancy and advanced old age. The concerto began with a basic and memorable chordal structure, matured fully in the middle movements and then gradually settled down into the final minute of the piece, bringing back the same opening gesture.

The sound from the introductory orchestral performance of John Estacio’s Brio: Toccata and Fantasy for Orchestra had barely disappeared when the centre-piece began with rich sound from Bailey. Overall, the orchestra was supportive of the soloist, especially in the low-range melodies which Elgar writes in great quantity and quality. During those moments, the orchestra politely backed away and let Bailey’s 1693 original Gofriller cello take the lead. But unfortunately when the cello played at the top of its range, the sound was lost due to overlap with the violas and violins.

Bailey overlooked no details in the third Adagio movement, which was certainly the most sensitive in his presentation. He gradually dropped the dynamic level and made the audience lean forward in order to hear all of the details; in this section he was certainly doing the conducting, while Maestro Zeitouni was picking up on every subtle musical cue, only then relaying it to the orchestra.

The last movement featured a similar amount of finesse from the orchestra but unfortunately here the cello intonation was the worst, in part due to the high positions Bailey used on the instrument. Nevertheless, this movement had to somehow make its way back to the original  “adolescent” themes of the opening. The performers dropped the dynamic level almost to the point of disappearing, then suddenly brought back the jagged chords from the top of the score. It was clear that the whole concerto had had a transforming effect on that theme, and it had now returned for one final reminder of the “baby stages” structure that Bailey described in his introduction.

Overall, Bailey delivered a sensitive performance; this concerto is obviously familiar to him.  Brief moments of hesitation on the orchestra’s part demonstrated that it had not been rehearsed for too long. In rare moments, the soloist, rather than the conductor, seemed to spontaneously dictate the interpretation. Those were the most memorable aspects of the entire concerto.

 

Konstantin R. Bozhinov is a Ph.D. student in historical musicology at UVic, as well as a professional performer on the lute, baroque guitar and theorbo.

Leonard Cohen delivers unique holiness

By Julian Gunn

My plan was to see the exhibition of Leonard Cohen’s prints at a leisurely hour on Saturday morning, after some strong coffee and a wander up Oak Bay avenue. I knew that the Avenue Gallery resided there, theoretically stuffed with the evidence of Cohen’s vision, tucked between a Starbucks and Ivy’s Bookshop. I’d asked my friend J. to come along, but his schedule was less flexible than mine, so he called the gallery Friday night to see if he could run by after work (the sneak!)—and they told him the show was over. The newspaper and the website showed the wrong end date.

He texted me the news. I railed against fate in a few brief bursts of angry typing, and then J. updated me: the gallery owner had revealed that there were still a few stacks of prints standing up against the walls. We could see them if we wanted to, provided we arrived before five-thirty. It was almost five. We bolted to Oak Bay in J.’s car, Poncho.

It was true: the show was down and the gallery folk were in the midst of redecorating for the next exhibition. The whole room smelled of fresh paint and thwarted longing. The remaining works of Cohen stood on the floor in three close files of matching frames. The large and medium prints rested against the back wall, and the small ones were almost under our feet near the cash desk. J. knelt down and with reverence parted the frames. There it was, Leonard’s sigil and stamp, the Unified Heart: two interlocking hearts in a circle, a modified Star of David.

I’ll level with you, friends. I believe that Leonard Cohen is a saint. I don’t adhere to any faiths with saints in them, but I know a holy fool when I see one.  If  you were at his concert with me on Wednesday night, you saw him too, frail as a bird in a black suit, tipping his hat to us and the beautiful, terrible joke of mortal life. (That Voice. Inimitable. Sinking over six decades from a quavering tenor into an almost subsonic bass tremor rolling through the flesh of the earth itself. That Voice, now beginning to grow ghostly. It frightened me, but it made him laugh.) I say frail, yet he played three encores. We didn’t leave the Save-on-Foods arena (which Cohen described as “this difficult space”) until almost midnight.

Still, we are here to talk about Art. In parallel with Cohen’s gig, the Avenue Gallery exhibited a travelling display of his work. Or so I surmise—I never actually saw it on the walls. The question I was asked to contemplate was a reasonable one: was it Leonard Cohen’s great gift for visual art, or only his massive fame, that merited a display of his prints? We know he can write a song, but can he draw?

It is an article of faith with me (I have faith in any number of things, if not a central bureaucracy of divinity) that anything made with true attention, honesty, and compassion will produce beauty. I think you can tell. I think that it shows.

I think it shows in Cohen’s prints. There’s skill in the execution: a thick calligraphic line that twists to form a face, slightly abstracted Grecian forms for beloved women. There’s clumsiness too–the same lumpy pixellation that confused me in the art for his album Dear Heather.

The visual art’s precise analogy is his music. I think even we who love Leonard above rubies can agree that Mr. Cohen didn’t start out as a great musician or vocalist. He began instead as someone with a profound gift of attention—to the sudden flaring of the sacred in the ordinary world, to the nuances of desire and longing, to his own internal states. There’s a kind of narcissism in his work, but it is a wrenchingly humble self-contemplation that deserves a better name. Likewise, his visual work is full of self-portraits, but these are not self-aggrandizing images. Quick tracings of the deep canyons in an old man’s face, they bear wry inscriptions:

yes
always somewhat
off balance
but peaceful
in his work
peaceful
in his vertigo
an old man
with his pen
deeply familiar
with his
predicament.

That gift of attention, worked on by years of effort and humility, has produced something more than artfulness, though I think his songs are great art. The only word that comes close enough is holy, if there were some version of that word that insisted on only precisely the feeling of bliss and peace and mutual surrender. The songs have been transformed further by the musicians Cohen brought together to tour with him. The liquid violin of Alexandru Bublitchi, the incredible fingerwork of Javier Mas, the playful and sure percussion of Rafael Gayol, the golden vocals and songwriting gifts of Sharon Robinson—these would all be worth a ticket in themselves. We had all those, and we had him too.

“It kind of fits, though, doesn’t it?” J. pointed out as we rushed to the Gallery in pursuit of the remaining fragment of the art show. “Somehow it’s better this way, to come too late and to almost miss it. It’s like something from his songs.” And he was right.

 

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer and music lover.

Reid’s essays capture “inside” view

A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden:
Writing from Prison
by Stephen Reid
Thistledown Press, 133 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

This is possibly the saddest book of essays I have ever read. Not sad because the writing is bad; not sad because the author has no insight. But, yes, sad because the essays seem to be written by a man perpetually divided against himself and deeply in pain about the schism.

On the quiet side of the ledger, as illustrated in the collection’s “Epilogue,” hunkers the introspective man, the poetic, sensitive observer: “The years have passed and I have watched the tides come and go, carrying their debris, real and imagined. I have grown old in prison and I am only interested in beginnings these days, but the string becomes harder and harder to find. It seems I am losing the plot of my own life.”

And on the wracked side struts the famously infamous Stephen Reid, the bank robber who revels in his bad-boy exploits, as brought to life in “The Last Score”: “We’re flat out, doing eighty maybe ninety clicks an hour, almost flying velocity on a residential street. I’m wedged out the window, the wind whipping my hair, and for one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires lift free of the ground, I am no longer bound to this earth.”

But of course, gravity always wins: the car lands, the cop on the motorcycle keeps on coming, and Reid’s cocaine-botched June 1999 robbery garners him 18 more years in prison. As these brief samples show, Reid has grown into a writer of both sophistication and energy. Although still haunted by his past, he’s confronted those first early transgressions when he was introduced to morphine at the age of 10 by a pedophile doctor named Paul; he’s lived through his Stopwatch Gang years, outlived his partner-in-crime Paddy Mitchell, contributed to his community, been Susan Musgrave’s husband and watched his daughters grow–always with the spectre of recidivism at his side.  .

While Reid hasn’t made his living as a full-time writer for the past 40 years, he is a man who ruminates and a man who writes–and when he’s able to subdue his addictions and the catastrophic decisions that usually follow, he demonstrates genuine talent.

This book of essays is a collection of work printed elsewhere, in Maclean’s, in the Globe and Mail, in an anthology and on salon.com, to name just four venues. I’m glad Thistledown has collected these pieces, even if here and there they could have been edited to pare away repetition. This is an important collection of essays, one that should be read by lawyers and police, by corrections officers and psychologists and, yes, most of all, by ordinary citizens and the politicians who purport to represent them. A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden demonstrates what “inside” really means. It gives us a world shaped by both grief and joy, seen through the eyes a man often yearning to be free of himself.

Poems flare with precise intensity

New Theatre
by Susan Steudel
Coach House Books, 95 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Karen Enns

A short, untitled poem in the first section of Vancouver resident Susan Steudel’s New Theatre seems designed to look like a typewritten, anonymous message. Words are cut and pasted across the page, slightly off-kilter, but the images are clear and the phrases crisply articulate: “a study of channels”, “the coal bird”, “Grace in the/ noon water.” This sense of shifting ground under precision-tuned language runs like a fine thread through Steudel’s striking debut collection.

From the opening “sound list” translated into russian using both cyrillic and roman alphabets, Steudel invites the reader to listen hard and manage the grand leaps, not only between language and meaning, but between things themselves, the stuff of them. A meditation on time uncovers surprising (and delightful) aural and imaginative connections:

“Noon. A grumble. A black currant.”

“Tea. The stain in the iris.”

“Evening. River ice clinking into water.”

“The hour. Graphite on paper, a blunt guide.”

“Bath. Giant, silent elk.”

Central to the book is the section called Birch, inspired by Robert Payne’s biography of Vladimir Lenin. Steudel gathers points of illumination and lays them out, side by side, to form a kind of collage. Found poems, lists, quotes from Lenin’s own notes, and word games become the “multiple foci/ through which sunlight tapers to flint sparks.” Mayakovsky, Kandinsky, Tolstoy, and Akhmatova make brief appearances in this series of historico/political poems that bears the chiselled starkness of a siberian plain:

he saw in forests the hardness and purity of
a styled movement,
a lone person in a birch forest

closing his stride;
‘organization of professional revolutionaries,’
this one thought like circling wolves.

Scenes, a more autobiographical long poem, focuses on eleven different domestic settings. Stage directions offered in square brackets create a flickering focus; the reader is urged to step in and out of the poem to reconsider, listen, look again as “loose regattas of dark capsize and drift.” The question of what is real or solid is never resolved. Even clarity is fragile: “But here is the tree, bright as limes/ and the pure call of glass owls.”

In the end, Steudel’s committed vision crosses the spaces she creates. We are left with images that are tightly wound and visible, moving toward us from the outskirts:

I wake beneath dark lamps,
my window fractions into deeper darkness.

A flooded road,
faces of the brown deer and limping buck.
From an antler
grass trails by the roots.

 In Theory and Practice, love is “the magic of intersections: street crossings,/ intersecting lines/ converge momentarily then go streaming off.” This may be the most fitting description of Steudel’s poems that flare with intensity as they negotiate enormous distances.

 

Karen Enns is a Victoria musician and poet.

Debut EP Saltwater sure to set sail

Ghost Lights
Saltwater EP (2012)
Produced by James Finnerty

Reviewed by Jennifer Louise Taylor

Ghost Lights is the debut musical project of a former west-coaster now living in Montreal, Noah Cebuliak, who sings and plays most of the parts on the EP.  He’s supported by a wide cast of equally talented folks, including producer James Finnerty. The result is a well-produced and artfully arranged collection of songs that reflect a wide variety of influences. Saltwater has elements of folk for the folkies, R&B for the soul-minded, stimulating lyrics for the intellectually curious and enough ambient sound and jazzy bass riffs for those just wanting to sit back and enjoy the ride.

The album is inspired by Cebuliak’s west coast wilderness travels: if you have ever found yourself with feet in sand, a hot cup of coffee warming your hands as you watch the fog roll in off the water on a “soft” west coast morning, then you already have a sense of what this album evokes in the listener. Saltwater works because the lyrics, instrumentation and vocals are thoughtfully crafted, giving the listener a cohesive,  intriguing musical experience.

In the second track, “A Train is Coming,” smooth vocals offer a musical onomatopoeia of an oncoming train; the song creates an R&B/old-time feel, applied to sentiments of love and loss that leaves you feeling joyfully lonesome. The album’s fourth track, “Babble from a Beehive,” reminiscent of California artist Brett Dennen, has a fabulous acoustic dynamic with plucked strings and breezy horns contrasting with the rich, soothing vocals of Cebuliak. The only track on Saltwater that left me sitting musically confused and lyrically dusty, was Thundercloud with its retro 70s rock feel. For me, it does not hold the same rich, ambient, melodic feel of the other five tracks. That being said, five gems out of six songs, is stellar for any album, let alone a debut EP.

Cebuliak says his melodies often come to him “while walking or sitting outside in nature.” As a songwriter, he has the unique ability to melodically distil the essence of the outdoors without lyrically watering down the complexity of human experience. What is more, the lyrics are clearly enunciated and beautifully presented for the listener–always a boon, but particularly with lyrics worth hearing.

Ghost Lights’ Saltwater is a musical example of a journey well taken– like that memorable summer spent with your wisest and most eclectic elderly uncle. In this case, the purveyor of the experience happens to be at the beginning of his journey. If this is just the start, then I truly look forward to seeing where Cebuliak’s future musical musings will take him and us.

A Train is Coming:

Jennifer Louise Taylor is a Victoria-based musician and former world traveller who enjoys the sound of west-coast rain on a cold tin roof.

WordsThaw: 1st annual spring symposium

Saturday, March 23 2013
10 a.m. – 10 p.m.
UVic, Human and Social Development Building
Room A240

Celebrate the Spring equinox by spending the day and evening of Saturday, March 23rd with The Malahat Review and nineteen of B. C. and Alberta’s finest writers.

The symposium will consist of three daytime panels and a literary reading in the evening.

Zoom In, Zoom Out: Focus on Fiction (10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.)
With John Gould, Yasuko Thanh, and Daniel Griffin. Moderated by Amy Reiswig. Sponsored by Focus magazine.

A Sustainable Feast: The New Food Writing (1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.)
With Rhona McAdam and Kimberley Veness. Moderated by Don Genova.

In Our Names: Writers on Poverty (3:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.)
With Patrick Lane, Madeline Sonik, and Sylvia Olsen. Organized by the Victoria Writers Festival.

Words on Ice (8:00 p.m.)
An evening of readings with Marilyn Bowering, C. P. Boyko, Lorna Crozier, Katherin Edwards, Bill Gaston, Lee Henderson, Laura Kraemer, and Pamela Porter.

Full Pass includes three panels and evening reading.

Full pass regular: $40
Full pass student/Friend of The Malahat: $30

All full passes include a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review for yourself or a friend.

Words on Ice tickets (at door):

Regular: $10
Student/Friend of The Malahat: $5

All attendees at Words on Ice will receive a free copy of our current issue, #181 Winter 2012.

To purchase a pass, visit www.malahatreview.ca.

Films Worth RE-visiting: The Illusionist (L’illusionniste)

The Illusionist (Lèillusionniste)
Directed by Sylvain Chomet
Original screenplay by Jacques Tati,
Adapted by Sylvain Chomet.
2010

Reviewed by Joshua Zapf

The Illusionist is beautiful for many reasons, but most of all because it is believable.

The story takes place during the 1950s. The protagonist, Tatischeff, is an illusionist and a master of his craft.  We follow him, and a handful of other entertainers, as they struggle to make ends meet. In desperation, Tatischeff travels to Scotland and, after a small performance in a local tavern, he settles into his room. A young maid becomes so perplexed by Tatischeff’s abilities that she is convinced he is magic. She follows the illusionist to escape the humdrum life of her village, a place that has seemingly just seen its first electric light. Tatischeff, awash in her admiration, shows fatherly affection for her. He attempts to give her everything her heart desires but cannot prevent the slow disenchantment that comes with time.

The film does not incorporate hard dialogue. You might suggest, if you had to explain it, that there are no spoken lines. That’s why I nearly overlooked this film; I figured the premise too lofty, the design too avant-garde for my liking. Nevertheless, The Illusionist is one of the finest films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. I predict that after just twelve minutes you will be enchanted.

The Illusionist is a cartoon of the highest quality, drawn to the grandest scale. Scenes sprawl like photographs. The music, originally pieced together by the director Chomet, guides you seamlessly through scenes. No spectacle is spared as background characters move with their own accord giving life to every scene–more life than most live action movies could ever hope to attain.

At times the movie is like rolling artwork. The trip from Kings Cross to Scotland is outstanding. You could review that segment a dozen times and continue to discover new and wonderful details (the advertisement on the bus, the gulls meandering near a cliff, the Border Collie managing his flock, the change of passengers, the name of the Scotsman’s boat.)

Chomet has done a masterful job. The music, the sentiment, the novel characters, the idiosyncratic movements of the lead are all threads woven into a touching storyline. The Illusionist is a resounding achievement–a film that that should not be missed, no matter how old or young you are.

 

Josh Zapf just committed himself to Co-op Studies in Writing at UVIC; he  was mesmerized by Star Wars and Indiana Jones as a kid. 

Young adults attain untidy denouement

Whitetail Shooting Gallery
by Annette Lapointe
Anvil Press, 220 pages, $20.00

Reviewed by Emily McGiffin

Whitetail Shooting Gallery, Giller-prize nominee Annette Lapointe’s second novel, opens with a shotgun blast that reverberates throughout the book. It launches cousins Jason and Jenn, positioned at either end of the blast, into the middle of adolescence and into a sexual turbulence that will follow them into adulthood.

Set in Bear Hills, a small town on the peri-urban fringes of Saskatoon, the novel places a contemporary coming of age story against a rural landscape in transition. Its characters struggle with the tension created by the expectations and stereotypes of rural life while grappling with tumultuous task of finding oneself in the contemporary world.

The story follows the entwined lives of three central characters: Jason, Jenn and Donna, Jenn’s close friend and, eventually, lover to both cousins. Around them, the cast of secondary characters includes Jenn’s parents, Jason’s father Garry, and Sarah, his semi-estranged mother who left the family and moved to Saskatoon following a car accident brought on by a whitetail deer.

As the novel progresses, Jason spends greater amounts of time with Gordon, a mysterious sculptor from the west coast whose activities become increasing sinister as new truths emerge. As their friendship grows, Gordon evolves into a caricature of Jason: both men are marginalized, queer, confused about the shooting incident and, in their own ways and for their own reasons, fascinated by Jenn and Donna.

Far from a bucolic story of prairie romance, the novel tells the story of outsiders excluded from mainstream small-town prairie life by their physical characteristics (throughout their high school years, Jenn, Donna and their friends are “the fat girls”) and their sexual identities. While the family (with the exception of Sarah) lives in neighbouring houses on the family farm and remains united through Jenn’s high school years, the world of the novel unravels as it becomes clear that Jennifer and Jason—both irreparably damaged by the pivotal event in the book—are mired in misunderstanding of the event that prevents resolution and forgiveness. Despite the strong and supportive family that surrounds them, both drift into adult lives marked by an inability to establish real intimacy, which they seek instead in small animals and transient lovers.

An up-front, no-nonsense look at young adults developing their identities in small-town Saskatoon in the 80s, Whitetail Shooting Gallery develops a realistic set of scarred characters, explores their complexities and, finally, arrives at a complex, untidy denouement.

 

Emily McGiffin’s non-fiction and award-winning poetry has been widely published. Her first book of poems, Between Dusk and Night, was published by Brick Books in 2012.