Overlooked classical composer only Edmonton Juno winner
If you don’t count k.d. lang’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Vivian Fung is the sole Edmonton winner at the 2013 Juno Awards. “I feel so honoured to be recognized and acknowledged by the Canadian recording industry,” she says. “It’s a wonderful feeling.” If you have no idea who Vivian Fung is, […]
Moving to Edmonton will get you into the Velvet Underground
Growing up in Beaumont, Alberta, a Francophone farming community of 14,000 located three kilometres South of Edmonton, Brazilian Money’s Garrett Johnson remembers listening to Velvet Underground for the first time. “I thought it was total garbage,” he says. So how did the Beaumont musician end up appreciating the context and musicality of Lou Reed’s legendary […]
WAR OF THE WORDS: Controversy at Edmonton Poetry Festival!
Poets, especially Canadian poets, can be a fractious lot. There have been recent public battles between various prominent Canadian poets, mostly notably between Jan Zwicky and Michael Lista on the relevance of criticism. Heated words like “illiterate” and “incompetent” and “stupid” were deployed in a war waged on the pages of the National Post. Veteran […]
OPERA: Dark ache of an unhappy soul in Eugene Onegin
There’s a burning question about opera that most opera buffs never talk about because they fear they’ll look like complete idiots. No problem here: Why not just perform all operas in English? Most of opera fans speak English – so why do they keep coming to operas performed in languages they don’t even understand? Imagine […]
EXTREME METAL REUNION: Disciples of Power rise again
It’s hard to believe there was a time when an extreme metal band from Edmonton could get on television. Disciples of Power first hit the MTV and MuchMusic airwaves in 1989 with “Crisis,” a thrashy technical-death metal number denouncing environmental degradation, from its debut album, Power Trap. The coming years saw the band relocate to […]
LEDUC RADIO: New country station declares undeclared war on CISN
There hasn’t been a serious challenger to CISN radio’s hot country hegemony in decades of Edmonton Radio. That’s all about to change with Tuesday’s launch of “93.1 FM The One” in Leduc. This is war – and the funny thing is that neither opponent will ever declare it openly, because that’s just the way radio […]
WHO NAMED THE RAPPER: Classified no secret
“It’s not a good story,” warns rapper Luke Boyd, better known as Classified, on how he picked his rap name. It’s not a very good rap name, either, let it be said – though not to his face when he was in Edmonton for a promo tour a couple of months back. He’s back to […]
Don’t cry for New City, Edmonton, it’s the cycle of life
If you go back about 25 years to remember Edmonton’s best live music bars, the landscape is unrecognizable: People’s Pub, the Grinder, Boiler Lounge, Sidetrack Café – all gone, their very names meaningless to younger folk perhaps more familiar with places like the Starlite Room or the Pawn Shop. Point being that the recent closing […]
BOOKS: Big message in little sports story for kids
Steven Sandor’s new novel Replay may seem like a nice little story about sports in small town Alberta – but there’s something deeper going on here. Aimed at readers grades 5-8, the story revolves around Warren Chen, a Chinese-Canadian kid living in Sexsmith, Alberta who dreams of joining the local Bantam football team. When he […]
HARPSICHORDIA! Antique instruments fight for cool factor at Early Music Festival
You won’t find a musical instrument as misunderstood and maligned as the harpsichord – not the doleful bassoon, not the dreaded dulcimer, not even the hideous pipes, the pipes, the pipes calling from glen to glen and down the mountainside are as hated as the harpsichord. Avant-garde composer John Cage compared the harpsichord’s buzzy chime […]
