We'll be at the Coxwell Parkette located at Danforth and Coxwell
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 Jazz in the Park with Autorickshaw (with Dylan Bell on bass) Coxwell Parkette located at Danforth and Coxwell Time: 5pm-8pm Cost: free
(Pictured above: Seven Singing Structures from New Waves Festival)
I just finished at the inaugural New Waves Festival - a brilliant festival held at the beautiful Young Centre for the Performing Arts as part of Luminato that I'm proud to have organized, programmed and performed in, along with the other 11 resident artists.
This was a free festival for all ages that transformed the Young Centre into an artistic treasure hunt and playground, full of wonder, discovery, exploration, and a feast for the eyes and ears. This was the only place that you could find a dancer in a frog costume randomly running across a stage that held 24 musicians of such diverse backgrounds; a spontaneous performance of a beat boxer, tap dancer and Celtic fiddler; singers with amazingly crafted structures on their heads; a larger-than-life jukebox with choreographed dance and the live vocal jukebox provided by Retrocity, and the creative list of players and collaborations goes on and on.
All in all, this festival brought collaboration to the fore, it brought creativity to life and life to creativity with over one hundred emerging and established artists from our beautiful and culturally diverse city, and it effectively blurred the line between artist and audience. Thanks to all performers, staff, volunteers, organizers, the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, Albert Schultz, resident artists, and to all of the audience members who not only witnessed the inaugural New Waves Festival, but played along brilliantly as active participants. Read reviews, see highlights here: http://www.youngcentre.ca/productions/09_season/new_waves_recap.html
FreePlay Duo's European Adventure
My husband Dylan and i recently returned from our first performance tour of Germany and Holland... and we finally have a website, and a new CD! It's a funny thing... Dylan and I have been performing together for about 16 years now, and had never taken the Duo on the road! Not only that, but in all these years, we never recorded our own CD. We finally decided it was time to fix all that.
Over the years, the FreePlay Duo has developed from a straight-ahead piano-and-voice jazz duo to what we call "inspired eclecticism": a multivocal, multi-instrumental program ranging from Bach to Charlie Parker, to Peter Gabriel, to world music. For this tour, we left the instruments at home to create an all-vocal program. Some pieces were simply two voices, and for others we used a "looping station", allowing us to layer parts on-the-spot and create multi-voiced textures.
Our workshop-and-concert tour took us to Kassel and Vellmar (central Germany), Gorssel and Lochem (Netherlands) and Kiel and Hamburg (northern Germany). We had wonderdul audiences the whole time, revisited some old friends, and made new ones. We look forward to going back next year!
Many thanks to Sybille Mayer (and parents Conni and Klaus), Guido Weber and Susanne Reitinger; Joep Hopstaken and Nathaly Mascle; as well as Till and Karin Kindschus and Martin and Katherin Carbow. Thank you for inviting us, and for your gracious hospitality. See you next year!
