deviating from the program
The concert was scheduled at the Bram Taylor Green, a granite box with velvet seats and good acoustics but bad parking. Julian Wong, the pianist, was known only to a […]
they can’t hear it
One afternoon, while the orchestra violins tuned, Chad the oboist turned to Berta, who was polishing her flute with a cloth that had once been a scarf. “It’s all over,” […]
The new Ostinatos
I’m working on two new ostinatos one rooted in B, the other in E. They started off as simple loops, but lately I’ve been trying to stretch them across two […]
burn your dashiki
Three musicians, Alex, Georgia, and Ty, traveled from Guelph to Montreal, hoping to record the album they’d been imagining for years. They had songs. They had time. They almost had […]
shaking the system
In the beginning, Jonah and Avery sang only for protest marches and basements where rent parties ruled. They called themselves Black Lantern. They wrote songs that detonated. They had rules.No […]
last note
The gallery was small, near the Black Sheep Inn. Not much more than a room with windows, above a bakery in Wakefield, Quebec. Word had spread: a retrospective of Jay […]
Mr. Frochill
On the ferry to Salt Spring Island, with the gulls screaming like unpaid interns and the rain politely refusing to stop, Halid Frochill sat in the galley with a soy […]
31rst
It is (or was) Robin Kuretsky’s birthday, thirty-first of the month, a number mirrored in my own thirteenth, like two cards from a fortune deck flipped in opposite hands. Inversions, […]
hank’s only beat
In a city where musicians practiced day and night to impress the festival judges, there was a drummer named Hank who played only one beat. Every morning, he sat outside […]
first draft
Reading through my novel for its first round of edits. So far, so good – no nervous breakdowns, no setting fire to the manuscript, metaphorical or otherwise. Thirty pages to […]