Sealand White

Deep brown shadows arched beyond the golden streetlamps in a Regent Park co-op on that somber October Friday night as much of Toronto's critically obscure community of reggae musicians rose and gathered to support star drummer Raffa Dean and his family. The tragic loss of Raffa and Karen's son, Sealand White to a pointless discharge of gunfire into an opening elevator door last week has shattered their lives, and the lives of his school community. A tearful crowd of teens wept and hugged beside a tribute wall full of the fifteen-year-old's exploits, while the night's breezes flickered candles over a floor space covered in bags of Skittles. The purple ones were his favourite. Reggae and hiphop sounds gently soothed and smoothed the sobbing and the silence of the crowd of about a thousand mourners. The intensely inventive and fun-loving qualities of the popular lad were the epitome of all that Jamaican culture has to offer; these were characteristics largely inherited from his father, Raffa Dean. As a drummer, singer and a beacon of steady personal Rasta cultural force, Raffa has had no equal in this city. Growing up amongst tightly focussed musical peers of Jamaican background in Malton Ontario, Raffa would run home after school every day to practise the drums. He was called to Montreal at the age of seventeen to play for reggae royalty, Dennis Brown. As jazz musicians revere the abilities of Tony Williams, who famously joined Miles Davis' band at the same age, Raffa's progress was as precocious and as in fluential. Since Leroy Sibbles left Toronto in 1993, along with the passing of Jackie Mittoo, reggae, arguably the most important style of music to evolve at the end of the last century, has languished in Toronto. A once-thriving cultural scene, centered at the Bamboo and the Jerk Pit has been excised from the media and club interest that sustained dozens of local bands in the 80's and 90's.

I was at Jahmeel 'Shanx' Spence's funeral in September ( bullet-ridden at Lawrence Ave. and Brimley - another B.S. murder). He was carrying on the reggae cultural tradition in new ways. The pastor asked "where is the family", and a hundred people stood up.

Now Sealand White. These were good children that many knew to be full of the good things in life, not random gameboyz. More deaths are happening week after week.

Try to be a human and walk the earth in peace. Deep winds will blow you down in a moment too,( in Jamaican patois' idiom, the code of acceptance says do not feel no way). Let's work on the gun culture together; from cops n robbers movies, music and media and conversational bravado, retreat from levity and irony. Death is too real, but sudden and random death is soul-killing, fuelled by hatred and ignorance; it is just the end of the beginning of a pain and sorrow that will last through generations.

“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” a devastated Jax White said of her younger sibling.

“My brother was the light of my life,” she added. “He didn’t live long enough ... I miss him already.”

Anyone with information is urged to contact Homicide detectives at 416-808-7400, or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477).

Jim Bryson! Live! Free! With The Weakerthans!

The Falcon Lake Incident CD Release Show
Jim Bryson & The Weakerthans (full band) will be celebrating the release day of The Falcon Lake Incident by playing Dave Bookman's Nu Music Nite at the Horseshoe Tavern. Doors open at 9:00pm. The band will be playing at 10:00pm. The price is free.

Tuesday October 19th
Horseshoe Tavern
Toronto, Ontario
Set Time 10:00pm (sharp)
Free Show.
19+

Rah! Rah! Rahman!

I was at the-almost-best-show that I've ever seen on Sunday. It is a close and unwinnable contest for first place, with perhaps a thousand to compare amongst. But not many like this, my friend. It was the vision of genuine Indian genius A.R. Rahman, performing a make-up show for the Journey Home tour that had stopped just before it reached Toronto last June, due to a collapsing lighting rig in Detroit the night before. I can't remember ever having felt the shivers of pain and pride emanating so intensely from any other performance piece (maybe Isaac Hayes at the O'Keefe, maybe Bob Marley at Massey Hall in '76. And Mary J.).

There were banks of empty seats. On the floor, where ticket prices ranged from $350-$500, about 3/4 of the seats were occupied. No matter, the view from the surrounding arena had the panorama and scope that Rahman's vision was crafted for. As grand as imposing as the sub-continent itself, the columned curtained stage was presented at the beginning as a temple. A ghetto youth ran in panic, spotlighted, from the back of the auditorium to the stage, where the projected image of a door opened to him and scooped him, and us, inside to play and dance to a world-wide variety of musical styles; indeed we had taken refuge together in the temple of music.

Twin staircases that would later become walls and prisons and stages ushered him up into the welcoming intoxication of O... Saya, the opening number, with the composer singing and strolling down the staircase in a fedora and suit, stylishly conjuring memories of both Sinatra and Michael Jackson, as dancers radiated out around the floorspace and a dozen virtuoso musicians stressed the groove to the depths and heights of their expressive powers; high-def live rear projections, expertly filmed and edited, focussed the audience's attention as lights and sliding patterns spun around the performers. (I didn't see a cameraman all night). Judging from internet evidence, the show has changed and evolved since the accident in Detroit. The singing progressed forward to a curved projecting catwalk that embraced a hundred of the lucky fans in the first ten rows with three singers led out on parade by a scepter-wielding DJ BlaaZe and caboosed by Rahman in casual whites with matching ball cap and a portable keyboard/lyre. This was the first of a dozen quick costume changes that Rahman managed during the show. Sexy hot-pants and suggestive dance moves were enticing, but they always stayed a few shades short of lurid, maintaining an admirable classiness that mixed well with the sensuous spiritualism of the music.

Rahman's prominence as a worldwide touchstone for the hopes of oppressed Tamils caused the majority of expats in the audience to respond boisterously to the Hindi and especially the Tamil songs of DJ Blaaze, Lata Mangeshkar, who appeared as a hologram on the front curtain to engage in a moving duet on Luka Chupi from Rang De Basanti , Desi superstar Hariharan, whose rapid fire microtonal pleas and endearments sent all into a state of rapture, the crystalline Richa Sharma, and Sufi / Ganesha / Bhangra echoes that permeated, but never dominated the truly global allegiances of Rahman's vision. Dance-pop, jazz piano, acoustic guitar duets, chanting, virtuoso solos on the violin, cylindrical drum, wood flute, sitar, and trap kit, as well as contortionists, acrobats, break dancers, ballet, reggae, MJ's Black or White, a Happy Birthday singalong for the composer's 62-year-old mother and a program of Indian music at the center of the show: each had their moment, and were swept away by a change of light, beat and costume, so that by the climactic Jai Ho finale, a seeming dream-time had taken up our collective consciouness for almost three hours, like an epic film. The boy of the opening returned and ascended the staircase with the man he had become, and the two turned hand in hand to wave farewell as credits rolled on the curtain, ending with urgent quotes from Gandhi and his disciple, Martin Luther King Jr., imploring us to further the dream for peace, especially in the arena of racism, which continues to frame the major conflicts that defile our world.Messages of hope and world-wide unity in the sweetest context imaginable.

Disks to find:
2002. The Legend of Bhagat Singh.
2001. Lagaan.
1999. Thakshak.
1998. Dil Se.
1997. Vande Mataram.
1995. Rangeela.
1992/4. Roja.

Today's Show : Goodness and Mercy

In the wake of the slaying of musical don-in-the-making Jahmeel "Shanx" Spence of the East-end La Phamillia crew, a special dedication to the goodness and mercy which must surely bring peace to the beleaguered friends and family and to a neighbourhood where a good life can be stolen away as casually as this.

Hometown hero Glen Ricketts was on the show describing the vast terrain of his reggae/soul/rock career, and his up-coming movie premiere at Revival this Thursday, a thriller entitled"Eyes Beyond"by Torontonian Elizabeth Rizzuto. Virtuosa singer Rosita Stone also gave up two live blasts of Spanish melody and passion, as her cd release at the same screening approaches. The show will benefit Mental Health programs in Toronto.

An interview with Dylan-approved singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier gave a warm heartbeat to the dramatic retelling of her wanderings in search of her true parentage detailed on her latest release "The Foundling".

Final trajectory was calibrated by Greg Lawson urging us to "Watch This Sound": sampling the best of those Jamaican artists who have called toronto home: Jackie Mittoo, JoJo Bennett, Leroy Sibbles and so many more that perhaps a Part Two will be necessary.

Foals forgot to call. Still worthy Mercury noms available live at Lee's Palace Monday.

My Roots - Guitar playing in 1979 for Ernie Smith

Happy Labour Day

Geoff Berner's HIGH GROUND from KLEZMER MONGRELS

Wealthy people like to live, live near the water
They pass their real estate down to their sons and their daughters.
Generations are happy just enjoying the view, but
When the water starts rising you know what they're gonna do

The rich are gonna move to the high ground
The rich are gonna move to the high ground
Holy doodle, look at your town
The rich are gonna move to the high ground

All those singers and actors and philanthropists
Say the poor are at the top of the priority list.
But when the levees start breaking and the barriers fall
Where will they be when we come to pay a courtesy call?
With their mistresses, wives, pets, children and all
At the top of a hill behind a fortified wall.

The rich are gonna move to the high ground
The rich are gonna move to the high ground
Holy doodle, look at your town
The rich are gonna move to the high ground

Every sad number that the scientists find
You get the feeling that some people really don't mind
To see a new feudal age for the whole human race
'Cos the rabble will finally be all back in their place.
They'll be no revolution, we'll be meek as wet mouses
Begging them to let our children serve in their houses.

The rich are gonna move to the high ground
The rich are gonna move to the high ground
Holy doodle, look at your town
The rich are gonna move to the high ground
Take me higher to that higher ground
You and me baby, we're gonna watch the poor drown

The show went a little more electrotextural than normal, but what is ever normal in Orbital Music? Mod Pop trance-formations observed through the Corbiscope this week included the new Hawksley Workman Milk, new Stars' Ghosts, Winter Gloves' All Red, Rae Spoon, Neon Indian, and some re-grooved Beatles and loungey headspace loops. Then we let the blood rush back to your soul with Greg Brown, coming to Hugh's Room next weekend, Geoff Berner's eloquent High Ground (SEE ABOVE), and Mary Gauthier's and Stacy Burke's different songs about home and family. We let a touch of blue shift come over next with a new Charlie Musselwhite ("Sad and Beautiful World"), Les Copeland ("Don't Let The Devil In"), both on Alligator Records, and some rare retro Sly and the Family Stone and Curtis Mayfield, capped by Fred Hammond's jahovial "Happy". Then a Brazilian orgiastic drum chant from Black Orpheus took us to warp speed, Frail Fragment and Skindred brought the Metal Health and the landing pad came into sight with Tanya Philipovitch and her Secret Fiction Romance music.

Projection project

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