Tag Archives: Culture Reject
Join Coco Love Alcorn at Roxy
For her upcoming Dec. 7th concert at the Roxy Theatre in Owen Sound, Coco Love Alcorn is “building a volunteer, non-auditioned, pop-up choir” to join her on stage. The first fifty people who send her an email at info@cocolovealcorn.com with the subject line “Dec 7 Roxy Choir” will be registered to take part.
Participants will attend a song learning workshop the night before the concert, on Dec. 6th where Coco will teach them three of her original songs. No music reading is required. What is required is that you are available on both nights, and you dress in black. You also have to be okay with being filmed. The bonus is that you get to attend both the workshop and the concert for free. She’s added the free tickets because this concert is in her home town.
When she took a five year hiatus from touring after the birth of her daughter in 2010 she used the time to write new material, but with an inspired twist: the instrument she used to write was her voice, layered with the use of a looper. Like everything she does, the result was music that was not only melodically beautiful but also spiritually uplifting.
When she posted her looped a capella song, The River on You Tube it was taken up by choirs in North America and the UK to be included in their repertoire. Further inspired by the phenomenon, she created her latest album “Wonderland”.
Jake Feeney Is Clearly a Star in Development
Jake Feeney is visiting the south shore of Georgian Bay tonight and in a single evening he’ll be joining up with other musicians to play for audiences in Meaford and Owen Sound. In Meaford he’ll be opening for Culture Reject at The Barn Coop. While he is there Missy Bauman, Andrew Nunno and Marshall Veroni will be playing at Heartwood Hall and Jake will be joining up with them later in the evening.
Son of country record producer and songwriter Joel Feeney, Jake has always been a musician and songwriter.
“Every day, music has always excited me,” he says, He started at the age of six, on the piano and then guitar. By the time he graduated from the Etobicoke School of The Arts a few years ago, his music had impressed his principle as well as his classmates.
“Jake was a regular contributor to our once-a-month drop-in arts show, ‘Miscellaneous,’” his principle Mr. MacKinnon told www.radixonline.ca at the time. “He was always well-rehearsed and played and sang cover tunes as well as original compositions. His quiet energy was engaging for everyone in the audience and whenever he would go up, the chatter would go down and the cameras would come out.”
And so Mr. Mckinnon entered him in the RBC Emerging Artist contest, which he won, hitting the ground running in a career he already knew he’d been born for.
“It can be a little bit isolating,” he says, “I knew when I was six years old what I wanted to do. It was strange to see my friends going off to university with no clear idea of what they were going to do.”
The Thursday Outlook – August 10 to 14, 2017
The Travelling Thornburys are featured this Saturday night at The Leeky Canoe in Meaford. This is a duo consisting of Jon Zaslow and Kevin Campbell. They offer up some great harmonies and tunes that range from The Beatles to The Everly Brothers. Jon as also an accomplished guitarist that has become a regular accompanist for Chris Scerri and has co-hosted many Thursday night jams with him at The Leeky.
At The Barn Coop on Saturday night, it’s a rare chance to see Culture Reject in concert. This is part of a concert series put together at The Barn by Greg Smith, in which he pairs more established artists with up-and-comers. Culture Reject, featuring Michael O’Connell and Karri North, is a band that has a unique and mesmerizing sound. Michael evolved this band out of the popular band Black Cabbage, with which he toured for several years. He now tours annually in Europe to a growing following there. The opener for this concert is Jake Feeney, a young singer-songwriter who seems much more mature than he is. Having been a songwriter since he was six or seven, Jake has a voice similar to John Maher and a beautiful style of guitar picking. This is a show well worth checking out.
Friday’s Summer Concert Best Yet
Meaford’s local impresario, Chris Scerri has a real talent for putting together a musical variety show. Often concerts that feature many acts are of a random nature, but he takes care to carefully structure shows which consistently add up to be greater than the sum of their parts. That was certainly the case with last Friday’s Meaford Summer Concert, the third in this year’s series.
It was an all-female show, a theme designed to support My Friend’s House, a crisis centre for women that serves Meaford and Collingwood. It’s more fitting, though, to refer to it as an all-exceptional-talent show. A half dozen acts followed closely on each other and built through the evening. It had been moved indoors to the Gallery in Meaford Hall because of the rain. About seventy chairs in the main room were filled and probably 30 more people stood in the adjoining room where the bar had been opened for the occasion. That was an ideal setup, allowing them to talk and enjoy a drink while people in the main room were completely absorbed in the show.
It began with Sequoia Koop, a diminutive 8-year-old singer that Chris discovered at an open stage. She was typically a little kid, looking down most of the time, wandering away occasionally from the microphone, and distracted at one point by an itch on her back. But her delivery of the songs she did never faltered and were beautifully delivered with emotion, and dynamics, not once losing her pitch. It’s always the sign of a great singer when you notice the song more than the performance, and her rendition of Allessia Cara’s “Beautiful” brought out the true meaning of the song.
Eden Young followed with a short set that compensated for the technical difficulties that marred her set at the first concert of the season, and this time her beautiful singing voice came through clearly.
