Articles by Tony Montague.

Concert Reviews

Raising the temperature at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival

By Alexander Varty and Tony Montague
Vancouver’s own Zapato Negro rewarded the early birds who flocked to David Lam Park on June 28 with a sizzling presentation of Afro-Cuban jazz. The quintet, led by bassist Allan Johnston, began with a lengthy version of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” that gave the classic a bright Latin face-lift.
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Music Features

Renaud Garcia-Fons draws on eclectic inspirations

By Tony Montague
If you think you know what a bass sounds like, take a listen to Renaud Garcia-Fons’s brilliant live recording Arcoluz. On several of the tracks you’d swear he was playing a cello or a viola, at times even a violin. But as the DVD that comes with the album reveals, the 45-year-old Frenchman coaxes all the timbres, tones, and textures from a five-string upright double bass.
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Concert Reviews

The best from the Vancouver International Jazz Festival so far

By Alexander Varty and Tony Montague
Herbie Hancock was in an expansive mood at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival’s opening-night gala—at the Orpheum on June 20—and he had every right to be. Just two days before, he’d been named musician of the year by the New York City–based Jazz Journalists Association, while his guitarist, Benin-born Lionel Loueke, was dubbed best up-and-comer.
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Recordings

Saul Berson Quartet

By Tony Montague
Intricacy (Moco Loco)
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Recordings

Miguelito Valdes & Puro Son

By Tony Montague
Ahi na’ ma (Independent)
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Jazz Fest

Shanghai star Coco Zhao called "boy Billie Holiday"

By Tony Montague
When Coco Zhao started singing jazz standards in Shanghai in the mid ’90s, there were few experienced musicians to accompany him. But things have changed dramatically since that time, and the Chinese megacity boasts one of Asia’s fastest-growing jazz scenes-with Zhao as its brightest star.
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Jazz Fest

Hilario Durán's jazz incorporates disparate Cuban threads

By Tony Montague
To be a leading Cuban jazz pianist, you need to have taught yourself to play a range of contemporary postbop styles and you should have studied for many years at a rigorous classical-music conservatory. But what’s mandatory is that you feel the island nation’s traditional rhythms coursing through your veins.
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Jazz Fest

Soul sensation Ryan Shaw has music in his blood

By Tony Montague
Singing has long been a crucial part of Ryan Shaw’s life. The 27-year-old soul sensation from Decatur, Georgia, grew up in a devoutly religious family, and before he was in grade school he was already an enthusiastic member of the children’s choir at his local Pentecostal church.
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Music Notes

Canadian Folk Music Awards get ready to award their own

By Tony Montague
Give ear, old-time fiddlers, blues guitarists, Highland pipe bands, country crooners, Latin percussionists, and a cappella cowboys—this year’s Canadian Folk Music Awards are calling, from afar. The ceremony won’t be held until November 23 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, but for a shot at one of the prizes you’ll need to get your application to the committee by July 4. There are 19 categories in all, including Pushing the Boundaries and Young Performer of the Year.
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Music Features

Billy Bragg immerses himself in English history

By Tony Montague
An interview with Billy Bragg feels like a brisk walk with him through England—in time as well as space. As his semi-autobiographical 2006 book The Progressive Patriot revealed, the bard of Barking is fascinated by history—not the stuff of kings and battles, but where and how the commoners lived, fought for their rights, and forged an identity. Bragg likes to go back a very long way.
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Recordings

Orchestra Baobab

By Tony Montague
Made in Dakar (Nonesuch)
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Music Features

Roots rebels the Wilders made their own breaks

By Tony Montague
Getting those first breaks in the music biz is tough for any new band with ambitions. For Americana roots outfit the Wilders, the chances seemed especially limited, as their Missouri/Kansas, base is far from the action in traditional music-industry centres. Soon after forming 10 years ago, the four musicians decided they needed to take a radical approach to attracting attention.
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Music Arts

Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares enchant with clear, bright voices

By Tony Montague
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares builds a legend using uniquely powerful techniques.
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Music Features

Dynamic Danish duo takes classical approach to folk

By Tony Montague
The map of northern Europe reveals a lot about Denmark and its population. The low-lying country of 5.5 million people is located in a strategic position between the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and no town or village is more than 70 kilometres from the ocean.
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Music Notes

Legendary Mississippi Sheiks to get their due

By Tony Montague
On a recent holiday, Steve Dawson—guitar maestro and founder of local label Black Hen Music—had the bright idea of putting together a tribute album to one of his favourite bands, the Mississippi Sheiks.
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Music Notes

Lawrence Anthony jazz benefit ready to roll

By Tony Montague
A concert to benefit Lawrence Anthony, the long-time production manager of the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society who—as reported in the Straight’s May 1 edition—recently suffered a brain hemorrhage, will take place on Saturday (May 17) at the Ironworks (235 Alexander Street). The event will feature local jazz, rock, and world-music acts, and Steven Hill of Leaky Heaven Circus as MC. For more details, see www.coastaljazz.ca/.
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Music Features

Music has taken Congo’s Mapumba around the world

By Tony Montague
Congolese songwriter Mapumba is one of the strongest new voices out of Africa, an artist who knows what he wants and won’t accept compromises. When he couldn’t find a producer who shared his musical vision, he decided to make his debut album on his own. This entailed not only financing the project but studying sound engineering and building a home studio—then playing every instrument on the 12 original compositions.
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Recordings

Rupa & the April fishes

By Tony Montague
Extraordinary Rendition (Cumbancha)
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Music Arts

Rich rhythms guide tabla master Zakir Hussain

By Tony Montague
For Zakir Hussain, the tabla is more than a percussion instrument with an extraordinary range of tones, timbres, and pitches. The Indian maestro regards the paired hand drums as faithful, lifelong companions. He’s never so much as thought of playing anything else.
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Music Notes

CJBS jumps to the aid of a comrade

By Tony Montague
Staff and friends of the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society were shocked to learn that long-time production manager Lawrence Anthony suffered a brain hemorrhage on April 18. “It happened at Festival House on Granville Island,” the society’s media director, John Orysik, told the Straight.
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Music Features

That 1 Guy is more than happy to lay some Magic Pipe

By Tony Montague
Mike Silverman, a.k.a. That 1 Guy, takes the tradition of the one-man band and hurls it into the future. The Californian musician, whose latest album is titled The Moon Is Disgusting, is the inventor and master of an astonishing metallic contraption he has dubbed the Magic Pipe. With this technologically enhanced instrument, he creates songs and soundscapes rich in tribal beats, dance grooves, and percussive rhythms.
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Music Features

Alison Brown makes bluegrass both accessible and eclectic

By Tony Montague
Banjo player and bandleader Alison Brown is usually tagged as a bluegrass musician, but she’s a more diverse artist than that. Her original acoustic music brings together bluegrass, jazz, folk, country, pop, old-time, Celtic, and even Latin flavours. In lesser hands, that could be a recipe for stylistic inconsistency.
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Recordings

Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill

By Tony Montague
Welcome Here Again (Green Linnet)
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Music Notes

Bringing Nyasha to Canada

By Tony Montague
Multi-instrumentalist Kurai Mubaiwa, one of Vancouver’s leading African musicians, received some bad news last month. His former partner had died of malaria in Zimbabwe, leaving their eight-year-old daughter, Nyasha, in danger. “I’m so very afraid for her,” Mubaiwa—who came to Canada from Zimbabwe as a refugee in 2002—told the Straight.
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Music Features

Fiddle Festival looks back to its deep Celtic roots

By Tony Montague
Kevin Burke is upbeat about the current state of Celtic music. Though its mass appeal may have waned over the past decade, the veteran Irish fiddler notes that its hard-core following is on the rise. He sees a movement back to the genre’s community roots in reaction to glitzy international stage productions like Riverdance, while at the same time there’s a greater appreciation of the diversity of Celtic tradition.
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Arts Features

Kiran Ahluwalia celebrates poetry and passion

By Tony Montague
Indo-Canadian singer Kiran Ahluwalia wants her husband, Rez Abbasi, to get his artistic due. After last year’s release of her third album, Wanderlust, the media focused almost exclusively on the more exotic new elements in the music, such as the use of Portuguese fado musicians on three tracks and the trancelike Saharan groove of “Teray Darsan”. But they overlooked the contribution of her guitarist spouse, whose influence on the recording is everywhere.
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Music Features

Famous friends help Kidjo bring Djin Djin to life

By Tony Montague
Angélique Kidjo is in overdrive. The New York–based African chanteuse has just won a Grammy for best contemporary world album for Djin Djin, and the requests for interviews are growing exponentially. So she doesn’t waste time tiptoeing around the question of how she bagged one of the music industry’s top prizes with her ninth release.
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Music Features

Spanish Harlem Orchestra revives vintage salsa dura

By Tony Montague
For more than 50 years, New York City’s East Harlem neighbourhood has been a crucible for Latin music. Better known as Spanish Harlem, or simply El Barrio (the ’hood), this community gave rise to boogaloo, Latin soul, and the hot salsa that conquered the world’s dance floors with the songs of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Rubén Blades, and their peers. The 13-piece Spanish Harlem Orchestra is dedicated to bringing back the vintage salsa dura sound of the ’70s, and taking it further.
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Music Features

Buchbinder does that Afro-Cuban/klezmer thing

By Tony Montague
Soon afterward Buchbinder discovered klezmer and founded the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, in which he continues to play. Instinctively, he gave the songs he was performing a subtle Afro-Cuban feel, but it would be many years before he took things further
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Recordings

Yves Lambert & Le Bebert Orchestra's Le Monde à Lambert

By Tony Montague
La Bottine Souriante's Yves Lambert returns with his hot acoustic quintet
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Dance

Why the Dervishes whirl

By Tony Montague
Every gesture has spiritual meaning for the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey
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Music Features

Federico Aubele links Alaska to Cape Horn with sophomore Panamericana

By Tony Montague
The globetrotting Aubele lived away from his beloved Buenos Aires for six years–first in Berlin, and then in Barcelona. He quickly landed a recording contract, though it wasn't with a European label. Since the late '90s, when he started working as a DJ to supplement his income as a guitar teacher back home, he'd been an aficionado of the tripped-out dub sounds of Washington, DC's Thievery Corporation, in particular its album The Mirror Conspiracy
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Music Arts

Ensemble Clement Janequin

By Tony Montague
The subtle interactions between the six tuxedoed and brightly bow-tied musicians, their dancing eyebrows and impish glances, lit a fuse of humour that burned throughout their presentation of sacred and profane compositions.
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Local Motion

Beats Without Borders make responsible worldbeat

By Tony Montague
What's in a name? Three years ago, when DJs Nils von Hahn, Tarun Nayar, Lady Ra, and Adrian Blackhurst decided to create a worldbeat fusion collective, they needed the right moniker one that would encapsulate their outlook and stick in the public mind. At a brainstorming session von Hahn hit the bull's-eye with Beats Without Borders. The tag had an alliterative hook, and gave a clear indication of the four spinners' music and ethos.
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Dance

The spirit of Santería dances on

By Tony Montague
Afro-Cuban troupe Yoruba Andabo follows tradition with its spirit-infused movement.
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Recordings

Manu Chao

By Tony Montague
La Radiolina (Radio Bemba)
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Arts Features

Khalifé courts controversy

By Tony Montague
Marcel Khalifé is not only a hugely popular artist throughout the Arab world, he's also a controversial figure. The Lebanese composer and oud player has faced criminal prosecution three times–in 1996, 1999, and 2003–for insulting Islamic values with his composition "I Am Joseph, O Father". The song, based on a poem by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, quotes two verses from the Koran–an inclusion deemed blasphemous by some. Kha­lifé was acquitted on each occasion.
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Arts Features

Following Buddha's footsteps

By Tony Montague
For Viji Prakash, bharata natyam­–the classical dance of southwestern India–knows no cultural boundaries. The director of the U.S.–based Shakti Dance Company has choreographed South Asian takes on Cinderella, The Nutcracker, and Peer Gynt. Five years ago, she was asked to write a piece for the opening of an Asian art exhibition in Los Angeles, and chose as her narrative the life of North Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha.
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Dance

A trip to flamenco's source

By Tony Montague
Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain is chiefly known as the capital of sherry, the fortified wine that takes its name, in anglicized form. But the Andalusian city of some 200,000 inhabitants is also one of the major centres of flamenco. It's home to three of the artists coming to this year's Vancouver Flamenco Festival: singer Manuel Tañe, dancer Adriana Maresma, and guitarist Juan Antonio Gomez.
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Music Features

Carthy enjoying a time when everything's shifting

By Tony Montague
Eliza Carthy is one of the linchpins of the English folk scene–leading her own tradition-based band the Ratcatchers, and performing with her mum, singer Norma Waterson, and her dad, legendary singer and guitarist Martin Carthy, in the band Waterson: Carthy. As if that's not enough to keep her busy, on her upcoming swing through British Columbia the 32-year-old singer and fiddler will be playing in the new duo she's formed with her partner, Victoria-born Aidan Curran.
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Music Features

Comedy commission pays off for obsessive survivor

By Tony Montague
Loudon Wainwright III's sardonic wit has a way of getting under people's skins and sticking in their minds. The veteran actor and folksinger-songwriter–best known for his paean to road kill, "Dead Skunk"–celebrates life's oddities and ironies with lyrics that oscillate between humour and pathos.
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Local Motion

Cercel has learned to adapt

By Tony Montague
Lache Cercel was 17 when he first heard the music that would change his life. At the time, the classically trained Romanian violinist was performing in Black Sea resorts, with a repertoire of light-opera pieces and classical themes, well-known Eastern European folk tunes, and a touch of Roma (Gypsy) music though nothing too wild or dark. In the 1970s, under the regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, it all had to be safe, state-approved fare.
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Music Features

Jansch's folk baroque continues to inspire

By Tony Montague
While few classic-rock fans may have heard of Bert Jansch, at least one song by the veteran Scottish folk guitarist is familiar to disciples of Led Zeppelin. That's because–at least, according to one side of the story–Jimmy Page ripped off Jansch's brilliant Irish lament "Blackwaterside" in its entirety, renaming it "Black Mountain Side" and taking full credit for both music and arrangement on the band's 1969 eponymous debut album. A lawsuit ensued.
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Arts Features

Oku renews ancient rhythm

By Tony Montague
For as long as she can remember, Nigerian-born Maobong Oku has been fascinated by dance and music–drumming, especially. "From my early childhood onwards, anywhere there was a drum, I was there. I would run from the house into the street whenever I saw or heard a masquerade [a procession of masked figures and percussionists], and I would follow it. I'd come back really late and get into trouble–but I kept on doing it."
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Music Features

BeauSoleil covers gamut of old-time Cajun music

By Tony Montague
When Louisiana fiddler Michael Doucet was growing up in the town of Lafayette in the ’60s, old-time Cajun music wasn’t hard to find. But like most teenagers he wanted to play rock ’n’ roll, so he joined a swamp-rock band as a guitarist. It took a trip to Europe a few years later to spark his interest in the traditional Acadian songs and dance tunes of the Bayou Country.
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Music Features

Pura Fé’s music blends the ancient with the new

By Tony Montague
The multitalented Pura Fé is best known as a singer with a remarkably supple and wide-ranging voice, and as a founding member of First Nations a cappella trio Ulali. But she’s also a poet, painter, dancer, actor, and—since a visit to Canada four years ago—a fine lap steel guitarist.
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Festival Vancouver

Spindel’s sound enchants

By Tony Montague
Norway’s traditional music is inseparable from its myth and legend, the country’s national instrument being a prime case in point. The Hardanger fiddle is a type of violin with four regular strings and four sympathetic strings, producing a ringing, droning, often ethereal sound—the aural equivalent of the northern lights. Long ago, it was known as the devil’s instrument.
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Music Features

Rastrillos bring Jamaica to Mexico, Strathcona

By Tony Montague
When the members of Rastrillos came together in Mexico City in the late '80s they were the only exponents of reggae in a metropolis of more than 15 million people. As a result, no one wanted to take the risk of booking them.
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Music Features

"World music" tag rankles South Africa's Masekela

By Tony Montague
When singer and trumpeter Hugh Masekela was growing up in South Africa during the '40s and early '50s, music played a crucial role in the lives of the country's black majority. Songs and dances helped the many indigenous peoples and tribal groups to maintain their values and traditions, giving them a sense of identity in the face of oppression by the apartheid policies of the government.
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Music Features

Basque rhythms infuse Tapia eta Leturia tunes

By Tony Montague
The type of accordion you play may affect your chances of getting into heaven. When Basque musician Joseba Tapia was six years old and showed interest in playing traditional dance tunes on the squeezebox, his family and the local priest became nervous about his choice of instrument.
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