In Turn completes its coverage of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka with a review of their Toronto performance. Photos by Joel Trenaman. (Read the interview/show preview.)

The nine men of Jajouka arrived at the Phoenix Concert Theatre for a July 15 performance—their first in Toronto in fifteen years — to almost otherworldly expectations.

A tradition passed down over thousands of years. The originators of the world music genre. Spiritual expression rooted in transcendental mysticism. These are some of the heady descriptions that have followed the Master Musicians of Jajouka around the globe for decades.

A week before the show, featured performer and hereditary standard-bearer Bachir Attar told my fellow blogger that, “This music can build, for the human being, mercy in the heart.” So, for a night, I put the details of the history and debates over rightful group representation out of my head, and focused on the visceral experience of a cultural legacy. (more…)

Last Saturday, Toronto was enveloped in muggy greyness. I was riding my bicycle along Bloor Street West, after being doused in unspectacular rain in High Park, and the street was less appealing than usual. Two women were yelling at each other outside a store with sad appliances in the window, the kind of appliances that break when you get them home; the police were cordoning some building off; and the whole street—which occasionally vibrates with a kind of transglobal charm—was entirely charmless.

“Amazing knowledge!” a man called from the sidewalk as I rode past. I laughed, and kept on down the block to the Salvation Army, where all the summer dresses were polyester testaments to humanity’s ability to create dreadful fashion; the kind of fashion that evokes a physical response, a shiver or a cringe. Stepping back out into the humidity, I followed my curiosity, and walked my bike up the block.

“What kind of amazing knowledge?” I asked the man.

“No, a maze of knowledge. Entry five cents.” There was a table on the sidewalk with a smiling woman and a yellow piggy bank. They were positioned in front of a door with black curtains. I rummaged through my pocket for a nickel and the man waived me along. “It’s free for people with purple shoes today.” (more…)

Hercules gets the initial credit for discovering purpura. He was strolling along the seashore with a svelte nymph, Tyros, and his dog was trotting along ahead in the sand. When they caught up with the dog, its muzzle was smeared with a brilliant, deep red-purple colour—a colour neither of them had ever seen before. Tyros begged Hercules to make her a garment with that hue (in fact, she told him she wouldn’t be with him unless he produced it), so he began collecting shells from the beach.

Shells? Yes, the famous Tyrian purple dye was made from snail shells: from the murex mollusk (shown above), a type of sea snail. It would take 250,000 murex shellfish to obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple, so the dye was highly valued. Purpura (its latin name) became the colour of royalty. It was produced in the city of Tyre, by the Phoenicians (whose name came from the Greek word phoinos, meaning “blood red”). They had been producing dyes in Tyre, and beyond, since 1000 BC.

“The Tyrian colour is most appreciated when it is the colour of clotted blood,” Pliny wrote, “dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”

By 400 AD, the murex mollusk was on the brink of extinction—a colour vanished from the world, perhaps.

Can a colour really go extinct? (more…)

“Legend has it if they ever stop playing the world will come to an end…”

These words appear on a flyer for the upcoming Master Musicians of Jajouka concert in Toronto (July 15 at the Phoenix); the flyer shows the Master Musicians in white robes, with their leader, Bachir Attar, front and center. Is he smirking? Pouting? Keeping a mysterious secret?

Legend certainly surrounds this group of Moroccan musicians, layers upon layers of it. To fully understand the legends, one would have to excavate beneath the recent bohemian myths surrounding them—beneath the mystique of the Interzone-Tangier scene in the 1950s, and the iconic writers and musicians like Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, and William S. Burroughs, who brought the power of Jajouka music to Western ears. The deeper mystique is that of the music itself: it has been taught in early childhood and passed down from father to son, through the Attar family, for centuries. Master Musicians would travel with the sultans of Morocco as official royal musicians; in more recent times, the clan performed as royal musicians for the Moroccan king. Trance-like, hypnotic, this Sufi music is reputed to possess power. [Listen to the track “Memories Of My Father”, written by Bachir.]

Listening to this music, I wonder: what is “powerful” music, really? Or: what can music do? Most of us would agree that it can lift the spirit. Some would say that music has the power to transport a person; others credit music with giving strength, or even with healing.

Through a stroke of luck, and the wonders of globalized communication, I was able to interview Bachir Attar via a shaky Skype-to-cell connection two nights ago. It was 1:30 a.m. in the village of Jajouka, Morocco, but he was awake and passionate, ready to discuss the power of his music, his musical heritage, and its possible disappearance.

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SIX MILE BEND, FLORIDA—The crop duster whined overhead, banking hard and swooping for another pass over the field. My impulse was to duck and cover, but it would have been a useless gesture. This was cane country: flat fields, straight canals, uncurving roads, all smothered with an eerie leaden haze. The only human being I’d seen in the area had been sporting a shabby plastic suit.

Cane country stretches for miles and miles, spreading across the Florida peninsula to the south of Lake Okeechobee from east to west, pierced by settlements with sugar factories: Clewiston, Belle Glade, South Bay. Occasionally, the green is broken by a rectangular parcel of a phosphate mine―a lunar landscape of bleached rock forms and strangely-colored pools, where rock dust hangs in the air. Closer to the eastern and western fringes, there are also occasional rectangular parcels of “Signature Collections”―million-dollar homes that boast elaborate fortress-like walls. The luxury homes are pressed up against the rock mines and cane fields in a bizarre patchwork of human intervention, which has blanketed the whole peninsula. You can walk down a road and have a coral pink fortress on your left side; a rock mine or cane field on your right.

This accidental quilt was pieced together only very recently. Much of this cane country was “reclaimed” from the Everglades by the sugar growers and the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s, who built the system of levees and canals that allowed the cane to be planted. Before that, the ecosystem was part of a “river of grass”—a unique bioregion that allowed water to flow between Lake Okeechobee south to the Florida Bay. The Everglades have since been reduced in size by more than half, and the national park that still exists is but a remnant of the actual swamp. (more…)

I had heard it would be harrowing. I had read that it might be offensive. But the last thing I was expecting of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman show about the young American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was to see Rachel Corrie’s real life mother deliver a talk-back at the end. For those who don’t know Corrie’s story, a brief history:

Rachel Corrie was a young American activist from Olympia, Washington, who travelled to the Gaza Strip in early 2003 to support Palestinians there in non-violent demonstrations. Two months later she was run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah. The bulldozer operator either clearly saw her before he ran her over, or didn’t see her at all (depending on who you ask, of course). (more…)

I glanced over as he sat down and a hot thrill of pleasure shot through my stomach, the same sensation I get on a rollercoaster when it careens downhill. He’s just three tables down from me, shiny white hair, age spots dotting his tanned face, a navy blue polo, khakis, and Teva sandals. He catches me staring and I quickly look away , but I can’t stop glancing over to see what page he’s reading first. It looks like Letters. Here he was — the elusive Walrus reader — taking a coffee in Dooney’s Cafe to leaf through the last issue I’d fact-checked as an intern.

After four months of slaving away, checking fact after endless f’ing fact and phoning everyone, everywhere — a retired pilot in B.C., an expert on the Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia, a mother who lost her son to Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Kurdish TV broadcaster in Diyarbakir, Pico Iyer on a book tour, a famous librettist and artist in London, my old history professor — who would have thought this lone reader would bring me such a straight shot of unadulterated joy?

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Kent Monkman’s Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: a Portrait (profiled in the May issue), left me wondering what has changed in how Canadian society imagines the Indian^{* (huh?)Just to be clear: The Indian here refers to Daniel Francis’s definition of “the Indian as the invention of the European . . . [and] anything non-Natives wanted them to be,” and is not to be confused with First Nations people living in Canada today.} since Paul Kane’s majestic braves captivated British North America in the mid-nineteenth century.

For the last three months, on my daily, three-kilometre stroll from Trinity Bellwoods to The Walrus office, the Indian has greeted me twice. Across the street from the Meeting Place, a drop-in frequented by addicts and the homeless, including some First Nations people, a bare-chested Indian stands on a tree stump. Leather straps, a shade darker than his bronzed skin, are knotted around his bulging biceps, a matching leather bag filled with tobacco drapes across his chest down to his green, fringed suede pants. He gazes up at the grotty Reverb nightclub, feather headdress tilted back, right hand blocking his eyes from the perennial sun. Red paint marks his handsome chiseled face like battle scars. His lips are perfect. At “West Side OPEN LATE Tobacco” the cigar store Indian kept a daily vigil (the store mysteriously closed up shop and left, with its Indian, last week). But no fear: the made-in-the-Philippines, cigar-store Indian marks a number of Toronto tobacconists. (Yorkville’s classy Thomas Hinds Tobacconist keeps its wooden Indian tastefully indoors.) (more…)

If you are among the not-terribly-silent majority that sees opera as a three-and-a-half-hour ordeal consisting of people in funny costumes screaming at each other, well, I can sympathize. Despite listening to and playing classical music for most of my life, and try as I might, for the longest time I could never quite *get* opera. Sure, I could get swept up by a beautiful aria, but as a whole, opera seemed to me a mess of hackneyed plots, bad acting, and overblown, bombastic music. It seemed that way, that is, until I encountered Claude Debussy’s haunting and ravishingly beautiful Pelléas et Mélisande in an undergraduate seminar on the French post-romantic/impressionist/symbolist composer. I’ve since never looked at opera the same way. Pelléas is now on stage at The Four Seasons Centre in Toronto in a production by the Canadian Opera Company, and I’ve had my ticket in hand for months. (more…)

While in Montreal last weekend, I skipped out on watching the Habs game for an equally hot ticket: the twenty-year retrospective of Belgian dancer and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’

While in Montreal last weekend, I skipped out on watching the Habs game for an equally hot ticket: the twenty-year retrospective of Belgian dancer and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’ Ultima Vez (Spanish for “The Last Time”). Judging by the generous turn out and hearty applause, the show was anything but a swan song. Rather, it had the power, speed, and fervor of another spectacle being played out on TV screens across the city.

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Like most kids worth their fluorescent slap bracelet and Air Jordan kicks, I can break out The Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song on command. So the day Vivian Banks inexplicably morphed into another woman was a strange one indeed. (Unbeknownst to impressionable ten-year-old fans such as myself, the original Aunt Viv was too busy suing NBC for breach of contract to attend Will and Carlton’s graduation. Her double silently stepped in a few episodes later.) This wasn’t a case of a bad perm job; it was identity theft. And yet, the Banks residence didn’t seem to notice. I was spooked. (more…)

To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, Winnipeg’s Video Pool media art centre made a poster detailing its history. But the twenty-five year history of an artist-run centre is as harried as they come. Rather than a straight timeline, Video Pool’s history looks more like a brainstorming session gone wrong. In the aptly titled The Incomplete, Contested, Anecdotal, Unedited, Messy, Nostalgic, Faulty, Controversial History of Video Pool So Far…,bubbles of people, places, moments in time, and minor scandals are connected with AV cables. (more…)

If, like me, you’d never guess this shimmery post title is also the name of a soon-to-be released album from Minneapolis hip hop artists Atmosphere, your indie music radar needs amplifying.

Help is out there. The Indie Music Filter, put together by tireless music promoter Chris Budd, is a great start. Budd keeps his entries mercifully short letting the tracks and videos do the work. His discerning taste points virgins and doyens alike to the choicest indie gigs, artists and tracks.

This week he’ll follow the axis of indie to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. Guided by his geeked-out Excel spreadsheet of must-sees, his picks should be on point.

*check out Road to Riches on Atmopshere’s myspace for a taste of the hip hop duo’s styles

When I get a hold of Toronto artist Mitch Robertson at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, he’s just returned from dropping off his son. The father and son team had been getting the gallery ready for Robertson’s show 5,6,7: Economies of Good & Evil. But being three years old, Robertson’s son was having more fun dirtying the Plexiglas containers than cleaning them.

Robertson’s son was a big influence on 5,6,7, which was exhibited in Oakville and Winnipeg last year. Most of the work in the show was made at a time when Robertson was struggling with how to raise a family. In Winners and Losers (2005-07) and From Good to Bad (2006) Robertson plays with our concepts of good and evil. By colouring one cowboy’s hat black and another’s white he exposes how subjective our morals can be. The concept is explored further in photos of groups of men, where their shirts are coloured in grey scale from black and white. (more…)

TORONTO—As I write this, Prince Edward Island’s Cyclone roller coaster is deep into winter hibernation, and the hordes of Japanese tourists that flood the island in summer to see the birthplace of Anne have just finished lunch back on their own island. Cows Ice Cream in Charlottetown is one of the few summer-time hot spots to stay open in defiance of winter. The Confederation Centre for the Arts is another bastion of island culture open year-round. Lucky for Atlantic Canadian hipsters.

Tomorrow (February 29) the centre is hosting Cute As A…, a button exhibity and trading event featuring unique designs by fifty Canadian artists—all on one-inch pins. The show is curated by Siobhan Wiggins, the Centre’s education and outreach officer. (more…)