Music

Snarky Puppy Live in Montreal

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This Tuesday, I witnessed something pretty spectacular. I went to see Snarky Puppy perform live at Metropolis. Not only was this one of the best live shows I have seen in a while, there were other things I found quite surprising. First of all, the show was sold out. Yes, a jazz fusion show sold out. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by this, as Snarky Puppy has been around for 10 years now, so they have managed to grow a pretty decent following. However, this audience wasn’t the typical ‘old dudes’ type audience I was expecting. Instead, it was largely people in their early to mid twenties, and a fairly good representation of women as well (jazz fusion, like progressive rock has long been a good way to ensure you don’t get any dates or attention from the ladies). The band was very warmly received, and they were […]... Read More

Music I wrote as a teenager

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Back when I was in high school and CEGEP, I thought that I was definitely going to be a composer. I spent all of my years in high school completely immersed in Bach and Mozart. Especially fugues, I was all about fugues — Die Kunst der Fuge totally blew my mind, especially contrapunctus III and (Mozart’s) K 546 (which is, not surprisingly, a fugue and is still my favourite piece of music of all time). These two pieces of music still give me goose bumps when I listen to them. When the Canadian Brass came out with The Canadian Brass Plays the Pachelbel Canon, which has 3 amazing arrangements of Bach fugues, I nearly wore out the tape. I transcribed the Little Fugue in G Minor before I learned that I could just go to the sheet music store and buy it (which I later did for the other two). […]... Read More

Religious Music

Posted on by Christopher 4 Comments
Most of my friends are aware that I consider myself to be an evangelical antitheist. This means, that like atheists, I don’t hold any belief in any deity. It also means, that unlike many atheists, I hold a positive belief that there aren’t any gods, that the belief in such things is harmful to our society and that these views should be shared with everyone willing to listen. With that in mind, some of my friends and many acquaintances are surprised to learn that I really like religious music (mostly Christian actually). And I don’t mean only songs that are often played in secular crowds during the holidays like ‘White Christmas‘, or ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas‘. While I do really like both of those songs (and play them frequently on the piano in mid July even), I also really like many overtly religious pieces — Cantique Noël, Silent […]... Read More

Jon Lajoie – Song for the Students

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Montreal born and raised comedian/musician Jon Lajoie wrote and shared a song in support of the student protesters. He has also tweeted permission to upload and share it. Although he hasn’t specified the license, I’m going to assume Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. If you are Jon, or if you know Jon and he doesn’t like this, please let me know. You can down load the mp3 version by right-clicking on the link below and selecting ‘Save link as…’ (or something like that, it depends on your browser): Download: Jon Lajoie – Song for the Students You can also listen to the song on SoundCloud here, or watch the YouTube video below. Thanks so much for this Jon! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL1TBfyZNoA]... Read More