It’s no secret: right now, among our various cultural sectors troubling signs can readily be found. Stresses, fissures and cracks, intergenerational change and systemic failures – some chronicled elsewhere in this issue – feel as though they are starting to be as common as the wildfires that scourged the globe this past summer.
Earlier this year an email appeared in my inbox with an intriguing invitation. “Join us in celebrating Peter Chin’s last major work, featuring an international cast of dancers and musicians on June 23 and 24 at 8pm, and June 25 at 2pm at Harbourfront Centre Theatre.” The announcement continued, “trillionth i signifies the third eye and beyond, to the trillionth eye, in an embrace of endless ways of sensing, knowing and of being in the world…” and was signed off with “choreography and music composition by Peter Chin.”
Let’s start at the beginning. Trichy Sankaran was born on July 27, 1942 in Poovalur, Thiruchirappalli district of Tamil Nadu in southern India. Another significant date occurred 29 years later when the classically trained Indian drummer Sankaran took a momentous leap of faith across the globe, accepting a job teaching at the fledgling Music Department, York University. He arrived in 1971, retired in 2015. What he accomplished in between is the subject of the first part of this story, and the prequel to the second part.
While some cite Paris’ 2001 Nuit Blanche as the concept’s ground zero, it likely had its roots in Helsinki in 1989; Helsinki’s nighttime festival of the arts, with all museums and galleries open “until at least midnight” proved to be contagious, steadily spreading to over a hundred of the world’s cities, including across Canada, including Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax, Winnipeg and Saskatoon.
I well recall the buzz around Toronto’s premiere Nuit Blanche in 2006. I cut out the double-page downtown event map in NOW magazine to facilitate my bicycle-driven art crawl to well over a dozen events and installations. Dubbed Scotiabank Nuit Blanche for its title sponsor, it is today the City of Toronto’s baby, after the bank withdrew in 20125, saying the event no longer aligned with its sponsorship priorities. By then, it had “grown into one of the largest public art exhibitions in North America,” according to the city’s website. How large? In 2015 the city claimed in a promotional video that “Since the inaugural event, more than 9.5 million people explored 1,200 art projects by 4,500 artists.”
Twenty-five years is a respectable milestone for an organization dealing with culturally diverse music, and Toronto’s veteran leader in this category, Small World Music, is celebrating in style. It has launched “25 for 25”, an ambitious yearlong festival, with the initial September 13 to 19 event lineup consisting of eight online and in-person concerts, plus a panel discussion, Beyond Community, co-presented with BLOK (Eastern European music summit). Three of the events are online, three in-person at Lula Lounge and the rest at DROM Taberna with its patio/parking-lot stage; the musicians being showcased range from emerging to well-known, and include both local and international talent.
When I reached Alan Davis, Small World Music’s founder, on his cellphone he was relaxing at a Georgian Bay cottage, BBQ-ing and soaking in the last hot days of summer. His comments in our wide-ranging talk on his “baby,” Small World Music, were understandably framed within his founder’s perspective. He was eager to share thoughts on his music curating career, with its roots going back to his days at Toronto’s Music Gallery beginning 35 years ago.
As long as I’ve known Alan, his passionate appetite for musical exploration and expression has been fundamental. I reminded him that he was among the first cohort to join Gamelan Toronto in 1995 when I was invited to organize that large community music group by the Indonesian Consulate General, Toronto. “It’s very funny that you mention that,” he replied, “because I literally just had a conversation about it with a new friend last evening, ... about my music practice and how it intersects with Small World, about playing gamelan at the Indonesian Consulate.”