Tag Archives: Jazz Festival

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Down With Love

LUMI, 9-course Tasting Menu, SonoLux, 9 July 2026

Chef Graham Hood’s first of two desserts with the new summer 9-course tasting menu at LUMI, Hôtel SonoLux. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Venus de Milo, who said to Colonel Sanders, ‘Mmm, this is finger lickin’ good’ … never got a dinner.”
—Red Buttons

Even folks of my parents’ generation might have trouble remembering the Borsch Belt comedian Red Buttons, who achieved modest fame following World War II as an early television pioneer and recording artist with, among other niche successes, a minor hit in the double A-side, “Strange Things are Happening.”

Born Aaron Chwatt to Russo-Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Manhattan, New York, in 1919, Buttons struggled harder than his contemporaneous comedians, like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, to gain a foothold in emerging media.

To put it generously, Buttons wasn’t handsome. He didn’t possess natural charisma. He resembled a garden gnome, with his stout physique and shock of ginger hair. And he garnered a reputation for being impossible to work with, having fired more than 80 writers from his eponymous General Foods-sponsored variety programme, until the company and his network, CBS, publicly cancelled him in 1952.

Buttons enjoyed a second life in the 1970s as a regular panelist on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, a series of T.V. specials in which famous actors, singers, and politicians would take a kicking in the form of insult comedy from their peers. Don Rickles might have been the master of this genre. But Red Buttons developed a routine, a rhythm, a pattern that he would apply in 19 episodes to such celebrities as Frank Sinatra, Muhammed Ali, and Betty White, leaving his fellow panelists, like Orson Welles and Milton Berle, in stitches.

Buttons would question why host Dean Martin should honour so-and-so when so many other notable historical figures “never got a dinner.” He would then list off a litany of famous personalities followed by one-liners like, “Lot, who said to his wife, ‘salt I’ve got, it’s popcorn I need!”

The one-liner is an underrated device that contemporary comics have largely abandoned in favour of more topical humour. But jokes dependent upon current affairs don’t enjoy the shelf life of a timeless and politically incorrect Buttons witticism like, “Adam, who said to God in the Garden of Eden, ‘I’ve got more ribs, have you got more broads?’”

St. Vincent Symphonique with Ruby Plume, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 28 June 2026

St. Vincent performs at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier with the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“Well, some people try to pick up girls, they get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
The girls would turn the color of a juicy avocado
When he would drive down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street, girls could not resist his stare
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Not like you.”
—David Bowie, “Pablo Picasso”

A recent New York Times op-ed titled “Go On, Date Your Co-Workers” pricked up my attention, for obvious reasons.

The increasing estrangement between women and men, what has newly been termed “heteropessimism,” was the subject of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast only a few weeks prior. And Magdalene J. Taylor, senior editor at Playboy, astutely noted in her own guest essay in May: “Gender relations are tense to the point of hostility these days.”

In this post-#metoo moment, something that was once considered as innocuous as inviting a colleague or even a stranger to dinner can carry the risk of wild accusations and potentially devastating consequences.

It is no surprise that a woman wrote the Times article encouraging inter-office romance. Because along with the carpet-bombing condemnation of even an inkling of male desire, female sexual prowess has been concurrently rebranded in our era as overdue feminist empowerment. A woman can behave like Don Draper from Mad Men nowadays and rather than being called “Jian” or getting dragged on social media, she is simply asserting her long-sublimated femininity. You go, girl.

There is no shame in sluttiness — nor should there be. But sexual intercourse is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of associating with people, regardless of sexual identity or gender normativity. Maybe, and this may be a radical suggestion, hanging out with someone of the opposite sex without the expectation of sex can go some way to bridging the perilous gender divide.

“The best relationships — the ones that last — are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship,” writes Gillian Anderson, best known as X-Files it-girl and author of We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.

“The person who was just a friend is … suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédérique D. Oberland with Jessica Moss, La Sala Rossa, 27 June 2026

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédérique D. Oberland perform at La Sala Rossa with Suoni Per il Popolo Festival. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex — to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.”
—Susan Sontag, On Women

We don’t tend to describe men as “beautiful.”

Men, especially in Montreal, known for its packs of man-bunned buttoned-down jeans-and-sheux-wearing walking Adam’s Apples, are “handsome” or “dapper” or “dashing,” qualifiers that are more often associated with sartorial style than with physical charm. Heaven forbid a fellow be beautiful, lest he is effeminate, or an adolescent — Björk’s archetypal “Venus as a Boy.” Especially a man of a certain age can never be described as beautiful.

At the same time, masculinity has become the purview of the manosphere, of incel subcultures, dangerous radicalism, repressed testosterone, Louis C.K. apologism, and right-wing hysteria. These are ugly qualities, not beautiful ones. The modern man might instead do well to aspire to a beauty in spirit in order to overcome any lack or loss of aesthetic splendour.

Beauty is regrettably constrained when it is beholden to the eyes, or age, or the fairer sex, only.

Diana Krall with Anaïs Cardot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

Diana Krall performs at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, ‘I’m going to pee…’”
—Charles Bukowski, Women

Man, I love a beautiful woman. I think of Nicolas Cage’s soliloquy in Adaptation — “one has eyes that dance; one has eyes that contain the sadness of the world” — or sometimes of Cheech Marin’s infinitely more vulgar inventory in From Dusk till Dawn that has no place in polite company.

Summer is the season to “try with pleasured hands,” as The Zombies’ Rod Argent wrote; “Un beau jour c’est l’amour et le cœur bat plus vite,” according to Françoise Hardy. Tell me more, tell me more! All I can say is, if loving a beautiful woman is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Quinton Barnes with Preoptic Ridge, Le Système, 2 July 2026

Christian Richer and Frédérique Duval perform as Preoptic Ridge at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

I hope I’m not telling tales out of school by recounting that the hip-hop artist Quinton Barnes and I had an insightful and in-depth conversation the other day about the complicated relationships between gender and race and economics and culture.

A beautiful man if ever there was one, Barnes lamented that modern Black music, in North America at least, has historically been the oyster from which white pearls have been plucked since the age of negro spirituals, when the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis mined Juke Joints for what came to be known as Rock n’ Roll.

Of course, “rock n’ roll” originated as a Black euphemism for sex that over the years became deracinated and sanitized to the point that any Catholic nun can say she loves rock n’ roll without getting her habit ruffled.

Another example of a phenomenon co-opted from the Black community is the term “cancelled,” which according to my deep dive, has its earliest origins in the sense that we use it today in the 1968 Brunswick recording by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister.

“Like a credit card that ain’t been paid,” Franklin sings, “you’ve been cancelled.”◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Quinton Barnes performs at Le Système, 2 July 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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Midnight Indigo

Fondations, Pur Pasteur, Fondations (Self-released)

Pur Pasteur performs at White Wall Studio 22 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Montreal is a city known for its nightlife. The inky blue sky that appears in the summertime between midnight and dawn is the dome under which much of Montreal’s arts and culture is incubated. “The productive hours,” an artist friend recently defined it.

I prefer to preserve a sanitized image of the urban night, a city of late-night strolls and romantic encounters. But Montreal’s nighttime economies have come under fire at the policy level since at least Expo ’67, when the SPVM, QPP, and RCMP established a joint task force in 1966 to counter the rise of illegal activities that often unfolded under the cover of night.

Matthieu Caron, author of Montreal After Dark, writes that the tabloid media at the time amplified perceived crises like drug abuse and sex work, “to create panic regarding security and moral standards.”

Montreal’s unofficial nightlife ambassador Sergio Da Silva argues on the contrary that nightlife cultivates community and culture. Da Silva pointed out during his municipal candidacy campaign in 2025 the incongruity of noise regulations aimed at loitering bar patrons in neighbourhoods that greenlit major residential construction projects. And ironically, many of those apartments now sit unoccupied.

Montreal’s new mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada on Friday announced at a press conference, to phoney fanfare, that Montreal will contribute $540,000 to renovate 45 vacant housing units for “vulnerable residents.” Meanwhile, roughly 25,000 immediately inhabitable rental units remain vacant as moving day approaches, in part because landlords are legally allowed to significantly increase rents on units that have not had a tenant for more than 12 months.

Short-term rentals, too, are notorious contributors to the seamier side of Montreal’s nightlife and also eat into the availability of affordable housing. An investigative analysis that The Globe & Mail published on 22 June exposed a human-trafficking ring that lured teenagers to Montreal bars only to be ensnared into the skin trade through interprovincial networks of short-term rental units.

It is possible that the Airbnb next door might be the source of the rattling mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Vent bleu, Maude Arès, Guido Molinari, Anne-Marie Proulx, Fondation Guido Molinari, Until 23 August 2026

Guido Molinari, Vent bleu (1995), Acrylic on canvas, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec collection. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“When, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless, I enjoin a small offensive fellow to ‘fuck a duck,’ I don’t mean he should.”
—William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry

It is disappointing when it rains on a parade, to which we might say, ‘fuck this.’ It is disappointing when the metro leaves just as you arrive at the station, to which we might say, ‘fuck that.’

But nothing is as disappointing as another person, a celebrity or someone in a powerful position, especially someone whom you might once have admired, respected, even loved, behaving in an unbecoming manner, to which we might say, ‘fuck you.’ Petty, spiteful, unclassy, envious, vainglorious — these are ugly characteristics that come into focus in the light of a 10,000-degree Kelvin day.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. And it might be tempting to blow a cool blue invective toward someone who has wounded you. But the best revenge is no revenge at all. The most effective remedy for the blues induced by another person’s private hell is not to add more blue, but to become a gray rock.

Character is revealed in distress tolerance. Let disappointing people be, to live out their life sentences imprisoned by their own miserable existence, immersed in a blue cocoon.

Max Richter with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 26 June 2026

Max Richter introduces The Blue Notebooks at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

“Pay blue—Pay back the blue you stole and bottled and doled out in eye droppers of junk—pay back the blue you stole for your police uniforms—pay that blue back to sea and sky and eyes of the earth—”
—William S. Burroughs, Nova Express

Max Richter, the German-born British composer performing on Thursday night at Place des arts with the Montreal Jazz Festival, explained to the audience that he wrote The Blue Notebooks in response to U.K. complicity with the U.S.-led 2003 Iraq invasion, whilst contemplating philosophically how to treat others and how best to exist in the world.

Creative pursuit is one answer. For every monstrous act, it seems that there must be an immense and equal and opposite outpouring of beauty and goodness and justice. The form this justice takes is different in every instance, but most often it manifests in works of righteous art. The Sorrow and the Pity, for instance, would not exist without French Nazi sympathy.

Kaïros, dir. Jennifer Alleyn, Cinéma Moderne, 24 June 2026

“Blue is a noose strangling a vulnerable sky.”
—George Elliott Clarke, Blue Elegies, for David Odhiambo

Air fluctuates differently at night. The city’s oscillations and its corresponding pulse appear to slow to a gentler rhythm. This is when those with acute sensitivity can rest, or feel at peace, or feel more comfortable inside their own skin.

There is something about darkness that is paradoxically revealing, as if another kind of light manifests in the shadows. Our contours blur into obscurity, uniting us.

Remembering Gabor Szilasi, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026

Attendees gather to view an exhibition of Gabor Szilasi’s photographs after the Celebration of Life ceremony in his honour at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 13 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“More lights
Blue signs
All gold
All new
So small
So high
Down there
Tonight.”
—Brian Eno, “A Different Kind of Blue”

Nearly a half-century after Susan Sontag wrote On Photography, it is still difficult to explain what makes a good photograph. Photos are “praised for being subtle,” Sontag wrote, “or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or — a favourite — deceptively simple.”

To this list we might add sentimental. A photograph that evokes melancholy either in its subject matter or its materiality is bound to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. Identification — if we recognize the person or the location or the situation that the image depicts — contributes to the perceived quality of a photographic image as well.

Unsentimental photographs, however, have their own virtues. Surveillance photos that are void of any aesthetic considerations, like lighting or composition, possess a certain documentary charm. Ruined photos that flaunt their mechanical flaws, or in which an errant thumb appears, or that cut their subjects off mid-face, or are hopelessly out of focus, also frequently make for good snapshots.

These glitchy kinds of images defy easy identification, capturing every part of the moment in interesting and powerful and complex ways, yet with deceptive simplicity.

Intelligence is measured in the acceptance of ambiguity.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Max Richter and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble perform at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 25 June 2026. Victor Diaz Lamich for FIJM.

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The Part You Throw Away

Alicia Clara, Blame it on the Moon, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains — a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself.”
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It seems at times that there is no refuge from life’s trials and tribulations, no vacation from the constant barrage of work and domestic labour that doesn’t get done unless you do it, and no respite from the onslaught of information and incessant media — most of it utterly inconsequential — that assaults us on a daily basis.

Summer is supposed to be the season to relax and recharge, and many of us remember holidays taken at this time of year, a break from school or a pause from work, endless idle and expendable expanses of indefinite duration unspooling like rolls of toilet paper launched mischievously into a neighbour’s tree.

There is no time to do nothing these days, every waking moment filled with a sense of urgency and purpose, each day regardless of its calendrical station beckoning us to make something of it, as if everything unproductive was necessarily a waste, a casualty of capitalist ideology. Throwaway days are a thing of the past.

Time waits for no one. There is no escape within time or without it.

T. Gowdy with Nennen, Ky Brooks & Mat Ball, and Elizabeth Anka Vajagic & Steve Bates, Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025

Tim Gowdy performs with the Suoni per il Popolo festival at Casa del Popolo, 28 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

In troubled moments, I return over and over again to the thinkers who influenced me most. And re-reading them — certain Biblical passages and scholars thereof, William S. Burroughs, Mark Fisher — never fails to reveal something new, something that clarifies and distills their ideas.

This process provides some comfort, some sense of stability in an increasingly destabilized world, a world in which natural cycles have been broken, natural progressions interrupted, natural continuity ruptured, and progress apparently set in reverse.

I am amazed, for instance at Fisher’s crystalline thought processes in defining the subtle distinction between the weird and the eerie. Everyone has an understanding and an experience of these two designations, and on the surface of it, they don’t seem particularly dissimilar or necessary to distinguish. But still, Fisher forges on churning the cream into butter by describing weirdness as the presence of something that shouldn’t be present, and eeriness as the absence of something that should.

And in an instant, those definitions seem foregone and essential. A disembodied voice is eerie. Whereas, say, a renaissance instrument in electronic music invokes the weird.

As most of the forces that exert agency in the world remain mysterious to us, we live in predominantly eerie times.

Nonetheless, it is weird that there is a clown holding the office of the United States presidency, or that there exists widespread plague, war, famine, and death in an age in which technology, diplomacy, and prosperity should have diminished all of these things.

Tautologically, weirdness is a condition upon which the eerie persists. The survival of that which should be absent produces a failure of absence.

Renée Condo, One Who Shatters Particles, One Who Smells Flowers, Blouin|Division, 26 June – 23 August 2025

Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

We tend to believe that humans bring order into the world. We attribute organization to the Anthropocene. But ours is an era of manufactured chaos.

Nature is the law. Humanity is lawless.

Kara-Lis Coverdale with Noam Bierstone & Daniel Áñez, and Beast, Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025

Kara-Lis Coverdale performs with the Suoni per il popolo festival at Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, 30 June 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
—Proverbs 18:17

We live in a spiritless society. Idols of worship have been replaced not by other gods or even people, but by lifestyles that ultimately rely upon accumulation and waste, exploitation and submission, complicity and silence, labour and leisure in appropriate measure, status and celebrity, a hierarchy of comments and likes that makes the Angelic order look as simple as a game of snakes and ladders.

The question of morality — the matter of a universal right and wrong — is so repressed as to be inverted: the absence of a moral code is itself the new morality; nothing is true, everything is permitted.

But the basic truths of bygone moralities hold true: karma is real, and she’s a bitch. What we do to others we also do to ourselves. And what we do not do for others, we also cannot expect in kind.

In an ironic twist, not stopping ourselves from amoral acts is what constitutes damnation under late capitalism. We desperately need to start speaking again in terms of what is universally right and what is unequivocally wrong.

For instance, violence is wrong. Genocide is wrong. Upsetting our planet’s delicate balance and making it uninhabitable for future generations is absolutely, undeniably, definitely wrong.

God doesn’t require us to believe in a god. Or even to worship a god. Whether or not “god” exists is independent of human faith or lack thereof. But a religious education and a sense of doctrine are invaluable to reconstructing the kinds of morality that will be necessary to solve the earth’s mounting existential crises.

We must become shepherds, our brothers’ keepers, leading by example, bringing light to the darkest corners of consciousness, gently walking on.

no cosmos, Pub Molson, 2 July 2025

no cosmos perform at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, 2 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL

“The thing you long for summons you away from the self.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I’d rather have a line than a point.

A point only takes one second to make. Or conversely, you could be stuck making the same point for years. Points are easy to miss. Points mean stasis and death, whereas lines mean movement and change and life.

Don’t have a point. Draw a line and defend it.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Gallery view of Renée Condo’s exhibition at Galerie Blouin|Division. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Our Side Has to Win

Joyce Joumaa, A Temporary Loss of Consciousness, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 19 August 2024

Joyce Joumaa, Solar Panel Screen Installation, Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

50 or so species of ants have been known to practice various forms of what we might consider slavery.

Aphids, the minuscule insects that suck sap from plants and flower petals, produce honeydew as waste matter. So, farmer ants collect colonies of these sugar-making aphids and mine them for their sweet excess nectar.

Scientists call this a “symbiotic” or “mutualistic” relationship because the farmer ants exhibit a protective kind of behaviour, often moving their aphid populations to new and more fertile ground and shielding them from other predators.

But farmer ants also act violently to keep their aphid populations under strict control, deliberately clipping their wings so they can’t escape, and secreting a tranquilizing chemical from their feet which makes them docile, continuously producing sap for their Formicidae masters.

The Polyergus genus of ants go one step further, enslaving other ant species to perform virtually every aspect of work life for them — from cleaning their nests to taking care of their young and even feeding them. Polyergus are so reliant upon slave populations that they no longer do anything autonomously; they exist solely to raid, entrap, and subjugate other ants.

Even though they should be capable of overcoming their attackers in sheer number and physical force, researchers discovered that Polyergus discharge a compound called a “Propaganda pheromone” that confuses their prey, disorganizing and preventing them from mounting an effective defence. The Polyergus then steal their pupae and larvae to raise them on their own as slaves, consuming some of them along the way as they travel in columns back to their colonies.

Ants have yet to develop a governing moral character that, for instance, regulates the media, or prohibits chemical warfare and kidnapping, or condemns slavery, cannibalism, and colonialism.

Nature’s dystopian brutality unfolds for ants with quotidian banality.

Yuki Isami, Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024

Yuki Isami performs at Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only time I was ever in prison was to visit and interview the author and famous Canadian bank robber, the late Stephen Reid. I somehow knew or at least suspected that he smoked cigarettes, so I brought a few packs of American Spirits as a gift. Even if he didn’t smoke, I thought, he could at least trade them for something else he was addicted to.

Of course he wanted them, and over four of the most interesting hours of my life, the two of us chain-smoked one after another after another in the yard of the William Head Institution on the south-westernmost coast of Vancouver Island. “Doing time is easy,” Reid wrote in his 2012 book A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, “quitting cigarettes is hard.”

One of the most surprising things Reid told me was that he wasn’t unhappy in jail. He rather preferred its routine to the chaos of civilian life.

The Persian-born autodidact Doris Lessing observes in her Massey Lecture, broadcast on the CBC in 1985, “We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in.” Some forms of brainwashing are benign, while others can manifest in innocent people confessing to crimes they never committed, and even killing in the name of cult, country, or king.

“The best we can hope for,” says Lessing, “is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”

Angela Grauerholz, Ellipses, Blouin | Division, Until 31 August 2024

“The blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It’s a little bit of a thing that I have,” the photographer Angela Grauerholz tells me behind the scenes at her exhibition’s vernissage.

“Doors and windows, the scrim or screen that sometimes happens, the blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that. I do like putting some kind of device between the viewer and the actual image, to just give a moment of arrest.”

Joep Beving, Le Gesù, 30 June 2024

Joep Beving signs an autograph for a fan. Photographed by Darragh Kilkenny-Mondoux for NicheMTL.

In the third episode of the classic British series The Prisoner entitled “A, B, and C,” the character known as Number Six, a former spy-turned-inmate, is administered three doses of a powerful drug that allows his controller, Number Two, to view and manipulate his dreams on a TV screen.

For three consecutive nights, Number Six dreams of attending a garden party where he encounters three of his former colleagues, each of them a potentially suspect collaborator, while Number Two seeks “information” on the reason behind Number Six’s resignation.

A doctor called Number 14 delivers this experimental truth serum via injections to Number Six’s wrist, which he eventually discovers, replacing the purple drug with water on the third attempt, finally thwarting the mind-control experiment.

In each episode of the psychedelic drama, which plays out something like Gilligan’s Island on acid, Number Six attempts to discover who is ultimately in control of the island-prison, called “The Village.”

He repeatedly asks Number Two, a character played by a different actor in each episode: “Who is Number One?” And over and over, the answer he receives is a cryptic non-sequitur: “You are Number Six.”

In the end, just a slight change of inflection, a strategically placed comma, reveals a clue to the riddle’s solution.

Biennale Elektra — Illusion, Arsenal, Until 21 July 2024

Still image from Slow Track by Timothy Thomasson. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Then the proud waters had gone over our soul. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. —Psalm 124:5-7

Amidst this year’s assemblage of ultra-contemporary, technologically assisted, and artificially intelligent art, which gives a cumulative affective impression approaching Homer Simpson’s website, is a thoughtfully produced and quietly executed video entitled Slow Track by the young artist Timothy Thomasson, an infinite scene which recedes deliberately and hypnotically through familiar-feeling tableaux representing, as the accompanying text aptly describes, “nowhere in particular.”

This gently profound work is a welcome exodus from the hyperactive and overstimulating tendencies characterizing digital art today.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Angela Grauerholz, La Compteuse 2/5, 2018, Inkjet prints, 45 1/4 x 65 1/4 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

若武者: in conversation with Yuki Isami

A certain fascination with Japan doubtless preoccupies the West.

Europe in the mid-19th century was swept away with the fad known as ‘Japonisme’ after the nation’s ruling class ended its Edo-era protectionist policies. Still today, with all of its technological advancements and futuristic fashions, Japan exudes a sort of ancient wisdom that mystifies, captivates, and resonates globally.

North Americans especially revere the restraint, order, and precision that stereotypically characterize Japanese culture — pristinely manicured gardens and aesthetically decorative raw fish dishes and Samurai swords as sharp as the devil himself.

Yet fascination is a two-way street.

“I had heard that Montreal was the Paris of North America,” says the flautist Yuki Isami when I inquire why she chose to relocate here over two decades ago. “It was my dream to speak and understand different languages, and I heard that in Montreal, they speak French and English. When I arrived, I didn’t speak any French. I learned in my second year. I was still struggling with English.”

Isami has long since mastered both of those — as well as Catalan and some Spanish — worked with Claire Marchand at the McGill Conservatory, received the Prix avec grand distinction at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, and furthermore, fortified this city’s reputation as an international music hub in the process.

“I think it’s the vibration of the music or the sound that makes us happy.” Serge Vaillancourt for Indie Montreal.

As a member of the Montreal-based Japanese prog rock band TEKE::TEKE, whose 2023 album Hagata was longlisted for the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, she literally blows audiences away with her raucous technique. Now, following the release of her debut solo album, entitled Rives, Isami explores a more virtuosic post-classical approach to her craft, fusing traditional Japanese and contemporary musical influences into something truly exceptional.

“Classical music is where I started,” explains Isami. “For the contemporary music side, it’s like an extension of my classical training. My album is like all genres mixed together.”

Rives indeed is comprised of an eclectic selection from the French composers Claude Debussy and Eugène Bozza, as well as of Japanese counterparts like Makoto Shinohara, Toru Takemitsu, and the sound artist Reiko Yamada, who also studied music composition at McGill. The recording is as evocative and enchanting as its performer, who launched the album with an exultant recital on 17 May at Joseph-Rouleau Hall.

“I was so nervous,” she confesses of that show. “I really didn’t want to go on. I was crying five minutes before going to the stage, saying ‘I cannot do it, I cannot do it.’ But when I walked on the stage, some switch was turned on, and I really felt like it was one of the best performances of my life.”

Fortunately, audiences will have additional opportunities to experience Rives; she repeats the concert for the Jazz Festival 1 July at the Club Montréal TD stage, as well as opening for the acclaimed pianist Alexandra Stréliski the following two sold-out nights at Maison Symphonique.

Isami began studying piano at four years old in her hometown of Osaka. Her parents, who enjoyed listening to Japanese pop music, The Beatles, and singing Enka-style Karaoke, believed it would give Isami a necessary sense of discipline.

“It’s our culture when we have girls in the family to send the girls to piano at an early age for basic training,” Isami explains. “They sent me to ballet school, piano school, calligraphy school. They sent me to all kinds of private lessons.”

Isami is the eldest of two siblings. Her mother worked part-time in a bank, and later, as a social worker. When she was nine, her father, who was in the building trades, moved the family from Osaka to the Tokyo region. And it was there that Isami encountered her chosen instrument.

“On the first day of September, I entered a new school,” she recalls. “We all got together in the auditorium, we sang the school song, and the school band was accompanying the song. Then, that day, I saw the flute. It was like electricity in my head. I heard the sound and thought I would like to become a flautist. It was so clear. I went back to my house, and I was pulling my mother’s arm to go buy a flute. I collected information — where to buy, who I should contact to have a private lesson. I subscribed to the music club. I did it all myself.”

Isami became obsessed immediately, purchasing her first record — an album by the Irish flautist Sir James Galway. “I was very much into his playing,” says Isami. “I would listen and try to imitate his sound. It was so powerful and special. I remember when he came to Japan, I was 10, and I had just started playing flute. My teacher brought me to his concert. I was so impressed. I was in the very front of the hall, so amazed.”

A chance meeting in Tokyo with the flautist of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal made Isami consider moving here. “They used to come touring very often when I was in university,” she says. “I think it was the first time I spoke in English to Western people. It was a real experiment to have that conversation. I was so excited. I thought, ‘oh, I can speak.’ I could understand something. I had a special connection to Montreal. So, I wanted to live in Montreal. I realized that people want to learn the connection between Japanese and Western culture.”

Isami has spent more than 20 years elevating her music-making skills here, both onstage and off. “There is a moment, I think for me, when I make sound with my flute when I really have the ideal sound that I would like to make,” she tells me. “I’m reaching and reaching. It is so concentrated, that moment in the practice room, when I feel that connection.”

As a performer, Isami preserves a profoundly philosophical approach to her work, letting go and trusting, in “the God of art,” as she describes.

“I think it’s the vibration of the music or the sound that makes us happy. I believe that it influences other people. If I feel good and I’m having fun, I think it goes to other people, too. My work is really connected to good feelings, good vibes, and to share this. I don’t think about it too much. It’s more searching within myself and connecting and centring myself. I believe if I do good things, it will impact in a good way to people — and the world.”◼︎

Yuki Isami performs at Club Montréal TD for the Montreal International Jazz Festival, 1 July 2024.

Cover image: Serge Vaillancourt for Indie Montreal

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All Dressed

Praise You: notes on Kassa Overall at the Montreal Jazz Festival

There are two types of people in this world: those who do things, and those who try to stop those who do things from doing things.

Take photographers, for example. Photographers do things; they take photographs.

Around the act of taking photographs is an assortment of other things that need to be done, things like obtaining specialized knowledge, buying cameras and film, acquiring lights and accessories, setting up photo shoots, along with all the other things that everyone else does, like arranging transportation, finding parking, fixing lunch — all while navigating an increasingly hostile world.

On the other hand, take bouncers. Bouncers — security guards, cops, soldiers — are the type of people who try to stop those who do things — say, photographers — from doing their thing. People like this see a world of interdictions within which they must insert themselves as arbiters.

These don’t doers may think that they’re doing things. They may believe that they’re keeping the world safe, guarding and enforcing some abstract sense of social order, separating right from wrong. But even the most chaotic and dangerous of people that security guards stop from doing things are in the ‘those who do things’ camp. Even a suicide bomber is a doer. Especially them.

Security guards who try to stop photographers from entering a gig with a camera are a special kind of people who try to stop those who do things, though. Those kind of people are malicious, spiteful, hostile, small-minded people. Maybe there are three types of people in this world: those who do things, those who try to stop them, and those who stop them in bad faith.

Perhaps in a time before everyone’s telephone was also an entire media production studio, it might have made some form of sense for a bouncer to stop a photographer from taking photographs at a gig. Nor is a photographer doing anything that every other person at every gig worldwide does nowadays: taking photographs. A photographer at a gig is not a suicide bomber.

Especially if that photographer is accompanying a journalist, and they have both been invited to the gig, and they have an email stating so, and that gig is in fact free to enter, and they have spoken to the front of house, and are endeavouring to do the things that they do honestly, politely, and with integrity, a bouncer trying to stop these two people is a supreme don’t-doer.

Thomas Hawes for NicheMTL

But back to the doers for a moment.

Musicians tend to be doers. Ideally, musicians make organized sound that pleases its listeners. Oftentimes, musicians also incline to be photogenic, which spurs photographers to take photographs of them doing their thing. Musicians tend, too, to be expressive while making music, which prompts journalists to attempt to describe in words the feeling of experiencing their musicmaking. It’s a constellation of people who do things, all bouncing off of each other as they’re doing their things.

There are some musicians who are especially good at making music. This usually means that they have spent extraordinary amounts of time and energy doing the things they do. Being steeped in a world of other doers usually produces more doers. It becomes a practice. Practice becomes a habit. And practicing doing becomes a way of life. Maybe there are four types of people in the world: those who do things, those who stop them, those who stop them with extreme prejudice, and then those who do things and do them artfully.

These are the better doers and, in my opinion, the best of the four (and counting) types of people in this world. I am particularly fond of emcees with impeccable style and just the right amount of braggadocio. Everyone loves exceptionally talented pianists and bassists and percussionists. Soprano saxophonists who run through the crowd in the process of doing the thing that they do — well, for all I’m concerned, they can do that all day. And there is a special place in my heart for a band that can make their entire audience jump all at once.

The dynamism between the world of the doers and the don’t doers could not be more different. Doers flow. Don’t doers block that flow. While musicians, journalists, and photographers do what they do, security guards and bouncers lurk about with their prohibitory vibes. Security guards ply their trade — at best, stopping punters from tossing beer bottles at the band, and at worst stopping the creative flow of doers from doing. A circulatory rhythm emerges as those diametric energies course, halt, and resume anew.

I suppose it’s possible that these two general types of people need one another, like the classic yin-yang pattern, each polar opposite containing a little piece of the other. Imagine a world where no one ever stopped doers from doing things. There might be more suicide bombings. Or there might be more beautiful photographs.

Thomas Hawes for NicheMTL

But imagine a world in which everyone stopped everyone else from doing things all the time. Imagine an exponentially escalating don’t-do zeitgeist in which people started stopping other people from stopping people from stopping people. I don’t want to live in that world. That’s the world we’re making — allowing the people who try to stop people who do things from doing things to be in control.

It would be a much better world if the people who stopped people from doing things could take a break for a change and let the people who do things have some praise. We’ve really gone through enough in the past three years at the behest of the people who stop people from doing things.

Photographers, journalists, and musicians who are excellent at what they do should be kings and queens for a minute. The artist Kassa Overall at his Montreal Jazz Fest performance repeated the phrase a number of times to an enraptured crowd: “This is our time. This is our time.” It’s time for some major doings.

And as for the world’s don’t doers? Those people must be stopped.◼︎

Kassa Overall’s Animals is released via Warp Records.

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