Even when he’s rocking out, as he does at the end of this clip, William Prince is as loose and easy and still as a winter Wednesday morning.
Last night I visited Meaford with my mom and her partners to hear The Irish Descendants, an iconic Newfoundland band. They are touring a new album of Stan Rogers covers, and between those pieces and the Irish Descendants’ own repertoire, I think I sang along with just about every tune they played.
Afterwards we headed across the street to The Dam Pub. This whisky bar is one of my favourite pubs in the world. It has over 1000 whiskies in the collection, a supremely knowledgeable staff and a great kitchen. It has been a longstanding tradition whenever I visit this region that we visit The Dam Pub. When my dad was alive we would go on Sunday for the prime rib dinner, and as was always our tradition, we would finish the evening with a nip of very excellent whisky. I’ve spent many nights there with friends and even sitting in with the traditional music session once.
Last night we took our seats at the bar and found out that this was going to be the last weekend of The Dam Pub. After starting in Thornbury in 2006 and moving to Meaford in 2022, Stephanie is finally calling it quits and retiring. The pub has been sold and much to my sadness, the whisky collection will be auctioned off.
This is surely the end of an era, and for me it feels almost like a right of passage. The Dam Pub was a ritual of my visits with my father especially. He died in 2021 and every visit since to the place was like circling up with one of his sweaters. It filled me with warmth, love, and the friendship and community that has gathered in and around those 1000 bottles over two decades.
Last night I ordered a nip of a 1993 Ledaig bottle commissioned by Gordon & McPhail. Tim, the bartender slid the ladder over and went to the very back of the top shelf, pouring me a nip and offering a little pipette and some distilled water to open it up.
That was to be my very last whisky at The Dam Pub. I wished Stephanie and Tim all the best and closed the book on a sweet and meaningful little ritual of my life. I’ll miss them terribly.
Here’s the Dam Pub’s last whisky menu preserved for posterity.
It’s Bandcamp Friday, the first Friday of every month, where 100% of sales on Bandcamp go to the artist. Today I pre-ordered the new album from Martyn Joseph (The Bruce Cockburn of Wales) “Revolved and Evolved” and picked up the new release from Bowen Island’s own Le Ren “Don’t Be Funny Without Me.” which is getting some good press and good play here in Canada. It’s a really good album and the quality of production is OUTSTANDING.
Go buy something and make a musician happy that you supported them.
One of the joys of my life is singing with my a cappella Renaissance choir, Carmena Bowena. For the past six yers we have worked on a repertoire of mostly Renaissance sacred music and madrigals and spreading into slightly later southern European folk music from places like Spain, France, Corsica and Italy. We have sung contemporary arrangements of songs by Sting and Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot and modern settings of old liturgical texts like Ubi Caritas, Ave Maria and O Nata Lux and O Magnum Mysterium.
Last season we added an Irish pub night on St. Patricks Day which will will repeat again this season and our vocal adventure will extend to include a whole show devoted to Broadway, on November 23. Our season will wrap up on June 26 with an electic performance of songs from this whole range of music making.
Monday night was our first rehearsal of the season and we worked on some of the sacred music pieces which we will perform at a contemplative experience on January 30. Specifically we looked at Voctoria’s O magnum mysterium, Robert Parson’s Ave Maria and a Kyrie from Palestrina.
These pieces are interesting to compare side by side. Palestrina’s smooth voice leading almost defines the very genre of Renaissance liturgical music. His harmonies are tight, and mostly consonant, while Victoria, writing in Spain, offers more “crunch” as we say in his work. The opening of the Kyrie is pure imitative polyphony. Altos, then Basses, Sopranos and then Tenors. We just worked the first few bars of this, and danced together with the entrances and lines moving against each other.
In contrast, looking at Victoria’s piece, we focused only on the final few bars, the Alleluia. The piece is very modal and slow but the final section has a jaunty little 3/4 section that returns to the original slow 4/4 time of the rest of the piece. It’s tricky, but shows up some of his more interesting compositional decisions.
Parson’s Ave Maria Parsons’s Ave Maria was chosen partly because of its extraordinary soprano line. Beneath it, four voices weave and braid their lines together; the soprano enters above them in long notes, each successive entrance beginning a step higher than the one before. The bass anchors the other extreme of the texture, and as we sing it I have the sensation of the whole piece opening up between those high and low registers. To me it is evocative of Mary receiving the message of the angel: thoughts moving and rising through her mind while something deeper and steadier holds the whole experience.
After working through short sections of these pieces, we flew into a short survey of Broadway tunes, which most everyone could sight read, so familiar are they. You’ll Never Walk Alone, Welcome to the Rock, I Dreamed a Dream, Edelweiss, and others. We’ve never done show tunes before but I think this show will be a treat. It’s not music I have sung a lot (other than at football matches) but some of it is certainly in the repertoire of the jazz standards I play with my friend Alex Fox.
So another season of music begins. I thought I’d chart this one here a bit this year.
I am so grateful that I can make music. It’s a language that allows me to speak in the pure vocabulary of emotion with people. It allows me to relate to people in a way that is totally different from every other form of social interaction, even sport, which comes closest. And it allows me to connect with myself as well.
A bunch of musicians have put together a short film that aims to tell you why they make music. If you are not a musician, it’s almost impossible for me to tell you WHY I make music, but I can always give you an experience of what it feels like. No one needs to be laden with the identity of “musician” to make music. I can show you right now. They next time you meet me, ask me to make music with you. We will do it on the spot and you’ll taste what it is that all musicians chase with this language.
I found that by following a link from Patti Digh to a site about creativity.