Always wanted a tubular fish tank that could encircle a room, maybe even go up stairs, exist underfoot… basically some way to enmesh the meditative qualities of “ambient fish” into my life. Will probably never get my wish, but while I’m waiting, the Chemical Brother’s “Salmon Dance” will have to do.

Violinist Joshua Bell’s virtuosity is so renowned that Interview magazine once said that his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” A few months ago, Bell walked into a D.C. subway station, flipped open his violin case, and played his heart out for spare change — on a $3.5 million 1713 Stradivarius.

The goal of the Washington Post experiment was to find out whether people would stop and listen to him play, or trudge right past like they would any street musician, nose to the ground, mind on the day’s tasks to come. You can guess at the outcome:

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

Bell: “I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian reggae and soul, eh? If you expect that combination to go down as easily as curried goat with a side of Canadian bacon, you may be surprised. By the late sixties, economic strains, liberalized Canadian immigration laws, and fear among draft-age men that a United States passport would lead straight to Vietnam led a growing number of Jamaican expatriates to relocate in Toronto. Just 236 miles from Motown, visionary keyboardist/ arranger Jackie Mittoo, who had already cofounded the Skatalites and served as music director at Jamaica’s Studio One, helped guide a gang of upstarts eager to mix their Island recipes with generous helpings of sweet soul and heavy funk. The Jamaicans in Toronto included rhythm king Wayne McGhie, gritty vocalists Johnny Osbourne and the Mighty Pope, dub-savvy crooner Noel Ellis (son of rocksteady legend Alton Ellis), and roots rocker Willi Williams, whose “Armagideon Time” (”versioned” from a Mittoo riff and showcased below) later became the Clash’s most moving reggae cover. The Toronto scene produced music of surprising range and vision for almost two decades, and then seemingly disappeared.

Thanks to Vancouver-based music historian Sipreano (AKA Kevin Howes) this vibrant body of work has been brought back from cultural extinction. The innovative small label Light in the Atttic—whose catalog includes everything from Brazilian iconoclasts Os Mutantes to the Velvets-meets-Roky apocalyptic sound of Austin’s Black Angels—has released two fascinating anthologies and reissued several crucial solo albums (by Mittoo, McGhie and Noel Ellis) chronicling the best of the Toronto scene. Last year’s mostly soul and funk-centered Jamaica to Toronto anthology, discussed more below, already ranks as one of my favorite music collections released in the Zeroes. Worth the price all by themselves are the tracks by Jo-Jo and the Fugitives—the righteous wanderers’ anthem “Fugitive Song,” and the delicious, McGhie-penned “Chips/ Chicken/ Banana Split,” whose huge break-beat deserves a place on your ultimate chicken dance playlist alongside the Meters’ “Chicken Strut” and Cibo Matto’s “Know Your Chicken.”

Jo-Jo and the Fugitives, Fugitive Song

Jo-Jo and the Fugitives, Chips/Chicken/Banana Split

The new Summer Records Anthology, 1974-1988, captures Toronto’s homegrown reggae as it traversed the path that Sipreano describes as “dub to digital,” although only Unique Madoo’s spirited dancehall workout “Call Me Nobody Else” really represents the latter. After a few tracks of Johnny Osbourne’s soulful crooning and house band Earth Roots and Water’s supple rhythms, it becomes easy to forget that Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studio, which operated around the same years, was thousands of miles away. An interesting short film (excerpts below) accompanies the anthology. In it, Summer Records vocalist/ impresario Jerry Brown, Willi Williams, and Jackie Mittoo weave a cosmic, rhythmic and economic thread that connects dub reggae, bicycling and auto body repair. Did you really think those rat-a-tats were just random noises?

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