Jay Levine has died at 69, and Toronto has lost one of the quiet architects of its cultural export business. If you don’t recognize the name right away, you certainly recognize what he built. In 1985 Jay created Fashion Television for Citytv, and for the next twenty seven years he produced it, with Jeanne Beker as the face the world came to know and Jay as the brain running things from just off camera. FT went on to air in more than 130 countries, which is a wild number for a half hour show that started as a scrappy local production out of the CHUM building on Queen Street West. That kind of reach doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone with real taste and real discipline is making a thousand small decisions correctly, week after week, for decades.

Jay’s résumé went well beyond FT. He produced network specials and documentaries, including a Channel 4 and CTV co-production on Elvis Costello, a UK series called The Art of Architecture, and the 2002 documentary Naked in the House, which won a Gemini. People who worked with him describe a man who led without needing to make a show of it, thoughtful, witty, opinionated, sophisticated, and never once loud about any of it. That tracks with everything I remember of him.

Friends in photos include: Peter Whittington, John Gunn, Joel Goldberg, Jay Levine, Dave Johnson and Mike Broadfoot.

I did a handful of appearances on Fashion Television over the years, including one memorable segment for BeeLine for Men, my short lived line of golf shirts that was about ninety percent comedy bit and ten percent actual business plan. It worked anyway. We sold shirts. I have always suspected that Jay and the team let a guy like me on the show precisely because they understood that fashion television benefits from a little absurdity mixed in with the couture, and Jay had the instincts to know when a joke would play as well as a runway

He wasn’t a singer, but provided talking backing vocals on my Deep Lounge Coalition album Sub Urban, one of those sessions where a guy from a completely different corner of the industry shows up, has fun, nails his part, and leaves you with a better record than you had before he walked in. (The project also featured Steve Anthony, Mark Dailey, Peter Kent and others). I always liked the guy. He was a good egg. Always smiling. Generous with his time, sharp with his opinions, never precious about any of it.

We had many mutual friends, Joel Goldberg and Moses Znaimer (who get their own columns soon) and of course Jeanne.

Jeanne Beker, who worked alongside him for those 27 years, called him the brilliant creator of their beloved show and said they had lived an amazing time in fashion history together, running around the world, dreaming and scheming. That is about as good an epitaph as a producer could ask for, and it is the truth. Jay Levine spent his career making other people look good on camera while staying almost entirely out of the frame himself. That is a rare kind of talent, and this city, and the fashion world he helped put on the map from a building on Queen Street West, is smaller for having lost him.

Speaking of Jeanne Beker - I did a piece on her in the past here on Substack:

Goddess of Oddness Investigates the Science of Romance” directed by Andy Jones C.M.

I want to tell you about a woman I know.

I own her paintings. I’ve had her sing at more salons, launches, and private parties than I can count. Somewhere along the way we became very good friends, the kind where I find myself genuinely curious what she’s going to do next: what she’ll write next, what she’ll paint next, who she’ll become next, because with Stella Walker there is always a next. She doesn’t finish a chapter so much as she detonates it and walks into the smoke to see what’s on the other side.

Before I get into the friendship, let me try to describe the woman, because on paper she barely holds still long enough to be described.

Jennifer Joy Walker Photography

The Official Version

Stella Walker is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto. Writer, singer, actor, comedienne, producer, director, painter, voice coach, songwriter. That’s the résumé line, and it’s true, but it’s also a bit like calling the ocean “wet.” It’s accurate. It undersells the scale of the thing.

Right now she’s recording her debut album of original songs, The Spaces Between Things: The Songs of Stella Walker, with Vezi Tayyeb at Kensington Sound. I’ve written about Vezi before in these pages: the man has quietly shaped half the records this city loves, and Stella has assembled a serious band to bring her songs to life. First songs with Jane Milliken. Then alter a band with Michael Shand, Toby Hughes, Artie Roth, and Daniel Barnes. That’s not a session band. That’s a murderer’s row.

The video for the first single, “I Want a Beehive Hairdo,” will be directed by John Mitchell, who also directed her one woman show Stellavision: The 3D World of Stella Walker. And in a detail that made me so happy, when I got to inform her that her Lula Lounge performance of a song called “I Rue the Day I Met Jaymz Bee” is going to appear in the documentary about me, Being Bee. I have been serenaded with my own comeuppance and I couldn’t be more delighted about it.

Her paintings hang in private collections across North America and Europe. Her comic alter ego, Vera the Poetess, published an anthology with the glorious title The Rose on the Windowsill of My Pain and Confusion, which tells you everything about Stella’s gift for finding the joke inside the ache, and the ache inside the joke. Her writing and performing have aired nationally on The Comedy Network, CBC television and radio, and Bravo. She was a cultural commentator on CBC’s Undercurrents with Wendy Mesley. She played Trix the Aviatrix in the smash hit run of The Drowsy Chaperone at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1999.

Andy Jones, the great Newfoundland comedy legend, directed her first solo show, The Goddess of Oddness Investigates the Science of Romance, for a two week run at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s. Working with Andy, she tells me, was her comedy finishing school. It led to an episode of CBC’s Comics! and to a one hour Comedy Network special she created with Insight Productions called The Merman-Off, a tribute to Ethel Merman where performers competed with their best Ethel impressions in front of judges including the late Lee Maracle, Mark Tewksbury, Kurt Browning, and yours truly. I was a judge on a show about doing impressions of Ethel Merman. My life has been strange and I am grateful for it. Kurt and I sat next to each other on the shoot at the Masonic Temple. I said “that gorgeous woman beside you; is that your agent?” He said “that’s no agent, that’s my wife” to which I replied “You are straight? What a waste of a great ass!” We got along famously. He had a haircut that reminded me of Kevin Spacey so I suggested he star in “The Usual Suspects on Ice” where he would skate slowly then pick up the pace. Lots of laughs! Oops, but back to Stella!

She has coached voices for 37 years. Thirty seven. That’s not a hobby, that’s a devotion.

Now Here’s the Part They Don’t Put on the Poster

That’s the surface, the good stuff, the stuff you’d put on a one sheet. But Stella gave me the longer version too, the one she says is “background for the interview, not necessarily for the article.” I’m putting it in the article. This is a woman whose life reads like it was written by someone with no editor and no fear, and I think she’d want people to know the whole thing, because the whole thing is where the art actually comes from.

She grew up in Vancouver, the youngest of three, to parents who were loving, classy, funny, and thoroughly bohemian. Her father Mickey was a wheeler dealer and a jazz drummer who once served as president of the Hot Jazz Society in Vancouver. As kids, Stella and her brother Stuart were his roadies, hauling the drum kit in and out of clubs. She grew up, quite literally, inside jazz clubs.

Her mother Lillie came from Otthon, a speck of a town on the Saskatchewan rail line, one of twelve siblings raised during the Depression, the child of parents who’d come from Central Europe in 1904 and homesteaded before moving to town. Lillie taught in a one room schoolhouse in northern Saskatchewan, then moved to the coast for a brief modelling career. She had movie star looks and a beautiful singing voice, and she met Mickey through the Vancouver jazz scene. Stella later harmonized with her mother on the soundtrack of the award winning film A Feeling Called Glory, directed by Corrine Mayres, and wrote compositions with her father. That alone is the kind of full circle most of us never get.

The family moved constantly. There were stretches with no electricity and a steady diet of Kraft Dinner. There were five motels in a row during a period when her father was drinking and selling Humpty Dumpty Magazines for Little Children door to door across British Columbia. In one of those motels, in Victoria, her sister was taken in by the Songhees First Nation across the street and danced with them, welcomed with a generosity Stella still speaks of with wonder. She writes about all of this in her memoir, and she’s told me, and I believe her, that despite how grim it sounds on paper, there are laughs in it. That’s Stella’s whole method, honestly. Find the laugh inside the grim thing. Don’t let the grim thing win.

When Stella was five, her father got sober through a twelve step program he stayed devoted to for the rest of his life. He became a successful land developer on the West Coast, and three years later the family moved into a mansion, the first house they ever owned. Then a government policy on lot sizes gutted his subdivisions, and it broke him, what people at the time called a nervous breakdown. When Stella was ten, he was institutionalized and received shock treatment that, by her account, saved his life. The family lost the mansion and everything with it. They rebuilt for a year in Calgary before returning to Vancouver, where Stella, identified as a gifted child, attended both a private school and a cutting edge alternative school. At sixteen, her voice was discovered by Agnes Stieda, a singer with a classical career in Europe, and Stella paid for her lessons by cleaning a house every Saturday. Agnes, remarkably, still performs regularly with a professional orchestra in Victoria at the age of 99.

The Yukon

At seventeen, right out of high school, Stella left home for a silver mill in Elsa, in the middle of the Yukon, following a high school friend named Lydia Barnes who’d gone up a year earlier. She wanted to chart her own course and make real money after a childhood of ups and downs, and I don’t think anyone who has met Stella would be shocked by that decision, because everything about her says I would rather live the interesting version of this story.

Before the mill hired her, she survived as a pool shark in the Keno City Hotel, in Keno City, Yukon, population 30 at the time. Her father had taught her to play as a kid at the Alano Club in Vancouver, a social club for people in recovery. His own father, from Liverpool, had been such a serious player he’d had a wall removed to fit a billiards table in the house. Apparently, here dad used to walk into a friend’s home and simply ask, “Where’s the pool table?” That instinct clearly survived a generation, because in 1977, in a Yukon bar full of miners, none of them saw it coming that the skinny, red headed, underage seventeen year old could take their hard earned money off the table, one game at a time.

She lived in log cabins with no running water, kerosene lamps, wood stoves, and outhouses. Her first job for United Keno Hill Mines was breaking rocks with a sledgehammer for twelve hour shifts. She’s recognized in the Yukon as one of the first women in mining, someone who helped pave the way for the women who came after her. The physical toll was real too: stacking lumber at the end of the greenchain ruptured a disc in her spine, an injury that took years to heal. She’s gone back to Keno City, now home to roughly a dozen people, several times since, for art, video, and theatre projects, and has produced two full series of paintings of the region.

Vancouver, Music School, and a Car Accident

In her twenties, back in Vancouver, she married, worked for Canada Customs (cleared to the secret level, briefly a customs inspector, which is a sentence I love), and then worked the 911 emergency lines for the RCMP. At 27, she left the marriage and the job and enrolled in classical voice at Vancouver Community College. That’s where her life in the arts actually begins, by her own account. She played the Railway Club, the Commodore Ballroom, the Town Pump, and other Vancouver rooms, first with a 1920s flapper act called The It Girls (with Sharon McNulty), opening for punk bands, and then with a comedy act called Luna Rossa alongside pianist Richard Coombes and Susanne Richter (who also played with Art Bergmann).

After music school she trained intensively, at times daily, with the Romanian opera singer Lucia Constantinuscu-Neagu, a strict and expert coach who sharpened her technique enough that Stella sang four seasons in the chorus of the Vancouver Opera and was preparing for international competition. Then, in 1990, a car accident in which she was a passenger, rear ended, left her disabled for a stretch and closed that particular door.

Toronto

She moved to Toronto in 1993, and she calls it the best decision she ever made. She threw herself into the cabaret scene, doing comedy on Church Street, at the Rivoli, and at Lisa Merchant’s March of Dames comedy festival, and spent two years as an associate producer at First Night Toronto, the all ages, alcohol free New Year’s Eve festival, booking acts into venue after venue.

At the same time, in a turn that shows just how wide her range really runs, she studied Yiddish and built a reputation as a serious concert artist, premiering new works by composers Srul Irving Glick, Helen Greenburg, and Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, performing with some of the finest klezmer musicians in North America and at the Ashkenaz Festival. She spent twelve years singing in the professional choirs at Beth David and Beth Sholom synagogues and trained in cantorial work to lead services herself.

Cree Language, Métis Heritage

Eventually she left the synagogue and returned to something she’d started studying decades earlier in Vancouver, while living with a Cree man, in order to connect with his family: the Cree language. Over three decades she was welcomed into community, continued her language study, worked as an elder’s helper, received her name in ceremony, completed a month of Cree immersion in Saskatoon, took part in an Artist Educator Foundations course on Manitoulin Island for Indigenous education, and worked as a substitute teacher of the Swampy Cree dialect at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto.

And then, through DNA testing and research carried out with the St. Boniface Society in Winnipeg, she learned that she is in fact Indigenous, with deep Métis roots on her father’s side. Her father’s mother, Dorothy Rebecca Dolina Blanche McLeod, was Métis, a fact his own mother never told him, so he died without ever knowing it. Stella’s heritage traces to British and Scottish Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders and cartographers, and to Cree women connected to the historic Red River Métis settlement in Manitoba, with ancestry from St. Peter’s Reserve. She’s a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation.

And in one last twist worthy of her whole life story, the DNA testing also turned up a small trace of Jewish ancestry, echoing something her maternal grandmother had quietly told her children during the Second World War. All of Stella’s grandparents died before she was born, so there was never a chance to sit down and ask them directly. She’s spent years since piecing the whole tapestry together herself, in her art, in her writing, in her music, refusing to let any single thread of it get lost.

Back to the Present, and to Us

So that’s Stella Walker. A woman who broke rocks in the Yukon and sang opera in a Vancouver chorus and studied Cree and found out in mid-life that she’d been Métis all along and never knew it, and who somehow, through all of it, kept making people laugh, kept painting, kept writing, kept singing. When I watch her work a room, whether it’s a gallery opening or a stage at Lula Lounge, I think about how much life is folded into every gesture she makes, and how lightly she seems to carry it.

I’m proud to call her a friend. I’m prouder still to own a couple of her paintings and to have had a hand in a few of the rooms where she’s performed. And I will admit, without an ounce of shame, that I am genuinely looking forward to hearing “I Rue the Day I Met Jaymz Bee” turn up in my own documentary, sung by a woman who has earned the right to rue whatever she likes.

She’s created some new paintings to sell. Sell art to make art!

Watch for The Spaces Between Things when it lands. Watch for whatever Stella does after that. With her, there’s always an after that.

Meanwhile, I will be interviewing Stella Walker at Kensington Sound...part of The Kensington Jazz Festival. Saturday SEPT. 19th at 3:30. No advance tickets - just line up (I suggest lining up at 3 if you want to get in) and see if there is room for you!

Speaking of Kensington Sound, here is a story about my pal VEZI:

There is a long and mostly disreputable tradition of mixing flesh and toon, and I have sat through most of it. It goes back further than people think; Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry the mouse, Mary Poppins hopping into a chalk drawing with Dick Van Dyke (of my own tender youth). But the form really found its nerve in 1988 with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” a movie I have never stopped loving. Bob Hoskins playing it dead straight against a rabbit with a Brooklyn accent, Jessica Rabbit drawn like sin itself, the whole thing lit and shadowed like a real film noir instead of a cartoon wearing a trench coat. That is the high water mark, and everything since gets measured against it whether it wants to be or not. Looney Toones: Back in Action (2003) was decent and well-written but didn’t really stick with me.

American in Paris (cute) Mary Poppins (really good) Roger Rabbit (wow) Looney Tunes (decent but forgettable) Space Jam (totally forgettable)!

Which brings me, reluctantly, to “Space Jam.” I never liked it. I know that is heresy in some circles, but the jokes were thin, the toons felt like hired hands standing around a basketball court waiting for their close-up, and there was always something off about the way the film handled Michael Jordan on screen. Critics have said for years that his skin tone reads several shades lighter than the man himself, and having actually stood next to him, I can tell you that is exactly the kind of thing you notice and cannot unsee. I met Michael in Las Vegas in 1997, at the opening of the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, one of those absurd, marble-columned, fake-sky Vegas spectacles where you turn a corner and there is the greatest basketball player alive just hanging around like anybody else. He was warm, he was sharp, he was unmistakably himself. Watching a studio soften and lighten that self for a cartoon crossover always struck me as a small, quiet insult, and it coloured the whole movie for me. So no, “Space Jam” and I were never friends.

A story about my trip to Vegas can be found in “Kolour Me Krazy” illustrations by Charles Hackbarth. https://www.amazon.ca/Kolour-Me-Krazy-Memoir-Colouring/dp/B09HQC4RQ3

This is a long way of saying I walked into “Coyote vs. Acme” with my guard up and my standards set by a thirty-eight-year-old rabbit movie. I need not have worried.

The premise is pure New Yorker, because it actually is. The film is spun out of Ian Frazier’s 1990 humor piece imagining Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for decades of defective anvils, rockets, and roller skates that never once caught him a roadrunner and never once failed to catch him. (He got paid for the rights but had nothing to do with the film.) In the movie, that thought experiment gets a body. Wile E., broke and humiliated after one explosion too many, tracks down a struggling personal injury lawyer named Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte with exactly the right note of a man who has given up on his own life before this case walks in on four legs. John Cena is Buddy Crane, Acme’s opposing counsel, all veneers and confidence, a corporate golden retriever with a law degree. Lana Condor plays Paige Avery, sharper than her father and clearly the one who should have been running the firm from the start. Luis Guzman gets to preside over the whole absurd proceeding as Judge Troppogrosso, which is a name I might just use myself someday.

The animation side of the ledger is deep bench Looney Tunes. Eric Bauza is doing heroic duty voicing Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy, Porky, and Elmer Fudd, Jeff Bergman covers Bugs, Sylvester, and Yosemite Sam, Bob Bergen is Tweety, Candi Milo is Granny, and Fred Tatasciore growls his way through Taz. Dave Green directs, working from a script by Samy Burch off a story credited to Burch, James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater, which explains why the courtroom farce and the classic slapstick sit together as comfortably as they do.

The plot itself is simple on purpose. Coyote sues Acme for every anvil, rocket skate, and giant rubber band that ever failed catastrophically at the worst possible moment, and the case becomes a referendum on whether a corporation can keep selling garbage to a customer it has been quietly, cheerfully destroying for seventy years. It is Sisyphus with a punchline, and somewhere along the way you start rooting for the boulder.

What surprised me most is the speed of the thing. This was the funniest and fastest film I have sat through in years, one gag landing on top of the last before you have finished laughing at it. It works fine for children, who will take the anvils and the dynamite at face value, but it works better for the rest of us, the ones old enough to recognize a class action lawsuit as its own kind of slapstick and to enjoy nurturing the inner child who always wanted Wile E. to win just once.

Hey - SEPT 5 approaches - a reminder about Fredathon, online!

I have never trusted a festival program that makes sense on the first read. The good ones are supposed to feel like a drawer full of mismatched keys, and this year’s lineup has that beautiful clutter, that sense that somebody threw darts at a map of the human condition and every dart landed somewhere true.

Being Heumann kicks off TIFF's fiftieth-first, and thank god somebody at Bloor and Yonge finally got the message that access isn't a footnote, it's the whole plot. Siân Heder, still riding the goodwill of CODA, hands us Ruth Madeley as Judy Heumann, the woman who parked a hundred wheelchairs in a federal building for twenty-eight days until Washington blinked. Mark Ruffalo shows up as the bureaucrat on the other side of that standoff, which feels about right, since somebody always plays the guy who has to be dragged toward decency. Roy Thomson Hall, September 10, red carpet, and for once the opening night movie has actual teeth instead of just Oscar bait dressed as a crowd pleaser. Toronto loves an underdog story. This one comes with receipts.

Start with the world premieres, because a world premiere is a kind of birth announcement, and I like showing up for those. I PLAY ROCKY sounds like a title that could go one of two ways: a boxing picture or a backstage comedy about an actor who never quite lands the part he was born to play. I’m hoping for the latter, because Toronto has enough boxing pictures and not nearly enough films about the particular ache of being almost cast. MISTRY GREEN has the kind of name that suggests either a detective or a garden, and either way I’m in. And A TALENT FOR MURDER, well, that’s just good manners in a title. It tells you exactly what it is and dares you to be bored. I won’t be.

Then there are the Canadian premieres, which always feel a little like a family reunion, films that have already been out in the world charming strangers and are now coming home to charm us.

Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend is the one everybody will talk about at the parties, and fair enough, though I should correct myself here before I embarrass myself further at those same parties. I'd assumed this was a documentary about Denis Villeneuve, our great director of Arrival and Dune, tracing his ambition surviving contact with an industry built to grind it down. It isn't. It's a biopic about Gilles Villeneuve, the Quebec-born Formula One driver who electrified the racing world in the 1970s before his death on the track in 1982, with Rémi Goulet playing the young Gilles risking everything on raw talent alone. Different Villeneuve, same appetite for ambition surviving contact with an industry built to grind it down, so perhaps I wasn't so far off after all. It's also, appropriately, closing the festival itself.

Run Terry Run sounds like it was named by somebody who understands momentum, which is really what all good films are chasing anyway, that sense that the story cannot stop moving forward even when the characters desperately want it to. It’s a documentary, and the momentum in question belongs to Terry Fox, told through nearly a hundred reels of previously unseen 1980 footage of his Marathon of Hope that had been sitting forgotten in a Toronto storage unit for over forty years. Director Sean Menard interviewed the people who were there, Fox’s van driver, his brother, and the footage apparently catches Terry mid-transformation, from a quiet 21-year-old with a wild idea to a young man learning to carry a nation’s attention on his shoulders. It premieres a day before the actual Terry Fox Run, which is the kind of programming symmetry that makes we festival-goers weep a little into our popcorn.

Drifter, on the other hand, is a title built on stillness, or at least the illusion of it. A drifter is a person who has decided that arriving anywhere is optional. I have known a few. They make wonderful company and terrible houseguests. This one is Sung Kang’s directorial debut, and he stars too, as a lonely racetrack custodian who turns out to have a hidden gift for competitive drifting, which is really just stillness dressed up as speed, a man learning to trust a found family instead of controlling everything alone.

Paradise Lost borrows its title from Milton, which is either a very confident move or a very foolish one, and I respect both. Yeon Sang-ho, the mind behind Train to Busan and Hellbound, returns with a psychological thriller about a mother whose son vanishes along with a busload of other children, only for the boy to return home nine years later as a grown, cold stranger, right as she’s grown attached to an AI-generated version of him as a child. It’s the kind of premise that sounds like science fiction and behaves like grief. The Assassins has the good sense to be plural, which tells me this isn’t a lone wolf story, it’s a story about a crew, and crews are always more interesting than loners because crews have to negotiate. Hur Jin-ho’s political thriller dramatizes the aftermath of the real 1974 assassination attempt on South Korean president Park Chung-hee, with Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il and Lee Min-ho circling the unresolved edges of a genuine historical mystery.

And Always Lalisa closes things out with a name that sounds like devotion itself, the kind of title that promises us someone’s whole heart on screen, which is really all any of us are asking a film to give us. It’s a documentary about Lisa of Blackpink, directed by Sue Kim, following the year the K-pop superstar stepped away from her group for the first time since childhood to launch a solo career and figure out who she is without four voices harmonizing around her.

That leaves the actual closing night, which belongs to that Villeneuve picture I already tipped my hand on above. There’s something fitting about ending a festival full of underdogs and drifters and grieving mothers with a young man from small-town Quebec betting everything he has on raw nerve, whether he’s aiming a race car or, as it turns out, not aiming a camera at all. TIFF opened this year with a woman refusing to leave a building until the world changed around her, and it closes with a man who never learned how to slow down. That’s a hell of a bookend.

That’s several films and several different ways of asking the same question the festival always asks: what does it mean to want something badly enough to chase it on camera. I’ll see you in the dark.

So many movies…so many parties…and speaking of TIFF Parties…

A young Jaymz Bee with Alwaxman and Johnny Favourite. TIFF 1999

Coming soon, memories of some old TIFF Parties!

Speaking of movies, here’s a story:

Kerry Doole is not, as far as I can determine, a secret agent, though the internet’s near total silence on the man makes a compelling case for the theory. What little I could piece together goes like this. He was born and raised in New Zealand, a country famous for sheep, hobbits, and producing music writers with more curiosity than the job requires. He began his dubious career in music journalism over 50 years ago, filing reviews for two university papers before setting sail for England, because in the seventies that is simply what a serious music addict did. He lived in London from late 1976 to early 1980, precisely the years worth living through if music was your religion, and reported from the trenches for The Montreal Star and assorted N.Z. publications. When the romance of squats and dodgy Thatcherite flats finally curdled, he decamped for Toronto, a city he called home for nearly 40 years. He has spent the past eight years a contented resident of Hamilton, and he is, remarkably, still writing, for more outlets than most of us can name.

There are writers, there are journalists, and then there are culture heroes. Kerry Doole is all three, and he has been quietly, joyously essential to Canadian music for as long as I can remember having a band worth writing about.

I got birthday greetings for Kerry from two of my favourite publicists in Canada.:

“Happy Virgo kiddo - It’s a YOU day with tons of Happiness coming right back - after all year long you take care of us all- the gift of love - Happy Birthday!”- Joanne Smale

“Kerry Doole now lives outside Toronto so that makes it super hard for him to come to many T.O. shows - I miss him - but he has integrated in Hamilton and helps out shows happening there, and continues to promote music across Canada and around the world.” - Jane Harbury

I believe he was on staff at Music Express, the magazine some of us still call Rock Express out of pure nostalgia, when our paths first crossed. I was immediately impressed, and not just by the charm or the exotic accent that made every interview feel like it was being conducted from somewhere more interesting than the room we were actually in. What got me was that he had clearly done his homework. His questions were never boilerplate. He had listened to the record before he showed up, which even now remains a rarer virtue in this business than anyone would like to admit.

All my bands, from 1989 to a couple years ago!

At the time I was fronting Look People, a band that had wandered somewhere into the ditch between ska, funk, and future punk, depending on which set you caught. We wore T-shirts that said “Six Guys Who Think They Are Playing Jazz,” which was as much a confession as a joke. Kerry got it instantly. He compared us to Frank Zappa, which is the kind of reference that tells you a writer actually understands the tradition of gleeful, well rehearsed absurdity we were working in, rather than just reaching for the nearest available joke band.

That would have been enough for one career’s worth of gratitude, but Kerry kept going. Over the years he wrote about the Royal Jelly Orchestra, about TUK, the strange and wonderful side project I built with Carlos Perón of Yello, about The Deep Lounge Coalition and Bonzai Suzuki - projects with Dave Howard, then The Tiki Collective and right on through to my current outfit, Music for Secret Agents. He covered artists on my label, Vesuvius Music Inc, with the same care he gave the bigger names, because to Kerry there were no small Canadian acts, only underexposed ones.

He thanks me for sending quality music - I thank him for spreading the word. Double thanks!

Let me do the math on that, because it is worth doing. That is half a dozen bands, something close to a hundred musicians passing through them over the decades, and that is just my little corner of the story. Multiply that by every other artist Kerry has championed since the Rock Express days and you start to understand the scale of what he has done. When I think about what his writing has meant to the Canadian music industry, the number gets genuinely dizzying. I cannot think of a single writer who has done more for this country’s music scene than Kerry Doole.

And he is not finished. Kerry is now writing for Billboard, which means the wild, joyous abandon he has always brought to promoting Canadian musicians, in every genre, without exception, has found the biggest stage a music writer can stand on. That is exactly where he belongs.

So today I raise a glass to this great journalist and old friend. Well, not that old.

photo: Arnie Guha

I had a feeling I was going to like Asher Ettinger before I ever met the man.

He sent me an email that was, without exaggeration, one of the more respectful requests I have ever received from a stranger trying to get me out to a gig. I am paraphrasing, but only barely: “I know you are a busy man, and you are probably invited to things like this all the time, and I promise I would not be contacting you if I did not believe in this singer with all my heart. We have a show coming up in a week at the Drake Hotel, and I think you will be very impressed with the voice and stage presence of Elise LeGrow. If you can make it out, I would be happy to buy you a drink.” That is not a pitch, that is a character reference for the person sending it. I called him up, he sounded exactly as sincere and polite on the phone as he had on the page, and instead of just going myself I loaded up twenty friends for a jazz tour and made his show our first stop. Elise did not disappoint. Her voice was terrific, and Asher’s playing was spot on, tasteful, listening, exactly where it needed to be and nowhere it didn’t.

After that night he invited me over to his place for a songwriting session, the three of us in a room working on something called “Skyscraper”. I could not hum you a bar of it today if my life depended on it, but I remember the feeling of it perfectly: how fast ideas moved between us, how quickly a stray line from one person became a hook because someone else caught it and threw it back better. That is the whole trick of collaboration and most people who call themselves collaborators cannot actually do it. Asher can. I booked him and Elise a few more times after that, and the one that still lives in my memory is a special evening at the ROM where they played a set ahead of the great Peter Appleyard, which is its own kind of vote of confidence from a room full of people who know what they are listening to.

Years passed, the way years do, and I found myself working on an album and thinking it might be fun to sit down and write something with just Asher and me, no one else in the room. That became “Unexpected”, our first real co-write. I had visions of getting Fred Schneider to sing it for my Music for Secret Agents record, and for a while that felt like it might actually happen, but the scheduling gods were not on our side and it never came together. Then Covid arrived and shut every door except the ones on our laptops, and Asher and I kept writing anyway, bouncing files back and forth across a city where neither of us could safely leave the house.

Fred Schneider is a dear friend and gets his own Substack piece soon.

When I started work on my first short film, Wild Music, Asher was one of the first people I thought of. He and Robert Priest wrote a piece called “Grey On Grey” for it, and it remains, without qualification, my favourite piece of music in that entire film. For my second short I went back to the well and pulled out “Unexpected”, rewrote the lyrics from scratch, and it became a different song entirely under a new title, “Earth Is a Dangerous Place.” Same bones, completely new animal.

But the richest stretch of the whole partnership came with my first feature, MagicLand. Asher and I wrote “Reluctant Carnivore”, “I Got Nothin’”, and “Carpet Song” together, three songs that do very different jobs in that film and all of them land. He also wrote a piece called “I’m Mortal” with Robert Priest for the same picture, which tells you something about how naturally he moves between collaborators without ever losing his own voice in the process.

My favourite collaboration so far: I wrote “Reluctant Carnivore” with Asher Ettinger. Big thanks to Lorenzo DiGianfelice, Jono Grant and Drew Jurecka for bringing it to life! “

None of this happens by accident, and it is worth saying plainly what Asher brings to a room before he ever touches a keyboard. He has been at this for the better part of four decades, a pianist, composer, synthesist, producer and arranger with something north of two thousand five hundred compositions to his name, alongside more than a decade as a working fine artist. I am happy to report - I own some of his art!

He composed and music directed for Charlotte Church on Joan of Arc, work that earned an OFTA Television Award nomination for Best Music in a Motion Picture or Miniseries. He ran Thinkmusic, an award winning house that turned out roughly three thousand short, medium and long form tracks including over a thousand commercial spots before it closed its doors in 2009. He gave synthesizer tutorials to Oscar Peterson, who liked Asher’s painting well enough to own one from his Tipping Point series, which might be the single best character reference in this entire piece. He has written concert works too, an opus of piano preludes, a symphonic tone poem, a string quartet, a suite for string orchestra called Pieces of English. In 2008 he became a principal partner at the Bread and Circus in Kensington Market, a theatre, gallery, music venue and bar rolled into one, sitting right in the bohemian center of gravity of this city.

He has come out to more than a few of my salons over the years, and I have been welcomed at several of his in return, which is really the only kind of friendship worth having in this business. Gifted composer, genuinely talented musician, and, the description he earned the very first time I read his name in an email, a trustworthy fellow.

Happy Birthday Asher Ettinger, August 30, 2026.

I like to guide you along and suggest another story of someone you should know!

Norman Jewison and Jaymz Bee at CFC during TIFF 2015.

There are so many things to love about the Toronto International Film Festival, and I have loved most of them for a very long time. First, of course, the movies. Seeing a film before it becomes world famous is one of the great private pleasures of this city. Last year it was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, unveiled to a Toronto crowd before the rest of the planet caught up. That is the trick TIFF has been pulling for decades: it hands you the thing before the thing becomes The Thing.

Look at the roll call. Slumdog Millionaire premiered here in 2008 and was practically headed straight to video before a TIFF audience stood up and told the industry otherwise. Green Book premiered here in 2018, took the People’s Choice Award, and went on to take the Oscar for Best Picture. Twelve Years a Slave did the same dance five years earlier. Silver Linings Playbook picked up the People’s Choice on its way to a Best Actress Oscar for Jennifer Lawrence. American Beauty passed through (and I was completely blown away by it); Chariots of Fire took the People’s Choice here in 1981 and then took the Oscar too. The Big Chill opened the festival in 1983 when Columbia wasn’t even sure what it had. Steven Spielberg brought The Fabelmans through, his first time ever at TIFF, which tells you something about how the gravity of this festival works even on the people who invented Hollywood gravity. Toronto has a genius for spotting the sleeper before anyone else knows it’s asleep.

Of course, I love the galas too, and the parade of parties that comes with the festival turf. But my favourite has always been the modest one, the CFC TIFF picnic. No red carpet, no searchlights, just a few hours of wandering a lawn and running into old friends from the Canadian film business, the kind of unhurried afternoon that the festival proper never quite allows. I will miss not seeing Norman Jewison there. I used to run into him at jazz clubs now and then, this titan in a golf shirt just enjoying a set like the rest of us, and catching up with him at the CFC picnic always meant something to me. He had that rare thing, real fame with zero interest in being famous in the room.

Norman Jewison was proud to have Maxine Bailey (sister of TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey) become Executive Director of the CFC. On top of her CFC duties Maxine co-founded Black Artists Network in Dialogue and sits on boards including the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and The Walrus.

The Canadian Film Centre does great work, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than assumed. Jewison founded it in 1988, a director with seven Academy Award nominations to his name who could have spent his later years anywhere, and instead he built a training ground on the old Windfields Estate in north Toronto and set about making sure the next generation of Canadian storytellers didn’t have to leave the country to learn their trade. Over the decades the CFC has produced more than two thousand alumni working across film, television and digital media, a genuine pipeline into an industry that used to treat “Canadian film” as a punchline. It expanded into music with the Slaight Family Music Lab, into acting with its own lab, and it started handing out the CFC Award for Creative Excellence to recognize graduates who went on to shape the international screen business. At last year’s Canadian Screen Awards, dozens of CFC alumni pulled in over a hundred nominations between them. That is not a nice little charity. That is infrastructure. Jewison used to say that film had become the literature of this generation, and that Canada’s cultural survival depended on mastering the medium well enough to command a place on the world’s screens. The CFC is the proof of that sentence, built one resident filmmaker at a time.

Now, the practical matter of what to wear to all this. I have to consult old photos before I commit to a suit, to make absolutely sure I haven’t already worn it to the picnic or the galas in some previous year. I call this Liberace syndrome. When you own a truly loud suit, the kind that announces itself before you’ve said a word, people remember it. Which means you cannot repeat yourself, not at this festival, not in this town, not among people who will absolutely call you on it. So out come the old photo albums every September, a ritual review of sequins and stripes, all in service of one more walk across that lawn.

Speaking of Movies...here’s an old film I love very much. It actually inspires me to make a musical based on it one day. Story here:

MagicLand poster - first screening SEPT. 14, Paradise Theatre, Toronto 4pm.

Every artist has one idea they carried since childhood, folded up small and kept in a back pocket, waiting for the moment they were foolish enough, or brave enough, to unfold it in public. Mine was a musical about Greek gods stuck being human. I’d wanted an Oscar for it once, the way a kid wants a bicycle, badly and without much thought as to what he’d do once he had it. By the time I actually made the thing, decades later, the Oscar had quietly excused itself from the conversation. What was left, and what turned out to matter, was the simpler and harder ambition: to tell the story exactly as I heard it in my head, with nobody standing between me and the frame.

MICHELE SILVA-NETO - The Producer Who Financed Freedom

That’s the whole religion of making a movie, if you want to know. Music is a conversation. A film is a negotiation, usually with people who think their money entitles them to a producing credit and a say in your third act. I’d made short films before this one, no film school, just the accumulated wisdom of standing behind a camera and learning what breaks. So when financiers came around with their terms and their opinions, I already knew what I was protecting. Then Michelle Silva-Neto, who deserves a statue somewhere, told me she loved my work precisely because nobody got in the way, and offered to finance the picture on the condition that nobody else would have artistic say. That’s not a producer. That’s a patron. There’s a difference, and most artists go a lifetime without meeting one.

I had the bones of the script in a drawer, the way you always do, one of a dozen scripts that had been waiting for their moment. I called Robert Priest, who I still think is one of the great lyricists and poets walking around loose in this city, and we sat across from each other for months without a single argument, which if you’ve ever collaborated with anyone on anything, you know is its own kind of miracle. Some songs he wrote outright. Some we split. Lori Cullen loved his lyrics so much she refused to touch a word of them and just sang them, beautifully, which is its own form of compliment. Taylor Abrahamse turned in the kind of songs that don’t need a movie around them to work on the radio. Barbra Lica wrote five songs in a single week, an act of either genius or defiance, possibly both.

We cut the bed tracks at Kensington Sound with Vezi Tayyeb, who also wandered into a cameo, and then I brought everything to my old friend Jono Grant at Victory Drive, a man I’ve been making records with since he was a teenager and whose ears I have never once had reason to doubt. Lorenzo DiGianfelice signed on as publisher through Vesuvius, and now there’s a soundtrack coming this fall, digital first, vinyl eventually, in a pressing so small it will be a collector’s item by design rather than by accident. That’s the kind of scarcity I like. Not manufactured hype.

Adam James as Narcissus, more Will Ferrell than Fabio…

The casting was where the whole thing turned from labor into pleasure. I wrote Athena with Irene Torres already in the role in my head, which meant the writing sped up considerably, the way it does when you’re not inventing a person but simply transcribing one. She spent the shoot holding cue cards and fetching coffee like an extra, though she was the star, because that’s who she is. I wanted Jeff Goldblum for Zeus until my producer reminded me what that would cost, and pointed out I already had a Zeus, in the mirror. A year later Goldblum turned up playing the same god on Netflix (Kaos), which tells you the instinct was sound even if the budget wasn’t.

Denielle Bassels played my movie wife and then, almost as an aside, wrote one of my favorite songs in the picture with Robert Priest and her sister. John Finley and Great Bob Scott played leprechauns with Brooklyn voices that collapse into cartoon Irish the second Athena walks in, a bit of grifter comedy that lands exactly because they commit to it completely. Peyton Lingle sang as a siren in drag, a boy playing a girl playing whatever pronoun the scene required, which is the most natural kind of shapeshifting an actor can do. (He played a boy, girl and a “they”.) Donovan Locke played a half man, half seahorse named after a kid I knew in high school in North Bay, Pat Griffin, because if you’re going to invent a mythological creature you may as well give him the most ordinary Canadian name available.

Queen Pepper made a great spider and also helped with props and catering. Everyone did everything for the shoot. Her son, King Louie helped a bunch too.

There was a children’s band with members ranging from six years old to thirty, a fact that should tell you something about how time behaves on a movie set. A little girl named Hope, daughter of Big Rude Jake - a friend gone too soon, had so much fun that her mother started talking about getting back into the business, at which point my cinematographer set her straight: “it’s never usually this much fun, he told her, you were just on a Jaymz Bee set, don’t get any ideas”. He wasn’t entirely joking.

Robert Priest played the Wizard, essentially playing himself, which is the only honest kind of casting for a wizard. Maureen Honore walked in off a single meeting at a party and blew Jono and me out of our chairs the moment she opened her mouth, the kind of discovery that makes you suspicious of every talent agency in the world. Serafin LaRiviere, when asked how he found the voice for a female cyclops, told me he was channeling an Air Canada flight attendant, indifferent to the point of rudeness, which is the funniest and truest thing anyone said to me during the entire shoot. Bianca Schmutz, who does my graphic design when she isn’t singing, played the genie and wrote her own song. Melleny Mellody, now going by Mellee Fresh, bruised her shoulder on the flying rig and refused to complain about it, because she said she’d wanted to fly her whole life and wasn’t going to let the harness ruin it.

The pirate role went through three actors before it went to nobody. One got sick, one got poached by a Star Trek production, one simply begged off after doing it. In the end I used Taylor Abrahamse’s original demo vocal and had Sean Rooney learn to lip sync to it, which worked so well I doubt anyone in the audience will ever know. All other songs were sung by the actual actors.

By the time we wrapped, I was somehow on time and on budget, a sentence I never expected to write about a feature film. What I hadn’t accounted for was the year of visual effects work that followed, because I’d made the rookie mistake of assuming a feature would take three times as long as a short, when the truth is closer to twenty. Jason J. Brown, my partner through all of it, kept telling me he didn’t need more crew and didn’t need more money, just more time, because it was the best thing we’d ever built together and he wanted it right. He got it right. It should get him work for the rest of his life. Working with Jason was so exciting - I can’t wait to work on another project together!

Great Bob Scott as Leppy! When I say Mythological - I stress the Illogical. Since when are Leprechauns in Greek Mythology?

Two years later, here we are. That’s the part nobody tells you about making the thing you dreamed of as a kid: it takes exactly as long as it takes, and every person who shows up to help you build it becomes, without asking to be, a permanent character in the story of how you got there.

Michele and Lorenzo - then Robert, Jason, Jono, Rhett Morita and Anthony Yin, my editor Rick Bartram...all the cast and crew...it was an amazing experience and now I hope you will come out and see the movie! September 14th, 4pm at Paradise Theatre and several screenings in November, to be announced.

To get on my monthly mailing list go to www.jaymzbee.co

For tickets for the first screening go now fast: TIX

If you check out previous Substack Columns here, you’ll find stories about my short films - but for now, here’s one about my partner in film, the brilliant Jason J. Brown!

The news says she was 80. That seems impossible, mostly because Dolly Parton never once acted her age, or anyone’s age. She acted like herself, which turned out to be a full time job and a gift to the rest of us.

I never met her. Plenty of people I know did, and every single one of them says the same thing: she was exactly who you hoped she’d be, and then a little more. I only knew her the way most of the world did, through the radio, through the television, through that voice that could turn a heartbreak into something you wanted to hum in the grocery store. But even at that distance, you could tell. She knew who she was, and nothing you threw at her was going to move that.

Everybody wanted to talk about the wig, the heels, the figure that launched a thousand lazy jokes from men who weren’t half as sharp as she was. She let them talk. She got there first, usually. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” is one of the great American one liners, and she delivered it like she was handing you a gift, because she was. She used to say she based her whole look on the town tramp back home in the Smoky Mountains, because to a little girl who’d grown up dirt poor, that woman looked like the most glamorous creature on earth. That’s not vanity. That’s a girl who decided, early, that she was going to build her own myth out of whatever materials were lying around, and then live inside it so completely that nobody could ever use it against her. You can’t embarrass a woman who already told the joke better than you were about to.

She was the fourth of twelve children, born in a one room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, in a family that didn’t have money for much of anything. Her mother pieced together a coat for her out of scraps of rag fabric, and Dolly turned that coat into “Coat of Many Colors,” maybe the most quietly devastating song ever written about being poor and proud at the same time. Her father never learned to read or write his whole life. That single fact, more than any award or any Vegas contract, is the one that explains her best. In 1995 she started the Imagination Library in her home county, mailing a free book every month to any child under five who signed up, no means test, no catch. It now sends something like three million books a month around the world. She said the kids call her the Book Lady. There are country legends and then there are people who quietly become part of the plumbing of a civilization. She was both.

Here’s the story I always bring up when someone tries to write her off as just a pretty voice with a punchline attached. In 1974 she wrote “I Will Always Love You,” a farewell letter set to music for her old partner Porter Wagoner. Years later, Elvis Presley wanted to record it. Elvis. The King himself. But Colonel Tom Parker, doing what Colonel Tom Parker always did, told her that Presley wouldn’t cut it unless she signed over half the publishing rights. Most people in her position, staring down that kind of star power, would have folded on the spot. Dolly said no. She kept her publishing. Elvis never got to sing it. Then, in 1992, Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard, and it became one of the biggest selling singles in history, and Dolly Parton earned a fortune from a song she’d written on a whim as a young woman saying goodbye to her mentor, and never had to split a dime of it. That’s not luck. That’s a woman who understood, decades before anyone used the phrase, that she owned her own intellectual property and nobody was going to talk her out of it, king or no king.

I saw a woman sing that song at a party for Burl Ives in Anacortes Washington and I wasn’t the only person moved to beautiful tears. The audience was basically a puddle with eyes. She wrote so many great songs but that one in particular won over the entire planet!

She married Carl Dean in 1966, a fellow she met outside a laundromat on her first day in Nashville, and by all accounts they stayed married until his death last year, mostly out of the public eye, by her own design. He inspired “Jolene,” which tells you Carl Dean must have been quite something too, though he never seemed to want the attention that came with being married to the most photographed woman in country music. She protected that part of her life like she protected everything else that mattered, with humour on the outside and steel underneath.

I think that’s the thing people miss when they only catch her on a talk show couch, laughing along with some host who thinks he’s the one steering the conversation. She was always steering it. Every “aw shucks” and every joke about her own chest was a door she opened on her own terms, so nobody else got to walk through one she hadn’t built first. Smart people know the difference between being laughed at and being the one who’s laughing. Dolly always knew which one she was.

I loved the songs. Everybody loved the songs. But what I loved most was watching someone hold a room, hold an industry, hold an entire culture’s assumptions about who she was supposed to be, and never once flinch, never once turn mean about it, never once stop being kind to the people asking her the same dumb questions for sixty years.

She wrote thousands of songs. She never had children of her own but mailed books to millions of them every month for thirty years. She turned down the King of Rock and Roll and came out ahead. Rest easy, Dolly. You already knew exactly who you were. The rest of us are still catching up.

Want more? There is a Dolly reference in this story from the past. (You know subscription is free, right?)

Peter Appleyard and Jaymz Bee, turn of the century, Royal Ontario Museum - Toronto.

There are people you meet who feel like they were beamed in from a more glamorous decade, and Peter Appleyard was one of them. He arrived on this earth in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, in the summer of 1928, in a grey seaside town that gave no hint of the Mercedes he would eventually park in a garbage-strewn alleyway off Carlaw Avenue in Toronto to play vibraphone for a kid with a checkbook and a big idea. That kid was me, and the check was for $555.55, and I want to tell you about the man who cashed it laughing.

Peter with Jono Grant and Jaymz Bee at VDR in one of their first sessions!

Peter’s path to the vibraphone is one of those stories that sounds invented but wasn’t. He started as a drummer, self-taught, banging around British dance bands and RAF outfits during the war, and the story he told me was that the vibraphonist in his big band used to fly separately to every gig and never rode the tour bus. There was a rumor he might have been a secret agent moonlighting as a jazz musician (which would be a killer plot for a cool film). One day he simply didn’t show up, and Peter, who could already handle piano and drums, was handed the mallets and told to figure it out. He already loved the instrument because of Lionel Hampton, and once he had it in his hands he never let it go. He’d tell you the vibraphone itself was barely a teenager when he was born, invented around 1916 and not really accepted until Hampton and the Louis Armstrong recording of “Memories of You” caused a stir in the early thirties. Peter arrived just in time to grow up alongside his own instrument.

He drummed his way through an 18-month stint in Bermuda starting in 1949, and on a stopover in New York he caught George Shearing and Lionel Hampton and made up his mind about his future. By 1951 he was in Toronto, and Toronto never really let him leave. He became a fixture at the Park Plaza, Stop 33, the Chelsea Inn, the Montreal Bistro, all those rooms where a certain kind of Toronto used to get dressed up and stay out late. In the seventies he joined Benny Goodman’s band and toured the world for the better part of a decade, and he’d tell a story about Carnegie Hall where they used exactly two microphones, one for his vibes and one for Goodman himself, which tells you something about how loud a room could get with nothing but talent in it. He played with Sinatra too, a benefit concert in Ottawa arranged by Rich Little of all people, and with Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme, a Rolodex that reads like the twentieth century’s own liner notes.

In 1992 the Governor General made him an Officer of the Order of Canada, and Peter wore that pin on his double-breasted suit like it belonged there, because with Peter, everything looked like it belonged there. Like Charlie Watts, I always figured the man got dressed for lunch whether he was staying home or heading out. He had that thing some people have where they simply look like they own a cruise ship, whether or not they do.

I found my way to him the ordinary way things happened in that era, through a phone number passed along by a friend. Melleny Mellody knew Peter and gave me his number, and I called him up sheepish about my nonexistent recording budget. Melleny and her husband Clive Smith donated and matched my small grant which made my first record possible! Peter was warm on the phone in a way that famous people are not obligated to be. He said he’d come down and play for a couple of hours no matter what I could pay him, and when he showed up at Jono Grant’s original studio on Carlaw Avenue, the first iteration of what became Victory Drive, he pulled up in a gorgeous Mercedes with his vibes in the trunk, and he had to navigate an alley full of garbage and recycling bins to get there. I apologized. He just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, man, it’s cool, it looks like jazz out here.” That’s the whole man in one sentence.

Inside, he played so fast his arms turned into a blur, like a Muppet conducting its own orchestra, and he nailed everything in a take or two. Those were my early Royal Jelly Orchestra days, and Peter Appleyard was there, and I have been dining out on that fact for thirty years. He kept coming back for more sessions after that, showed up on a MuchMusic special called Electric Cocktail, and I paid him $555.55 every single time because the number had become our private joke.

He started recommending me for other gigs too, which is its own kind of tribute, a musician of his stature vouching for a guy with a homemade (Nepotism) record label. I introduced him once at a ROM gala. When I landed at JAZZ.FM91 I got to interview him properly and book him whenever the schedule allowed, including a big night at Convocation Hall and later at Koerner Hall. But the one I’ll never stop telling people about was a duo show at a room called the Courthouse, Peter and his old friend Dick Hyman, with Norman Jewison and Phil Nimmons sitting right beside me. At one point in a single song Peter ran around the entire room playing vibraphone, drums, and piano, and it looked like Las Vegas had briefly relocated to Toronto. You did not see that kind of showmanship in this country very often. His friend Guido Basso used to describe a version of that same move, Peter abandoning the vibes mid-”Sweet Georgia Brown” to run the piano with two fingers at lightning speed before challenging the drummer, and the crowd always ate it alive.

Just a taste, he made a lotta vinyl! Sophisticated Ladies should be easy to find!

Later in his career I tried to get him signed to a proper label for a new record and got turned down by every major imprint in Toronto, which I took far too personally, since I could not imagine anyone saying no to a Peter Appleyard album. I suspect they just didn’t want it to be my name attached to the deal. It worked out anyway. My friend Geoff Kulawick signed him to Linus Entertainment and reissued old material that producer Anthony Motano had access to, and Anthony also produced a new record pairing Peter with a run of gifted female vocalists. That became Sophisticated Ladies, released in 2012, featuring Jackie Richardson, Emilie-Claire Barlow, and, because I lobbied hard for it at the very last second, a young Barbra Lica. Peter had already put out more than a dozen albums by then, and I started chasing down everything of his I could find on vinyl. I own most now!

Peter’s personal life had its own long arc. He married young, to his first wife JoAnne, and later shared his life with a partner named Elfriede. He had two children, his son Peter Jr. and his daughter Susan, and I count myself lucky to have stayed close with both of them since. I see Peter Jr. once in a while and I talk to Suzy fairly regularly. Suzy once said her father made people feel good, which is as accurate a review as anyone ever wrote about him. King of Good Vibes, double meaning understood.

He worked right up until the end. His last hurrah at the Toronto Jazz Festival in 2007, again with Dick Hyman, is something I will treasure forever. Back trouble slowed him in his final months, but Guido Basso said that even then, at what turned out to be his last concert, he still pulled off the old trick, vibes to piano to drums, still challenging the room. He died at home in Eden Mills, Ontario, on July 17, 2013, at eighty-four. 84…The same age I lost Don Francks and later my own father. Just a few months ago David Clayton Thomas died at 84.

Peter photographed by Don Dixon!

Peter had a farm out in Rockwood that I never once made it to, and I still have trouble believing that the man I grew up watching on “Peter Appleyard Presents” actually played on my records and stood on stage with my band. I’ve gone on to really appreciate Gary Burton and Michael Davidson because I grew up with Appleyard.

His name still comes up all the time. Someone will mention a Toronto club that no longer exists, or a Benny Goodman bootleg, or the particular way a vibraphone can sound like weather, and there he is again, arriving in that Mercedes, vibes in the trunk, telling me it looks like jazz out here. It still does, Peter. It still does.

A mutual friend of Suzy and I …here is a story about Vezi Tayyeb…a man you should know!

There is a culture here in town, and I want to talk about it. I want to talk about Christian Aldo. We are nothing alike. We don’t look alike. But there is something about his energy, his mission, that gets me every time. I sometimes feel like he’s my little brother.

We have a mutual friend, Genevieve Marentette, who told us years ago that we should meet. When we finally did, we laughed, because she was right. Gigi is always right.

Christian runs a place at Bloor and Dufferin called Super Wonder Gallery. He founded it back in 2012, and it has moved around the west end a bit since then, from a spot near Ossington to a stint on College Street and now to its home on Bloor. Wherever it lands, it turns into the same thing: part gallery, part live event space, part clubhouse for anybody in this city with a weird idea and no other place to put it. I’ve used it myself. I’ve screened some of my short films there.

Super Wonder built its name on shows that don’t apologize for being a little unhinged, themes running from science fiction to eroticism, from monsters to full-blown shock art. The annual Super Naughty Show, an exhibition of erotic art, packs the room every February. There’s Fashion Wars, a runway competition where the designers go for spectacle over street wear. There’s the Super Five Film Fest, five minute films from Toronto filmmakers, and the Ten Minute Theatre nights, original rock and roll musicals that Christian writes and performs in himself. (I appeared in one as Zeus.) Weddings, corporate parties, private events, he’ll host all of it, and somehow the room still feels like his living room every time.

I asked to see his short films, and honestly, I was floored. What that man does with no budget should be studied. I don’t know why he reminds me of Kevin Kline. He’s got this uniquely handsome, very serious face, the camera loves him, and yet I think he could do comedy brilliantly with minimal effort. He’s been running these screenings at his own venue for years, and I thought it was time somebody put his films on a real screen. So I’ve invited him to bring a selection to Paradise Theatre and share them with an audience for an hour.

His crowd usually comes out at night, so booking a 12:30 matinee on a Monday might be fraught with folly. But I know enough people around this town who love good art, and for a ten dollar cover, I think we can pack that theatre.

When Christian isn’t running a gallery or making short films, he’s out fronting his band, the Roncy Boys. I hired them for a charity event last April, and they picked up a slew of new fans on the spot and sold a stack of vinyl. Of course I bought the record. Anyone who’s good, and who actually finishes what they make, deserves to be supported.

There’s a low budget video of his floating around that gives you the whole picture of how he works. The props are handmade, mostly cardboard and paint. Like me, his casts are made up of friends, and he handles the casting and the directing himself, start to finish. It shows you exactly what kind of filmmaker and showman he is, somebody who makes something out of nothing because the alternative is making nothing at all.

I hope you’ll come out and see his films on the big screen. And whenever you’ve got a free afternoon, go check out Super Wonder Gallery. You can thank me later.

And HEY, following this screening Sept 14th - there is a retrospective from the Toronto 48 Hour Film Festival happening at 2pm. Story here:

A full day of film…

At the turn of the century (early two thousands) Jaymz Bee and Charlie Watts, Toronto.

There is a particular kind of Englishman who can walk into any room in the world, from Madison Square Garden to a village hall in Devon, and make it feel like a library. Charlie Watts was that kind of Englishman. He was born Charles Robert Watts on June 2, 1941, in Bloomsbury, London, and by the time I got to know him he had already spent decades being the most reluctant rock star in the history of rock stardom. He didn’t want the arena. He wanted the back room where the jazz records were.

I first saw the Rolling Stones rehearse and what struck me wasn’t the volume, it was the hush. They sounded more like an R&B band than a rock band, and Charlie’s drums were dead on, unshowy, exact, the sound of a man listening more than playing. Darryl Jones was holding down the bass that day, completely solid, and I remember thinking that the engine room of the most famous rock band on earth ran on the same quiet discipline as any good jazz rhythm section.

I told Alan Dunn, who worked for Stones management, that Charlie was my favourite Rolling Stone. I said I thought his drumming was underrated, basically perfect, and that I’d been playing Watts at Scott’s, his live double album, on my JAZZ.FM91 show fairly regularly. Word got back to Charlie that a Toronto radio host loved his jazz record more than his day job, and that was apparently exactly the kind of compliment he wanted to hear. Alan invited me to a party where I’d get to speak with him, and from our first conversation, about Oscar Peterson, I knew he was the real thing.

That was always the way in with Charlie. Not the Stones. Never the Stones. Kenny Clarke came up, and Louie Bellson, and how much we both admired Buddy Rich, especially the way Rich kept finding young players to mentor. Max Roach. Philly Joe Jones. Elvin Jones. We agreed that Joe Morello never got his due. And then he floored me by asking about Great Bob Scott, my best friend and drummer. Some of his crew had caught our band playing a small concert and had come back raving about him. That was Charlie. He noticed drummers the way other people notice weather.

Charlie’s own jazz life was not a hobby he indulged between tours, it was a parallel career he took seriously. In 2001 he brought his Tentet, ten pieces strong, into Ronnie Scott’s in London for a run of nights that became the album Watts at Scott’s, a band built around his working quintet with Dave Green on bass, and stacked with the best British jazz players of the era. It stands as the record of Charlie’s Tentet performing live at that legendary club, a dream team of jazz musicians playing a diverse book that ran from Ellington and Monk through to the band’s own originals.He kept at it for years after, playing European gigs into his later decades with his childhood friend Dave Green, the two of them going back to being teenagers together in Wembley chasing the same records.

I kept bumping into Charlie all over the world, backstage at Madison Square Garden in New York, at a small party at the Four Seasons in Toronto, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, at a private gathering in Zürich. But the one I’ll never forget was Halifax. He invited me into his private tent for high tea, hours before a stadium show, practising quietly on a pad while a proper British tea service sat on a huge tray of tiny sandwiches. Nobody else was in the room. Ron Wood wandered in for a moment, took one look at the two of us deep in jazz talk, and wandered right back out.

That was the other Charlie, the one who told me he didn’t want to tour at all, that he was happiest at home with his wife and his record collection. He arranged those records his own way, Count Basie first, then every musician who’d ever passed through Basie’s bands and made a solo record, then on to Ellington, then Fletcher Henderson, and so on. Thousands of albums, and he said he was the only person alive who understood the filing system. That was Charlie’s genius hiding in plain sight, an organizing mind so precise it turned a record collection into an archive and a drum part into architecture.

Home for Charlie, for nearly forty years, was Halsdon House, a Grade II-listed manor tucked into about thirty acres outside the Devon village of Dolton. He bought it in 1983 and lived there with his wife Shirley and their daughter Seraphina until his death, drawn to the woodlands and the old Victorian stables. Shirley was the true horsewoman of the family. She developed a self-taught, globally respected expertise in Arabian bloodlines and breeding after a horse fair in the south of France caught her interest, and Halsdon’s stables went on to enjoy a run of dominance in the show ring. Charlie went along to the sales in Poland and elsewhere with her, and by every account was as devoted to the horses as she was, even if riding was her passion more than his. We shared that horse world in our own smaller way, though I only made it to the track once in a while where he and Shirley were breeding champions.

France came into it too, though not for horses. When the Stones relocated there for tax exile and the band ended up sharing a house full of nonstop parties, Charlie went the other direction entirely and bought himself a castle an hour’s drive away, just so he could have some peace and quiet. He kept it long after everyone else had gone home, a detail the documentary Stones in Exile captured perfectly, Charlie building himself a moat of silence while the rest of the band built a legend out of chaos.

His press agent told me a story I’ve never stopped loving. The band was based at the Four Seasons in Toronto, and she came to find Charlie dressed in a full suit. She assumed he was dressing for room service. He wasn’t sightseeing, wasn’t partying, but he’d dress for lunch even if he was eating alone in his room. This time she asked if he was expecting a delivery, and he said no, he was going to be interviewed. She reminded him, with some alarm, that he didn’t do interviews. His answer was that he was going to speak with his friend Jaymz Bee, and they were only going to talk about jazz, not about the Rolling Stones. My own boss at the station wanted his star interviewer to take it instead, and I had to explain that wasn’t going to happen, that Charlie might simply not do it at all. I suggested we split the difference, I did the first half hour and handed the second to Ralph Benmergui, a good friend and wonderful interviewer who hadn’t had time to prepare and was understandably rattled. I told him to wear headphones, made sure Charlie didn’t wear any, and sat in the engineering room feeding him questions. We got two excellent interviews out of one very unusual afternoon, aired on two different programs.

The last time I spoke with him, Charlie told me he wanted the band to keep going whether he was behind the kit or not. The Stones had once said they’d only tour with Charlie in the chair, and he went along with that understanding for decades, but as his health declined they worked out an arrangement for someone else to step in. I’m glad they’ve kept making music. I understand why. But nothing sounds the same without that particular hush, that particular exactness, keeping time underneath it all. Steve Jordan is an incredible, tasteful drummer, but in My Quantum Reality, it’s Great Bob Scott who got hired to fill in for Watts.

Charlie Watts died on August 24, 2021, in Chelsea, London, at the age of eighty, a gentleman among ruffians to the very end, dressed for lunch, ready for the interview, still listening for the drummer nobody else had noticed yet.

Want More? I wrote about Mick recently...

Leaving you with two links - things I think you’ll dig. Classic Watts!

ROLLING STONES “Jumping Jack Flash” NYC’s Beacon Theatre (Bigger Bang Tour - 2006) Martin Scorsese knew to feature Charlie - from Shine A Light 2008.!

my favourite - so humble!

I’ve been a longtime devotee of Dizzy and Faye, that’s Mark Lalama and Amanda Walther for those keeping score at home, so it was something of a happy jolt to discover that Amanda has a whole other dynamic duo going, one that’s been quietly building a legend since before some of you reading this were born. It’s called Dala. And on October 6, they’re bringing it to Hugh’s Room Live.

Dala is Sheila Carabine and Amanda Walther, two voices that met in a high school music room and never really left each other’s orbit since. Toronto-based, Juno-nominated, and carrying a Canadian Folk Music Award for Vocal Group of the Year, which is the kind of thing you win when you’ve made a genuine signature out of harmony rather than a gimmick out of it. Amanda’s soprano is crystalline. Sheila’s alto is warm and velvety. Put them together and you get something that sounds effortless, which of course means it isn’t, it just means they’ve had over two decades to get it right.

Here’s the thing about Dala that gets me. Fourteen years since their last studio album. Fourteen years is a long stretch of silence for a working duo, and yet they never actually stopped. They toured. They wrote. They lived entire other lives in the meantime, solo projects, degrees, new careers, reinventions, family milestones, heartbreaks, marathons both literal and figurative. All of that went somewhere, and now it’s coming out as The Big Bang, their new record. Stripped down is the word people are using, but stripped down music made by people with this much mileage doesn’t sound thin. It sounds earned. There’s urgency in it, and maturity, and something that actually resembles joy, which is rarer than you’d think in music made by grown adults who’ve been through the wringer a few times.

I’ve watched a lot of duos come and go in this town. Most of them either flame out or calcify into nostalgia acts. Dala did neither. Since forming in 2002 they’ve played the 50th anniversary of Newport Folk, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Mariposa, Edmonton Folk Fest, all the rooms that actually matter if you care about the folk tradition and not just the folk aesthetic. They’ve shared stages with Tom Cochrane, Jann Arden, Stuart McLean, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens. That’s a serious lineage, and Dala earned their place in it the old fashioned way, by being that good live, night after night, for twenty plus years.

What I love about this moment for them is that it doesn’t read like a comeback. Comebacks are for people trying to recapture something. Dala never lost it, they just let it season. The connection between Sheila and Amanda, built over decades of actual friendship and actual work, sounds more thrilling now than a reunion record has any right to sound. From that high school music room to The Big Bang, the message is pretty clear. They’re just getting started.

Dala plays Hugh’s Room Live on October 6. Sheila Carabine and Amanda Walther. Go hear what fourteen years of living sounds like when it finally opens its mouth to sing.

And Speaking go f Amanda….Read on! Dizzy and Fay piece here:

Let me tell you something about deadlines. Most artists hate them. I love them. Nothing sharpens the mind like a clock that will not stop ticking, and nowhere is that more gloriously true than in the wild, sleep deprived, coffee fueled universe of the 48 Hour Film Project.

Here is the premise, in case you have somehow missed it in its quarter century of existence. A team of filmmakers, any size, any experience level, shows up on a Friday night. They draw a genre out of a hat. They are handed a mandatory character, a mandatory prop, and a mandatory line of dialogue. Then the clock starts. Forty eight hours later, on Sunday evening, a finished film, written, shot, edited, scored, titled and credited, has to be sitting in a drop box or nothing counts. No extensions. No excuses. No exceptions.

It began, as these things often do, with two people who simply wanted to see if it could be done. Mark Ruppert and Liz Langston cooked up the idea in Washington, D.C. in 2001, back when digital video was still a novelty and nobody imagined an entire global subculture would grow out of a dare. It did. Toronto was there almost from the beginning, one of the earliest cities outside the American capital to catch the fever, alongside Seattle and Portland. Since then the 48 Hour Film Project has spread to well over a hundred cities on every continent that makes movies, with more than seventy thousand short films produced by people who, for one wild weekend a year, decide that sleep is optional and story is not.

Toronto’s own chapter has been shepherded for years now by City Producers Steve Nash and Chris Cherry, two people who somehow manage to herd dozens of scrappy, sugar high production teams into something resembling order every single year, then throw a party at the end where everybody agrees it was worth it. There is the Annual 48HFP, and there is the Sci-Fi/Horror edition, a separate springtime madness where vampires, time travel and things with too many appendages are practically guaranteed. Whoever takes Best Film in Toronto goes on to represent the city at Filmapalooza, the international gathering of city champions, where the very best of the best get a shot at screening in the Short Film Corner at Cannes. Yes, that Cannes.

What I love most, watching these films year after year, is how the mandatory elements become inside jokes for an entire community. A prop that sounds like nothing, a metal key, a postcard, a coin, dice, a compass, a balloon, a box, turns into the connective tissue of a whole city’s worth of imagination. Nobody knows what they will get until the moment they get it, and then they have two days to make it sing.

A Few Personal Favourites, 2022 to 2026

Here is the thing about seventeen years of Toronto 48HFP. That is a lot of films. Too many films, honestly, to fit into any one retrospective, so Steve and Chris did not even try. Instead they went back through the recent past and pulled ten personal favourites from 2022 through 2026, and I want to be very clear about what this list is not. It is not a ranking. There was no jury involved, no scoring sheet, no complicated formula. It is simply ten films that made Steve and Chris laugh, or caught them off guard, or stuck in their heads long after the screening lights came up, or reminded them how strange and clever and creative a film can get when it is made in exactly forty eight hours. And yes, this particular batch leans hard into comedy. You have been warned, and you should be delighted.

The genre range alone tells you something. Dark comedy, buddy films, time travel, vampires, curses, dystopias, colonization, food films, and one unforgettable entry about the last porno ever made, which I promise you contains no nudity whatsoever, just a lot of nerve. Every single one of these teams had to work a required character, a required prop, and a required line of dialogue into a randomly assigned genre, all inside one ridiculous weekend. Ten films. Seven competitions. Five years of Toronto 48HFP madness. Reading through the list is like flipping through a strange and wonderful yearbook.

2022, Annual 48HFP Silent Treatment by SMASH, a dark comedy built around a busker named Max Remy, a metal key, and the line “Is this for real?”

2023, Annual 48HFP EGG by The Good Stuff, a food film starring a professional chef named Kai Lee, a postcard as the mandatory prop, and the line “Well, who knew?”

2024, Sci-Fi/Horror 48HFP Transfusion Parallax by Brown Leather Studios, a time travel piece with a news correspondent named Trillian Dent, a coin, and the line “Mistakes were made.”

2024, Annual 48HFP Get In Loser by Grossaffe, a fish out of water comedy featuring a treasure hunter named Belfast York, a pair of dice, and the line “I bet you’re fun at parties.”

2025, Sci-Fi/Horror 48HFP Appendage by Shady Lady Films, a colonization story, and 4 Friends 1 Curse by The Beta Units, a curse tale, both built around a courier named Kirk or Kirstin Nordenstrom, a compass, and the line “Sounds good to me.”

2025, Annual 48HFP Mary & Gary by RABfilms, a buddy film, Prehistoric Exposure by Ramen Squad, a time travel movie, and The Last Porno by Liam Peeson, a utopian or dystopian tale, all sharing a photographer named Joe, Jo or JoJo Michaels, a balloon, and the line “This changes everything.”

2026, Sci-Fi/Horror 48HFP Girl Dinner by Final Girl Collective, a vampire horror entry with a conspiracy theorist named Bela Karloff, a box, and the line “Talk is cheap.”

Ten films, ten genres, ten completely different worlds, all born from the same absurd constraint. That is the magic trick.

Come See It For Yourself

If you have never sat in a room full of filmmakers watching their own work projected for the first time, you are missing one of the great pleasures of this city’s creative life. Toronto 48HFP: Recent Favourites brings these ten films back to the big screen on Monday, September 14, 2026, at The Paradise Theatre. Running time is just over an hour of pure entertainment, which means you can catch the whole glorious, deranged spectacle and still make it home for a reasonable bedtime.

Before the 48 Hour Films, my first short film “Wild Music” will be screened.

Come cheer for the busker, the courier, the treasure hunter, and the conspiracy theorist. Come see what a metal key, a coin, a compass and a box can become in the hands of people who refuse to let a deadline beat them. This is what Toronto’s independent film community does best: it takes an impossible clock and turns it into art.

See you at The Paradise.

OH, and at 2pm before the 48 hour films, my first short film “Wild Music” will be screened. So that’s less than a buck a film! Tickets here:

Paradise Theatre SEPT. 14 tickets

If you want to know more about Wild Music…story here:

Bianca designed this poster for me!

My short films: I’ve told you about the first two. Wild Music was a freak accident, a hole in one on the first swing, and I still credit half of it to my director of photography, Aaron Alter, who made me look like I knew what I was doing before I did. Beat Speak was the sophomore effort, and like most sophomore efforts it taught me more from its stumbles than its successes. I filed those lessons away. Then I made Artists and Aliens, and everything I’d learned got spent at once.

The truth is I’d started it years before I ever pointed a camera at anything. It sat in a drawer, the way good ideas do, waiting for the right moment to be foolish enough to attempt them. Covid gave me that moment. Suddenly everyone had time on their hands and nowhere to be, and I decided that instead of baking bread like the rest of civilization, I would make a film about aliens fighting over art.

At the last minute, and my best decisions are always last minute, I brought Robert Priest up to a friend’s (Jessica and Assaf) property in the country to go over the script. Robert doesn’t so much edit as interrogate. He asked me why the aliens from Kepler wanted one of the Pleiades planets for storage, and what exactly they intended to store there. I told him I wasn’t sure it mattered. He told me that not mattering was precisely why it mattered, that a story earns its silliness by being specific about it. I said probably garbage, empty oil cans, the kind of interplanetary junkyard you’d expect. Robert suggested water. I countered with oxygen. One good question from Robert and a whole subplot clicked into place like a key turning. He also wrote a poem for the film, the one the alien child recites near the end, which still gives me a lump in the throat when I hear it.

Jason Brown came back to run the shoot, even more organized this time than the last, and Aaron Alter was back as DOP, which meant our only real friction was the usual opening-day tussle over who was actually directing. Once the cameras rolled that dissolved into rhythm. A teenager named Lili Occhipinti was shadowing us with her own camera for a school documentary about the making of the film, and when I needed a cutaway shot in a pinch, she stepped in without blinking. She wasn’t even sixteen and she walked away with an IMDb credit, which is the kind of thing that makes a producer feel useful in the world. With her talent, drive and supportive parents, Lili is going to succeed in whatever she chooses to do!

I cast my friends, because I always cast my friends, and Bazl Salazar showed up half an hour early asking the makeup artist to shave his head so there’d be more room to paint on veins. He wanted to look properly alien and he committed the way only a civilian actor can, with no self-consciousness left to burn off. People who’d known him for years were floored. He told me if I’d asked him to do this a decade ago he’d have frozen up. Now, in his words, he simply doesn’t give a damn anymore, and it shows on screen as total fearlessness.

BAZL AS KAZON THE LAWYER FROM KEPLER-69

Jef Farquharson returned as well, playing the same character from Beat Speak but for reasons known only to the universe, with an entirely different accent. In the first film he was a bartender. In this one he’d volunteered as an amateur lawyer arguing a cosmic court case, so naturally he arrived with a British accent he’d apparently been saving. He is, and remains, the most reliable way to shut down a set for laughing. Some lines took three takes just to get everyone breathing normally again.

Paolo Busato, who conducts the Castle Symphony Orchestra in his actual life, played our villain, and the first time I ever watched him conduct I thought of Gene Simmons crossed with Tommy Wiseau, all theatrical menace and zero restraint. He brought exactly that energy to the role, and a film like this needs a villain who understands he’s not in a film that takes itself too seriously.

The other casting story I love is Peyton Lingle. I’d met her in my neighbourhood, assumed she was a young woman, and sensed there might be more to the story than that. When I asked if she’d ever wanted to act, her whole face lit up, she said nobody had ever asked her before. We had lunch, went shopping for wardrobe together, and at some point I asked what pronoun she preferred. She said it honestly didn’t matter to her either way. I still wasn’t sure what the full picture was, and it turned out I had the age wrong too, she was twenty-two, not eighteen as I’d guessed. A week later I learned she is in fact a he. None of it changed a thing about how good he was in the role, which was the whole point of asking in the first place rather than assuming. Peyton brought a terrific attitude to a fun little part and delivered. We’ve since become great friends. His mom and sister are awesome too!

Our two lead aliens, played by Adam James and Queen Pepper, were the emotional engine of the whole picture, and since I did the casting myself I’ll take full credit for that pairing working as well as it did. I stitched in small cameos from people who’d appeared in my earlier shorts, Mariana Hutten and Irene Torres among them, plus one for myself, because if you’re going to indulge yourself as a filmmaker you might as well be honest about it on camera too. In my head, the whole extended cast of characters from Wild Music and Beat Speak had all been quietly abducted by aliens somewhere along the way and put to work teaching the arts across the galaxy. It’s the kind of continuity that only exists in the filmmaker’s head, but it made the work feel like one long story instead of three separate ones.

We shot the whole thing over three days at the Artscape Launchpad, on time and on budget, which for an independent film is its own small miracle. My new friend Scarlet Stinson signed on as a volunteer PA and ended up doing the work of three people as a grip. Rick Bartram edited, Jono handled sound as always, Jason Brown covered effects and scenery, and the alien judges presiding over our court case were played by close friends: Audrey Nesbitt, Yas Mori, Karen Ross, and a dancer and poet I’d met on the subway of all places, Donald Carr. You meet your cast in strange ways when you’re paying attention.

The plot, if you can call anything in this film a plot in the conventional sense, has the Kepler aliens petitioning for a storage planet because they’ve run out of space for whatever it is they’re hoarding. The Pleiades have seven planets, one for each of the seven arts, because the Pleiadians are in the habit of visiting Earth, absorbing whatever art moves them, and carrying it home. (mime.poetry, macrame, gastronomy, music etc) They refuse to hand over a planet for storage, and the dispute lands in intergalactic court. Kepler doesn’t believe art serves any purpose in the universe, dismisses the whole enterprise as a waste of space and time, until by the film’s end they fall for music the way anyone does when they finally stop resisting it. The twist is that what the Pleiadians actually want to store isn’t garbage at all, it’s oxygen, and there’s a spare planet perfectly suited to the job: the gourmet world, whose residents live on cabbage and beans and consequently have more methane than they know what to do with. It’s a court case between art and storage, decided in favour of art, with a fart joke holding the whole cosmology together.

Jono Grant wrote and rewrote the theme song in several arrangements, including one performed by a literal family of violinists, Drew Jureka and his relatives, who played a family of alien musicians on screen. A real family playing a fictional family of musicians is the kind of layering that only happens by accident and works better for it. The cameo roster kept expanding as word got around: Bobby Carcasses came all the way from Cuba for his moment on screen, My First Nations friend, Brian Wright McLeod has a short poem about sculpting and totem poles; violinists Daniela Olano and Ed Vokurka showed up, and identical twins playing a two headed keyboard player. And somewhere in the middle of all this cosmic chaos, King Louie turned up as the alien child Mochalcaha, small enough to steal every scene he was in. He had two pages of poetry memorized and he was six!

I gave Whitney some lyrics about Merope being a planet for sewing and macrame and she came up with this gem! She won Best Song from a Short Film in London England. She sings it nervously and out of key brilliantly.

By the time I watched the finished cut, I had goosebumps. It picked up more awards than anything else I’d made, and in my own ranking it sits in a dead heat with Wild Music for my favourite of the shorts, though it’s hard not to love the one that started everything. Artists and Aliens was the film that finally convinced me I was ready to write a feature, and I knew from the moment I finished it that Robert Priest would write it with me, and that Jason Brown would be there running the show the way he always is. Jono back in the sound/music chair and Rick back for editing. My executive producer, Michele Silva-Neto, loved this short as much as I did, and it was that love that got me the greenlight on my first feature, MagicLand.

Drew Jurecka, Rebekah Wolkstein and daughters, Legs MaHoney, Honey Novick, Monty Cantin (aka Amen), Irene Torres, Mariana Hutten, Bobby Carcasses, Daniela Olano, and Ed Vokurka.

Sidebar: Plot: The Court Case Nobody Needed to Have

We shot Artists and Aliens in a green screen studio in three days flat, which tells you something about how movies get made when nobody involved has real money and everybody involved has real conviction. It’s a continuation of sorts, a sequel in spirit if not in plot, to my earlier short Beat Speak. Once you’ve built one alien civilization out of duct tape and enthusiasm, apparently you just keep building.

The premise, for anyone catching up: KaRon and KaPon travel to the Pleiades to inform them they want one of their planets for storage, and Kepler already knows the answer will be no, so the whole thing gets kicked to an intergalactic court.

Here’s what I love about the Pleiades. Seven planets, each one devoted to something the Pleiadians picked up on their little field trips to Earth. Literature and poetry get a planet. Music gets one. Painting, sculpture, needlepoint, dance and gastronomy split the rest between them. There’s Maia, which has a standing Methane Alert because the Maians only cook with cabbage and beans, gourmet cabbage and beans, mind you, which struck me as the kind of premise that demands its own song. So Tony Quarrington and I wrote one, a Burl Ives kind of number, the sort of thing you could imagine a folksy giant strumming on a porch while a pot of something briny simmers behind him.

The Pleiadians themselves are blonde albinos, perpetually content, allergic to conflict. Their whole legal strategy is essentially kidnapping artists from Earth to demonstrate to Kepler what art is for, in the hope that it might sway a judge or a jury who has never needed art for anything.

It doesn’t work, not exactly. Their case is moving. Everyone in the room feels something. And they still get handed the old Vulcan line, straight out of Star Trek: “the good of the many outweighs the good of the few”. Which is the kind of logic that sounds airtight until you realize nobody bothered to ask a basic question.

Because it isn’t until the very end that we find out what Kepler actually wanted to store. Not waste. Not garbage. Oxygen. Something nobody thought to specify, and something the Pleiadians, breathing trouble and all on their own gastronomy planet, would have handed over gladly if anyone had simply asked.

That’s the whole movie in one image, honestly. Nobody asked.

What I like most about where this lands is that everybody turns out to be a little bit wrong. Kepler looks, at first, like the villain, cold and bureaucratic, indifferent to music and poetry and needlepoint. But sit with it a minute and you notice the tell. Indifference like that usually isn’t the absence of feeling, it’s the suppression of it. Music gets to Kepler too. It’s just been walled off so long that Kepler has forgotten the wall is there.

The Pleiadians aren’t innocent either. For all their talk of loving the arts, they hoard them like a gated community hoards a view. Seven planets of culture, and not one open door.

Two civilizations, both convinced they’re defending something sacred, and both too proud, or too anxious, or too used to not asking, to just say what they needed. The whole trial evaporates the moment somebody finally speaks plainly.

Three days in a green screen room. Seven planets. One court case that never needed to happen. That’s Artists and Aliens

In case you missed the earlier piece about the prequel, Beat Speak, it is here:

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Sailing Lake Ontario - Diane Roblin and Jaymz Bee (coincidentally in orange and brown)

There’s a particular kind of afternoon that used to happen at JAZZ.FM91 back when I was in Liberty Village. A musician would come through the door with a CD or vinyl album in hand, fresh from the pressing plant, still smelling faintly of new plastic, and they’d ask if I’d give it a listen. I always said yes. That was the rule I set for myself, and it’s a rule that occasionally pays off in ways you don’t expect. One of those afternoons, a pianist named Diane Roblin walked in with a disc called “Reconnect,” and she told me, almost as an aside, that she hadn’t played in about a decade before making it. She reported:

“After a 10+year hiatus, I came back to music after my husband died. Around the 90”s I had stopped hustling music (Rough Trade, bar bands, cocktail music) and had found rewarding work in other areas of interest for me - crisis counselling at a teenage girls shelter (my degree is in Sociology) …financing film development (Nelvana). Plus my husband Fraser and I were travelling the world. After he passed, I ran into a guitarist friend who asked if I wanted to get together and play my originals not standards….I said “yes, but it’s been a long time!”.

I think that putting together a band and playing music was very mindful and gave me focus and direction after such a huge loss. …and I am grateful for it...…..and the rest is history!”

That’s not a small thing to say out loud. A decade away from an instrument is not a hiatus, it’s closer to a small death and a resurrection, and you can hear both in the record if you know to listen for it. I put the disc on not expecting much, the way you don’t expect much from anything anymore, and by the time I got to the third track, “Fasten Your Seatbelt,” I was sold. Catchy bebop is a rarer commodity than people think. Most bebop wants to prove something. Diane’s just wanted to swing.

The albums that followed only deepened the case. “Life Force” opened with something extra groovy and then took the listener on a trip around the world, one that never felt like tourism, more like someone showing you her own record collection with genuine excitement. “Breath of Fresh Air,” the third, brought back George Koller, Kevin Turcotte and Jeff LaRochelle, and introduced Tim Shia on drums and John Johnson on saxophones into the mix.

Koller deserves his own paragraph here, because the language between him and Diane is a real thing, not a promotional line. I’ve watched them do experimental music together at the Tranzac Club, the kind of playing that doesn’t happen unless two musicians have spent real time inside each other’s instincts. Other memorable nights at LaRev and Jazz Bistro: George was matched with Ben Riley on drums, and the front line held Jeff LaRochelle on saxophone, Kevin Turcotte on trumpet, and Bruce Cassidy on the EVI, with Diane holding the centre on piano and, when the mood called for it, keyboard.

She’s particular about one thing, and she’ll say it to you directly if you give her the opening: she doesn’t hire a bunch of great jazz musicians for a gig. She has a band. That distinction matters to her more than most people would guess, because a band implies family, implies people showing up for the music rather than the cheque, and any jazz musician who has spent time on this circuit knows exactly which language that is. It’s the language of doing it because you have to, not because it pays what it should.

Diane is ageless and told me about an ageless relative, Ruth Winnick - who is 97 and lives in Westport Connecticut…she’s taking dance and competes with Fred Astaire Dance School...at 97! She said “Age Is No Excuse for getting old” and that phrase inspired me to write a song with Tony Quarrington and Zoey Adams for my first short film Wild Music. The lyrics: “Sure I’ve been around and for sure I ain’t a square - Look at all these lines, they tell you I’ve been everywhere - I’ve learned a lot of lessons on this journey and what’s more - I got a lot to give I got a lotta stuff in store - and I’ll be forever young, ball-sy and bold; Ageing’s no excuse for getting old”!

I see Diane constantly, and not just on stages. She is one of those rare musicians who is just as present in the audience as she is behind the keys, buying tickets to other people’s shows, actually listening instead of working the room. I took her sailing once with Captain Paul, Mariana Hutten and a few friends, and we spent the afternoon trading requests for great jazz tunes as the boat found its wind, which might be the most Toronto version of a perfect day I can think of. We also share lunches at Woodbine racetrack fairly often. Neither of us bets big. But a small bet buys you the right to scream a horse’s name as it comes down the stretch, and I have personally watched her winnings pay for the whole afternoon’s food and drink, which feels like exactly the kind of return jazz musicians deserve more often than they get.

You can catch Diane at the Markham Jazz Festival this year, on the Varley Art Gallery patio stage in downtown Unionville, noon on Saturday, August 22. Get there early. And Life Force keeps moving: Diane Roblin brings it to La Rev on Saturday, September 5th, 7 to 9pm. Twenty bucks at the door, or grab one on Eventbrite if you don’t mind the fees. The room is small and the music is good, which is exactly the kind of math that sells out fast, so advance tickets are the smart play. (Also, the food is great value so bring your appetite - delicious Mexican fare!)

Then the trio resurfaces at The Rex on Saturday, October 17th, 2 to 4pm, an afternoon set for the people who like their jazz with daylight still in the windows. And on Friday, September 25th, something a little different: Ladyfinger, the duo of soprano sax firebrand Kayla Milmine and Diane truly on keys, lands at Sellers and Newell, 672 College St. They’ll be running through originals alongside Bley, Shorter and the rest of the family tree. 8 to 10pm, twenty dollars at the door, or email ahead if you want to lock in a seat. (It’s a tiny room so always a good idea to book way in advance.)

As for Ladyfinger itself, Diane put it best: Two players deep in the current of Toronto’s creative music scene, writing their own book while still paying respect to the greats who wrote the earlier chapters. McCoy Tyner gets a nod, so does Wayne Shorter, so does Carla Bley. Jazz has always run on interpretation as much as invention, and Ladyfinger treats that as a two way street, whimsical when it wants to be, sharp when it needs to be, always improvising toward something new.

And Rome is next on the horizon. Top of November, Diane heads over for twelve days, hosted by Folderol Studios, where a beautiful grand piano and a well connected corner of the Roman art scene await. The plan is simple and glorious: meet the local musicians, perform, record, and fall into some improvising sessions that only exist because two cultures decided to sit down at the same instrument. She’s excited, and honestly, so am I. There’s something right about a Toronto piano player crossing an ocean to make music up on the spot with strangers who’ll be friends by the second tune.

Want more?Amanda Martinez is also at Markham Jazz Festival this Sunday, August 23 at 5:30pm..story here:

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas on August 19, 1921, and by the time he created the show that would outlive him a hundred times over, he had already lived a life dense enough for three men. He flew eighty nine combat missions as a B-17 pilot in the Pacific during World War II, survived two plane crashes, and came home to become, of all things, a Los Angeles police officer, just like his father before him. It was on the LAPD payroll, writing traffic safety releases and pitching scripts on the side under the pen name Robert Wesley, that he taught himself to be a storyteller. He did not sell Star Trek until 1966, when he was already forty four, a fact worth remembering every time someone tells you it is too late to start.

Here is the detail most people miss. When Roddenberry died in 1991, a portion of his ashes was carried into orbit aboard a satellite, making him one of the first people whose remains ever circled the Earth, a fittingly cosmic exit for a man who spent his life imagining what was out there. He was also the first television writer ever given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an honor that says something about how seriously he took the medium everyone else dismissed as disposable. He married twice, first to Eileen Anita Rexroat and later to Majel Barrett, the actress who voiced the Enterprise computer for decades, and between them he left behind children who carry his optimism forward in their own ways.

OK you can find hundreds of these online, that’s just a tiny bit. I like that the Sulu action figure is actually The Fonz in a trekkie sweater.

As much as I love the TV show, Star Trek, this reminds me to tell the story of his son, who has become a very close friend to me over the years.

“SON OF STAR TREK”

I met Rod through actress/poet Dawna Wright.

Many years ago I was dating a girl who had landed a role as an androgynous alien on a Toronto sci fi show called Earth: Final Conflict, and she brought me along to the wrap party. The venue had an arcade built in, and I ended up on a ski machine next to some guy I figured was crew. We raced, we had a drink, we talked. Turned out he was from Los Angeles and knew not a soul in this city, so I did what I do, I folded him into the scene. Dinners, concerts, a couple of parties, even one of my bowling karaoke evenings. By the third outing I was introducing him around as Rod, working on a TV show, visiting from LA. That was the night he mentioned his last name was actually Roddenberry. I said, “who do you think you are, son of Star Trek?” He said yes. My jaw nearly hit the floor.

What got me was how normal he was. No entourage, no attitude, just a polite, funny guy who happened to be Hollywood royalty. He told me his parents had made a point of sending him to a regular school and refused to let him be spoiled, which explained everything. A couple weeks later I met his mother, Majel Barrett, the actress who had voiced the Enterprise computer for decades and who Gene had married in 1969. She looked at me the way any mother would look at a stranger who had suddenly become her son’s tour guide in a foreign city, somewhere between concern and suspicion. The second time we met she had thawed considerably. Looking back, I understand completely. A woman married to the creator of Star Trek has met every kind of superfan and hanger on there is. I think Rod told her the truth, that I was just showing him a good time and he was no longer bored out of his mind in a new town.

Since everyone already liked him without knowing the name, I kept introducing him as simply Rod. That summer had a party at the house he was renting in Scarborough, a double date to dinner theatre, a rather classy affair thrown by Gino Empry, and one scandalous night courtesy of Diamond Dave. I could write a book on that summer alone.

Rod, for the record, did not coast on the family name, even if it took him a while to embrace it. He worked as a production assistant on Star Trek: The Next Generation as a teenager, spent summers as a telescope operator at Mount Wilson Observatory, and by 2001 had taken the reins of Roddenberry Entertainment as its CEO. In 2011 he wrote, produced, and starred in Trek Nation, a documentary chronicling his ten year journey to understand his father, the same year he founded The Roddenberry Foundation. These days he is an executive producer across the entire modern Star Trek universe, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, all of it. He is also an avid scuba diver who has logged over a thousand dives around the world. Not bad for a Hollywood kid who once just wanted to hit a party and go bowling in Toronto.

Almost twenty years after that summer, someone mentioned Discovery was filming in Toronto, and I picked up my phone and said, “call Rod Roddenberry.” He was floored to hear from me, told me he had been thinking about our Toronto summer just days earlier, and insisted I visit as soon as I could. Fate cooperated, I already had a wedding to attend in LA (for Robert Buscemi and Janet T. Planet), so we made a date for brunch. He brought his son Zale, an adorable, wonderfully behaved little monkey of a kid. We talked like no time had passed at all.

The next time Rod came up to Toronto, he had me bring a few friends for a tour of the Discovery set, and let me tell you, this was no paper towel tubes spray painted silver. This looked like an actual spaceship. I took him to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and after that, whenever I was in LA, we made time for each other. He invited me to his home in Hawaii, so I booked a flight and brought my best friend, Sahra Featherstone. Four days later as we were packing to go, he said we should stay longer next time. I thought of Ben Franklin, who said “guests, like fish, start to smell after three days”. On a recent trip to Toronto, I took Rod to Woodbine racetrack, perfect weather, good food, and we even picked a few winners

Gene and Majel Roddenberry raised a good one. Hard-working, humble, unfailingly polite.

Want more - my time with SULU and other stories here:

Rain or shine - Markham Jazz Fest is always a fun time! (with Ron Minken in Unionville)

I have spent a lot of my life standing in front of microphones telling rooms full of strangers why the next act is going to change their evening. Most of those rooms had a roof. My favourite one doesn’t. It’s a stretch of pavement called Main Street Unionville, and for two days every August it becomes the best jazz club in Ontario, even though nobody has to pay a cover.

The Markham Jazz Festival started in 1997, which makes it older than a lot of the marriages I’ve been to. I wasn’t there for year one. I arrived in the summer of 2002, and the reason I showed up at all was a fellow named Hal Hill, who was running the thing as artistic director at the time. I interviewed him for radio, the way I’ve interviewed a thousand people before and since, and something about the way he talked about the festival, not as a gig but as a village throwing a party for itself, got under my skin. I told myself I’d check it out once. That was twenty-four Augusts ago, and I have not missed one since. It is, without a hedge or a qualifier, my favourite jazz festival in the province. I’ve been asked to emcee the MainStage for most of the years. This is my umpteenth year (I stopped counting a while ago) and I even did a show during COVID lockdown when they did their festival online!

In the earliest years they used Toogood Pond as one of the stages, which tells you something about the founders’ instincts. Why book a room when you can book a pond. That impulse, the idea that jazz belongs outdoors in a village as much as it belongs in a basement club downtown, is still the DNA of the thing more than a quarter century later.

For the last decade-plus the festival has settled into a rhythm of three stages, all within an easy stroll of each other. There’s the Varley Gallery stage, which lives outdoors and occasionally ducks inside when the weather has other plans. Sometimes they book both outdoor and indoor and alternate so the breaks are nano seconds. There’s the stage behind the McKay Gallery, which might be the most civilized piece of real estate in the GTA in August: somebody’s perfect backyard, a glass of wine in your hand, a food truck idling nearby, a horn player working through a set forty feet away. And there’s the Millennium Stage, the main stage, which is where I’ve done my emceeing for as long as I can remember. Last summer the Millennium Stage was under construction and the festival improvised with a different footprint entirely, and it worked, proof that these people know how to keep swinging through roadwork. But I will admit I am relieved to have my old spot back this year.

Here’s the secret, and it’s not really a secret because I’ve told it to anyone who’ll listen for two decades. It’s threefold. First, geography: you can walk stage to stage in under ten minutes, which means no sound bleed and no excuse not to sample four to twenty different bands in an afternoon like a jazz tasting menu. Second, the crowd: the people who show up for this thing actually love the music, they’re not there because someone’s cousin got them a wristband. And third, and this is the real magic trick, the festival has never once had a bad artistic director. After Hal Hill came Josh Grossman. After Grossman came Michael Occhipinti. After Occhipinti came Sarah Kim Turmbull. And now the baton is in the hands of Ernesto Cervini, a JUNO winner with the taste and the Rolodex to prove it. Every one of them booked differently, but every one of them understood instinctively what the people of Markham wanted to hear, which is a harder trick than it sounds. All colours of jazz, a little bebop, some swing, singer-songwriters, latin jazz, global music and more!

None of this happens without the people who write the cheques, and a festival that stays free for thirty thousand people over a weekend does not stay free by accident. TD Bank has been the title sponsor for years through its Ready Commitment program, which is why for a long stretch this has technically been the TD Markham Jazz Festival even though everyone I know just calls it Markham Jazz. My old friend Ron Minken, of Minken Employment Lawyers, has had his name on this thing for as long as I can remember, and I always make a point of finding him on Main Street, because a festival’s real sponsors are also its real fans. The Dilawri Automotive Group, through Markham Honda, Markham Acura and Markham KIA, has kept the wheels turning for years too, in the most literal sense. And Long & McQuade, the music store that every working musician in this country owes money to at some point in their career, shows up in the program every single summer, which feels right for a festival built entirely out of people who make their living with instruments.

I always find my old friends there. Linda and Tammy and Christie have become as much a part of my August as the music itself. Ron Minken, obviously. And for years before the Sunday concerts began, June Garber used to host brunch at her house, and that brunch was as much a highlight of the weekend as anything that happened on a stage afterward. June has since moved to Australia, which the festival survived, though I still think about those Sunday mornings.

As for who I’ve seen over twenty-four years, I’d need another article and probably a lawyer to fact-check my memory, but here’s an honest attempt: Dr. Lonnie Smith, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Bruce Cockburn, Tony Monaco, Marc Jordan, Shakura S’Aida, Monty Alexander, PJ Perry, Caity Gyorgy, Hilario Durán and his big band, Luis Mario Ochoa, Michael Kaeshammer, Rob McConnell, Oliver Jones. That’s before I even get to the bands I’ve actually worked with on those stages myself: Tiki Collective, Genevieve Marentette and Robert Scott, Music for Secret Agents, and more performances with Irene Torres and her various ensembles than I could count on both hands.

This year I’m excited about Amanda Martinez, Artie Roth, Diane Roblin’s Lifeforce, Jessica Lalonde and Adrian Farrugia, Kalya Ramu, Nancy Walker, Ranee Lee, and Thompson Egbo-Egbo. It’s a strong weekend on paper, and on paper is usually the least interesting way this festival ever shows up. Seeing and hearing is believing!

The dates are August 22 and 23, downtown Unionville, and every note of it is free. There are restaurants and food vendors on every corner, thousands of people will move through those three blocks over the weekend, and somehow it never once feels crowded in the way that ruins a good time. It feels like a small town throwing the best party it knows how to throw, which is exactly what it’s been doing since 1997, and exactly what I hope it keeps doing long after I’ve handed the microphone to somebody else.

I have other social media sites for images but above are just a few random shots from Markham/Unionville over the years!

CHECK THE SITE HERE:

I have other social media for photos bt here is a quick random batch of pics over the years.

For shows this year, here who is playing Saturday August 22 at 7pm - RANEE LEE

AND FOR MORE INFORMATION ON WHO PLAYS SUNDAY AT 5:30

I was just in Port Dover emceeing the Southcoast Jazz Festival yesterday and went to The Beach House for lunch - I saw old posters and 8x10’s on the wall which inspired a deep dive: Talking to the old regulars and a day of “google-ing”.

A buck to see Satchmo! Those were the days!

There’s a picnic table now where Louis Armstrong once stood. Families unwrap sandwiches where Guy Lombardo’s baton once cut the humid Lake Erie air into four-four time. This is the great cosmic joke of showbiz — the stage always gets torn down, but if you listen close enough on a still summer night by the beach at Port Dover, you can still hear the horns.

I’ve spent my whole life chasing rooms like this. Rooms that don’t exist anymore except in the retelling. And Port Dover’s Summer Garden — Pop Ivey’s, if you were there when it mattered — might be the greatest room this country ever tore down and forgot to properly mourn.

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1921. Ben Ivey, a local businessman with more vision than sense, builds a dance pavilion out over the water on Lake Erie, on stilts, like the whole enterprise might just float away on a good wind — which, this being Lake Erie, it eventually did. Lake Erie ate that first pavilion in a 1929 storm the way Lake Erie eats everything eventually. Ivey rebuilt. Fire took the second one in ‘32. Ivey rebuilt again. This is the part of the story where you understand that show business and stubbornness have always been the same disease, and Port Dover had it bad.

By the time the third Summer Garden opened in May of ‘32 — the good one, the one everybody’s grandmother has a story about — Port Dover had positioned itself as something almost absurd for a town its size: a legitimate stop on the international big band circuit. We are talking about a dance hall on the shore of Lake Erie, in a town you could walk across in twenty minutes, that in the 1940s hosted Count Basie. Lionel Hampton. Gene Krupa. And — Louis Armstrong himself, blowing that horn out over a dance floor two hours from Toronto, servicemen from the nearby flying schools shuffling their girls around under paper roses.

Because that was the thing — Don Ivey, who took the reins from his father in ‘36, understood atmosphere the way the great impresarios always have. He’d deck the whole hall out in roses for the “Dance of the Roses,” the marquee event of the summer season, and somewhere in the collective memory of Norfolk County there are still elderly women who met their husbands under those paper roses and never left Port Dover again. That’s the power a room can have. That’s what we lose when we lose rooms like this.

I like to imagine the whole constellation of it — Bing Crosby’s voice drifting over the lake on a radio somewhere, the Andrews Sisters harmonizing close enough to a hall like this that the geography starts to blur, the Mills Brothers doing what the Mills Brothers did, which was make four voices sound like an orchestra and an orchestra sound unnecessary. Whether every marquee name of the swing era personally graced that stage or simply haunted the era around it, the point stands: Port Dover, Ontario, population barely four figures, briefly held its own against Manhattan and Chicago for who could book the best band on a Saturday night. That’s not small-town nostalgia talking. That’s just what happened.

THE WAY IT LOOKS NOW - TRY THE PERCH!

Then rock and roll came, the way it always does, uninvited and correct. Jerry Lee Lewis pounded those keys half to death at the Summer Garden in 1961 — the Killer doing what the Killer did, showing a room full of Norfolk County kids what a piano was actually for. And here’s the detail I love best, the one that ties this whole story into the bloodstream of everything I care about in Canadian music: in 1960, at that very hall, Ronnie Hawkins spotted a seventeen-year-old local kid named Rick Danko playing bass, and asked his parents if he could take him on the road. He promised he’d “take care of him.” The parents said yes. Rick Danko went from Port Dover to The Hawks to Levon’s outfit to backing Bob Dylan to founding member of The Band. One dance hall, one Saturday night, and a straight line to The Basement Tapes. (I met Danko when The Band played on CBC while I was music director Rick and Garth Hudson were so awesome!)

Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks kept coming back through ‘64. And somewhere in the archive of memory — misattributed in at least one old photo I’ve seen, labeled as Robbie Lane and the Disciples when it’s actually Hawkins himself, because that’s how these things go, the legend gets tangled with the label — the whole Yonge Street strip essentially relocated to the shore of Lake Erie every summer weekend. Robbie Lane and the Disciples were part of that same circuit, booked, like so many acts of that era, through Ron Scribner’s agency out of Toronto — the same operation that had The Charmaines and Little Jackie Shane and Richie Knight and the Mid-Knights crisscrossing Southern Ontario in station wagons with a trunk full of gear and a headshot pinned up in every beach bar between Toronto and Buffalo.
And then it just kept going. Lighthouse — Toronto’s own horn-drenched, orchestral rock outfit, the band that would go on to play the Isle of Wight Festival in front of 600,000 people the same summer they were still doing dance halls back home — played the Summer Garden. So did The James Gang, in the brief window just after Joe Walsh had already left for the Eagles’ orbit. Chubby Checker twisted his way through. And Rush — a trio of kids from Willowdale who would go on to become the most Canadian rock band who ever plugged in an amplifier — shook the foundations of that old wooden hall in the mid-seventies, part of a bill with Curtis Lee, May 19th, 1974, according to the ledgers that still survive.

There was even a rule, an actual contractual clause, that governed the whole circuit: if you played the Belgium Hall over in Delhi on a Saturday, you couldn’t play anywhere else in the Port Dover area for a stretch after — which tells you everything about how seriously this tiny stretch of Norfolk County took its live music economy. This was not amateur hour. This was a real circuit, with real rules, real money, and real stakes, running parallel to Yonge Street the whole time.

It all ended the way these things too often end in this country — not with a whimper, but with an arsonist. January 8th, 1979. Some misguided soul burned the Summer Garden to the ground, and unlike ‘29 and ‘32, nobody rebuilt it.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: rooms don’t really die. Not the important ones. The Summer Garden lives on in the trunk of every touring musician’s memory who ever made that drive down Highway 6, in a mislabeled photograph in someone’s scrapbook, in a seventeen-year-old bass player’s decision that changed the entire shape of Canadian music, in a headshot of “Little Jackie” pinned to a wall in a beach bar that still, somehow, survives.

But the marquee names only tell half the story. The real texture of that circuit — the thing that made it a *scene* and not just a tour stop — was the parade of working acts who never made the history books but kept the floor packed every single weekend, booked through the same Toronto agencies that ran the Yonge Street strip.

There was The Charmaines, a Cincinnati trio — Gigi Jackson, Dee Watkins, Irene Vinegar — who’d cut their teeth backing James Brown and Conway Twitty on the King label before falling so hard for Toronto’s club circuit that they just moved here in 1963, cutting sides for Stan Klees’ Red Leaf imprint alongside a young David Clayton-Thomas, way before Blood Sweat & Tears.

There was Little Jackie Shane, billed that way by bandleader Frank Motley himself — the most electric, most dignified performer to ever walk into the Saphire Tavern on Yonge Street, whose “Any Other Way” hit #2 on CHUM and whose story, largely forgotten for decades, finally got its Grammy-nominated due in 2017, two years before she passed.

There was Robbie Lane and the Disciples, assembled out of Toronto’s suburbs — kids from bands with names like the Concords and the Cyclones, kept together as much by who had a car and a licence as who could play — who got plucked by Ronnie Hawkins himself in ‘63 as insurance against the Hawks walking out on him, which of course they did, becoming The Band.

There was Dianne Brooks, a New Jersey-born voice so good that Ray Charles called her the finest thing he’d heard since Dinah Washington and Emmylou Harris said she’d hand in her contract just to sound like her. She sang the Bluenote and Le Coq d’Or circuit through the sixties before “Walking on My Mind” became her signature.

There was The Counts Five (part of the “Toronto Sound”), a band who have disappeared pretty much, and I count four - I’m confused! There was Richie Knight and the Mid-Knights, a bunch of Toronto high schoolers who scored “Charlena” — the very first Canadian record to hit #1 — and then spent years grinding the Southern Ontario dance halls, including regular Sunday nights at the Belgian Club just down the road in Delhi, a long, bad-road drive home every single time.

And there was Jon and Lee & the Checkmates, Ron Scribner’s own prized act, who packed Port Carling and Huntsville and Grand Bend and half the cottage country circuit in the mid-sixties before landing the opening slot for the Rolling Stones at Maple Leaf Gardens — the same relentless summer grind that, station wagon by station wagon, surely rolled through Port Dover too, even if the paper trail’s gone quiet on that particular date.

None of these acts got the marquee. Most of them never will. But they were the beat of the thing — the ones who actually filled the calendar between the legends, night after night, town after town, for the price of gas money and a headshot on the wall.

Go stand on that beach sometime. Order a picnic. Listen for the horns.

Speaking of Jon & Lee & The Checkmates, I’ve a story of lead singer John Finley here:

And Speaking of Lighthouse they are still performing and I’ve a story here from a while ago:

There are guitar players, and then there is Harry Manx, who somehow found the one note that lives at the exact midpoint between the Mississippi Delta and the banks of the Ganges and decided to build a career out of standing on it. If you have never heard him, imagine John Lee Hooker meditating in a Rajasthani temple while somebody hands him a twenty stringed instrument nobody in the room can pronounce. That instrument is called the mohan veena, and Harry spent five years in India studying it under its inventor, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, which is the kind of apprenticeship that used to be called a pilgrimage before we got embarrassed by the word.

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I have to give credit where it belongs. My pal Ronny Shinder is the one who put Harry Manx in front of my ears in the first place, and I owe him a drink for life. I listened to the records and thought, sure, this is virtuosic, this is special. Then I saw him live. That was the end of my objectivity. I became the kind of fan you have to keep an eye on at the merch table, the kind who might require a restraining order if the venue does not seat me far enough from the stage. The playing, the voice, the original songs, all of it top shelf, no substitutions.

Ronny and I - good times in Havana. I kazoo. He ukes. We both dig Manx!

Seven Maple Blues Awards. Six Juno nominations. A Canadian Folk Music Award. CBC’s Great Canadian Blues Award. Album titles like “Wise and Otherwise,” “Mantras for Madmen,” and “Om Suite Ohm,” which read less like a track list and more like the chapter headings of a very good, very strange spiritual memoir. He lived and played in Japan before India, and somewhere along that route he picked up the nickname the Mysticssippi Blues Man, because nobody could figure out a tidier way to describe a guy who welds Delta blues to Hindustani raga and makes it sound like it was always supposed to go together.

I have had the good fortune of getting close to the source a few times. I interviewed Harry on JAZZ.FM91, and he talks the way he plays, unhurried, generous, letting a thought bend and slide before it resolves. I introduced him at a concert once, which meant I got to stand in front of a packed room and tell everyone how lucky they were about to feel, then get out of the way. And not long ago, on my new show, Bee in the City on CIUT 89.5 FM, I played his music alongside another guitarist I adore both as a player and as a human being, Kevin Breit. Two guitar minds who each build their own private universe out of six strings, or in Harry’s case, considerably more.

Last time I saw him was at Hugh’s Room Live in 2023, one of the first concerts in their new gorgeous home, which was a church!

Now the man is coming back to town with something new, and Toronto gets first crack at it, live and in the room, the way this music was always meant to be heard. Harry Manx plays Hugh’s Room Live on Saturday, September 19th, and tickets are on sale now. Get them before the room fills up with people like me, the ones who followed a friend’s recommendation straight into a lifelong devotion and never looked back.

Here’s another local hero of mine, in case you missed it. Robert Priest is someone you should know!