Elate My Joviality In Late January. Go Ahead And Try...Wait A Minute. Wow!

Summery Memories and September Embers

Devon Sproule with Bernice at the The Burdock in the middle of August: complex compositions spread expediently across a team of visionary musicians.

The glory of Kristine Schmitt singing original old-time country songs with John Showman and Cris Coole can not be overstated. The Cameron has done more for real country music in Toronto this summer, with Kim Beggs and Sarah Jane Scouten also in month-long  residencies, than any other local club. 

Corin Raymond and The Sundowners are in many ways the spiritual hub of the scene for the past 10 years.

Panamania gave the whole city a chance to get charged up for no charge at all. It was impossible to keep up with the updraft of international talent that lifted the city into a mellifluous cloud of cumulative ecstasy.

Choc Quib Town from Colombia, performing on Independence Day at the Distillery Square to a flag-waving throng gave the whole celebration an anti-gravity component. 



Maqueque and Jane Bunnett brought a revolutionary jazz fiesta ambience to the proceedings.




Luanda Jones' band was a cool and soul seducing distraction from the hair-crisping heat.

And over at Nathan Phillips Square there was a night of home and native Canadian excellence, with performances by Cold Specks and Joel Plaskett neatly bracketing a half hour of torrential rainfall.

Mimi Oz brought it all back home from Brooklyn in September with a set of new songs that scintillated in the dark Cameron House back room and tickled the ear-bones immensely. Special harmonic emblazoning was provided by Jessica Stuart and Jocelyn Barth.

Ringmaster Alan Davis proves it really is a small world as he introduces Fanfarai at the currently on-going Small World Music Festival opening Thursday  Sept. 17

Braids were extravagantly joyous performing with full velocity at Lee's Palace the night after their performances at the Polaris Music Awards broadcast.

And just before months' end, up jumps Retrocity at the Mod Club evoking screams and memories with two sets of expertly arranged eighties hits for voices only. M+M's Martha Johnson was a surprise guest on a show-stopping version of Black Stations White Stations. 

Mimi Oz Plays Her Card

The wizardry of Mimi Oz

by PAUL CORBY

Originally published at http://www.rootsmusic.ca/

Meet Mimi Oz : wiry and tawny – raisin eyes crinkle inside shreds of coconut hair – and she’s an eloquent observer of flashlight darknesses.

Artistry has spread a path before her since childhood. Mimi says filling notebooks with her thoughts, “feeling emotions through words” became a secret life for her in the pre-teen years in Toronto’s west end.

A passion for creating visual art carried her through her teens. Traces of her graphic work can be found on the inner sleeve of her first record, Three Of Swords, which she released this year. In 2010, she made the difficult decision – for a shy person – to start singing her poems out loud. Touring the open mics of downtown T.O., she piqued the ears of another multi-faceted artist,Bobby Wiseman, to whom she dedicates the record with: “To the wisest of all men.” He responded to her music at the Tranzac one night by suggesting that they record a few songs together. At the same time, she began giving away all her work on paper and canvas to friends and family.

“I just got tired of taking care of all the material I don’t need,” she says. Wiseman began collaborating with Mimi in structuring her songs. “He made me consider what the song is really about,” she recalls. “Putting the words into the right shape, too. I had always thought of rhyme as a hindrance to expression, but if it’s done well, it really helps you to get the most out of a song.” With much of her material in different stages of development, it was necessary to align them to a theme.

“I had made a lot of bad decisions, gotten into some unfortunate circumstances, travelling, living in Mexico, and I was walking down the street with a friend. There was a card on the street in front of me and he said, ‘You’d better pick that up.’ It was the Three Of Swords from a strange Tarot deck; it is an indicator that pain must be seen as a learning experience, a symbol of the heart emerging from darkness.”

The event is dramatized in her first video, for The Thief.

Using that moment as a touchstone, the songs began to fall into order. From the first lyric, “Morning window song…” there is a discernible upward arch to the album. Through the gauze of Mariachi, electronica, torchy jazz and Japanese pop textures that decorate her voice, Mimi stays true to the course of betrayal, heartbreak and forgiveness that animate her narrative.

“There is such a variety of shading to her voice,” says singer Jocelyn Barth, a member of Mimi’s band, The Wizards. “The first time I heard the record I thought it was a compilation of different singers.”

The intensity of emotion that drives her recorded performance ignites even a few cover songs by Sam Larkin, Warren Zevon and Jose Luis Perales, which fit in with the redemptive concept of the record. The challenge of performing with the new band is not only to re-imagine the music on the ornately-textured disk, but to return to the pain that inspired it. “You get further away from pain,” Mimi reflects, “and you become closer to who you are, even though it still exists. The job for me is to expose truths about addiction, loneliness and suffering with fascination rather than obsession.”

Currently, she finds herself writing darker songs, and following compositional vectors suggested by jazz, blues and traditional folk music. A recent trip to New York has inspired a desire to design a poetry book, perhaps as an insert for her next record, and maybe even to start making art again. A Spanish word prefaces the booklet inside Three Of Swords: disfrutar, meaning to bask, to revel, to delight or luxuriate. Certainly Mimi Oz has earned this opportunity for a major disfrutar and has generously provided a musical landscape in which her listeners can do the same.

Playlist for show of Friday, 30 August, 2013

Guests: Heather Morgan, Mimi Oz, & Jocelyn Barth

( brought to you by The Dream, The Small Step & Syria’s Consideration and ) 5-7 p.m. online http://www.radioregent.com/ and at tunein.ca .  Canadians in Asterisk’d RED.

 Videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/CorbysOrbit?feature=mhee

5:00  Understanding The Peace

Bic Runga ~ Something Good ~ Beautiful Collision

Giant Steps NYC  feat. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & John Coltrane ~ Impressions ~ Dorado:  A Compilation

Amin Tobin ~ One Small Step ~ with Thomas Wolfe’s This Is Man recitation ~ Bricolage

Robert Randolph & The Family Band ~ I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier Mama ~ We Walk This Road

*Shawn Sage ~ Another War ~ Misadventures In Song @ NTB Lounge Saturday 9:30

5:30  Ephemeral Females

Patsy Cline ~ Stupid Cupid / Shoes /  Interview with Heather Morgan for The 8th Annual Celebration of Patsy Cline’s Birthday @ Lula lounge Thursday, 5 Sept.

*Coral Egan ~ A Couple Apartments Away ~ The Year He Drove Me Crazy New Disk

Swell Season ~ Fantasy Man ~ Strict Joy

*Zaki Ibrahim ~ Flux Capacitor ~ Every Opposite Polaris Prize Nominee New Disk

6:00  Mimi On The Beat

Mimi Oz feat. Jocelyn Barth ~ Your Eyes / Interview / To Then Ocean (live) / The Thief / Dreamin’ Again (live)

6:20  Dark Lightning

Pizzicato Five ~ The Earth Goes Around ~ Happy End Of The World

*METZ ~ Rats ~ METZ Polaris Prize Nominee New Disk

Preston School Of Industry ~ Monkey Heart & The Horse’s Leg ~ All This Sounds Gas

David Guetta ~ I Could Be The One ~ F*** Me I’m Famous New Disk

Superhuman Happiness ~ Our Favourite Part ~ @ The Garrison Thursday, 5 Sept.

*Brownman Electryc Trio feat. The voice of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ~ Recorda Me / Irrational Funktion @ The 3030 tonight with Gruvasylum  (Toronto Music Vectors read passim, çà et là)

*Lynn Miles ~ Million Brilliant @ Shelter Valley Folk Festival this weekend