My Canadian Music Week Diary
Wed Feb 26 Phoenix Concert Hall - The Indie Awards were a pretty freewheelin affair this year. Host(s) Dave Bidini and Radio guy______________ presented all but a few awards and it moved along quite quickly. The musical presentations were fine - slightly underwhelmed by Corb Lund - probably because he's been so built up.
I think I probably said the wrong thing to at least one person in the first ten minutes there, and as I saw one famous publicist leaving before the awards started. I never got into that other room - The invitation was in my coat which I left at the Downtown Jazz office - right across the parking lot.
They opted to start the show with a loud agressive band. Last year The Brothers Cosmoline opened the show.
The first award was Blues and was a tie between Fathead and The Twisters. They first announce Fathead the read on and said "Wait a Minute It's a Tie!" A lot of time went by until Julie Hill climbed up there and accepted on their behalf. Host Dave Bidini asked her "Who are you?" and said something about "Toronto Blues Society" and that seemed good enough for them - then she got her picture taken - holding *both* awards. Then someone who seemed like a very distant relative got up to accept an award - a little later an entire band got up to accept on behalf of another band in Vancouver
A drum/voice aboriginal/world group had trouble carrying to the back of the room. It was much noisier than the Maple Blues Awards in the same venue a couple of monrths ago.
Day Two - Thursday Saw a few panels - how to budget CD production and a panel of publicists with Richard Flohil and Karen Bliss butting heads. She said something like "maybe sometimes an artist doesn't need a publicist"
Evening showcases, no standout. I decide to head to Healey's to hear Morgan Davis - a guitar hero of mine. There were three guitars - Pat Rush, Healey and Morgan. I would have thought that Pat Rush might have been the expendible one except that when I walked in I was imediately capticated by a burning guitar solo and when I got closer, I realized it was Pat. When it was Jeff's turn to solo, it was starting to sound a lot like Morgan. It was the best mucic of the evening!
Day 3: Didn't get to CMW until 4:30 - checked out the songwriters evaluation (used to be "Date with a Tape" Suzie V. was rushing one of her new tunes, but alas it did not win the luck of the draw.
At 6, I skipped out to hear Daniel Lanois "Celebrity Interview" but I needn't have worried because