If you’re looking for something interesting and relatively inexpensive to do in Toronto, I highly recommend browsing through the Tickets for Sale on Soundscape’s website (or at Rotate This). The shows are pretty cheap ($10 - $20) and the lists are (largely) free of large label fodder and fresh-out-of-the-garage bands.
While checking out upcoming shows, I stumbled upon Baby Dee; a cabaret-style singer whose Dadaist lyrics are at times playful and nonsensical. At others, their simplicity transcends poetry (“justice is a worm eating a bird”). I spent an evening listening to “Little Window” and the gravity of her voice made it difficult to inhale. She reminds me of Nina Simone or Marlene Dietrich: it’s not the quality of her voice, but what it carries that is arresting. Weathered and unpolished, it lends gravitas to her painful, haunting songs.
Josephine Foster on the other hand, I had never heard of; which was sort of why I showed up roughly 15 minutes late for the opening act. Did I know that my late entranced would not go unnoticed in such a small venue? Yes. Did I imagine that it (along with creaking chairs, floors and bag rustling) would be viewed as a crime against humanity? No. A word of advice: the folks at The Music Gallery take their grade-C folk music very seriously. Show up on time.
But the upside of showing up late was walking in on Josephine Foster in the middle of a song: in the center of a dark church, lit by beautiful, soft light that perfectly complemented her hauntingly beautiful voice. Her pre-modern folk style was right out of the turn of the century: high pitched, full of ethereal operatic swells in the most unexpected places. As she strummed her guitar with her eyes closed, framed by the church’s rafters and backed by stained glass I almost expected to see wings extend behind her.
But, after 30 minutes or so, the magic wore off. Each one of her nearly-endless songs was virtually identical. And with all that repetition, those high-pitched swells began to sound like caterwauling. Desperate for somewhere else to focus my attention, I noticed that her clothes eerily mimicked her singing. Her hair was in a loose, messy top knot and her thin frame supported the loose, shapeless, colorless clothes you find in every sepia toned picture of mountain women from the period. Weird.
Eventually, intermission dawned. And as my eyes adjusted to the light I realized that if I had never heard of Josephine Foster, these people certainly had. The church was chock full of mousy-brown English Literature/Renaissance Art major types.
Almost on cue, the group next to me a group of girls began regurgitating one or another of the official opinions on one or another of the Oxford Classics. Their male friend piped in every now and again to offer a comment. I knew without asking that his name was Greg or Jon and that he will marry one of these women. The happy couple will wear lots of khaki and crocks and speak only in hushed monotone to their children.
The future of the others was here too: wan women in their forties who inevitably invoke the statement “I bet she has a lot of cats.” Thin women with their pelvises curled forward and their shoulders hunched well before their time, trying to dis-incarnate themselves. Kinda like Josephine’s music. That’s a metaphor.
If I had had any reservations about my sweeping stereotypes (I didn’t) my suspicions were founded when about ¼ of the crowd left after Josephine’s performance.
As soon as she sat down to play, I discovered that the best thing about Baby Dee is seeing her perform. A real musician, watching her is witnessing something so personal you feel you should look away: the eye-closing, head-nodding pleasure of conjuring the notes that resonate with those on your inside; the exposure of flesh, pale puckered and wobbly; squirming through chord progressions; ugly faces made in the throes of epileptic-esque ecstasy, climaxing and contorting there on the piano bench with guttural, staccato, goat like grunts. Like what Ian Curtis can’t Baby Dee can.
