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Normally placid Victoriaville becomes a musical Mecca May 16, as musicians and fans from across North America gather for the 29th edition of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle. With 20 concerts over four days, it offers a panorama of musical territories and sonorities, expanding the possibilities of organized and improvised [...]
In the pantheon of musicians who emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s during the folk revival, holding a prominent place alongside Bob and Joan and Joni is clear-as-honey voiced Judy Blue Eyes. Listening again to the five LPs she recorded during that era, I was transfixed by Collins and [...]
Musical gems culled from three centuries played in small-group formations by top-tier performers—that and some first-class jazz is in the cards during the month-long Montreal Chamber Music Festival that gets underway this month. Talking about it with festival founder, cellist Dennis Brott, I returned in my mind to the marvelous [...]
Throughout Israel’s embattled history, it has been a badge of honour to serve in the country’s armed forces. For obvious reasons, public expressions of conscientious objections, draft dodging or anti-war sentiments have been virtually non-existent. While objections to the draft remain relatively marginal, there has been a change among Israeli [...]
Union leadership usually begins on a voluntary basis, when none of your colleagues wants to accept the challenge of standing up for a worker’s rights, in the office or on the shop floor. It puts you in conflict with management, marks you as “the enemy within” and exposes you to [...]
A group of 25 adults gather around a table in a church hall on a Sunday afternoon to engage with a Montreal professor and his guest. Norman Cornett, 62, has convinced the usually private novelist Rawi Hage to attend a third session in what Cornett calls dialogic learning. It is [...]
North American Jazz Alliance; The Montreal Sessions (Challenge Records) The accordion never threatened the dominant place of the saxophone, trumpet or piano in jazz combos, but virtuoso Art Van Damme (1920-2010) was the instrument’s leading exponent. In the 1960s and 1970s, he created a unique group sound in combining his [...]
As a fledgling journalist in 1964, I was assigned to cover federal politics for United Press International in Ottawa and it was a tremendous learning experience, including linguistically. As I worked with an older crowd of top-notch reporters on Parliament Hill, I realized I did not speak English the way [...]
Most Canadians would be hard pressed to name any of Canada’s 105 senators. That’s the nature of the beast. Our senators are appointed by the governor-general on the recommendation of the prime minister. They require no public support or accountability to serve until age 75, and barring a scandal they [...]
The heroes of Machu Picchu are the porters, descendants of the peoples who were part of the Inca empire. The Inca made up the largest civilization in South America, which dominated what is now Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and into the mountains of Bolivia and Argentina from about 1300 until [...]
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