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Nanaimo’s Kerilie McDowall Wins Women of Influence Creative Innovator Award

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

Nanaimo’s Kerilie McDowall Wins Women of Influence Creative Innovator Award

Musician-turned-TV-filmmaker Kerilie McDowall was humbled and honored to win the Women of Influence (WIN) Creative Innovator Award for her documentary short In the Zone: Rick Kilburn—a profile of the Vancouver Island/Vancouver, BC jazz bassist/producer/composer—at WIN’s February 2024 awards gala in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Along with 100 fellow nominees in 11 categories, McDowall was in attendance to receive her award, which was sponsored by Canada’s Inland Truck & Equipment.

The objectives of the evening were extremely special to McDowall: Proceeds went to the Footprints Infertility & Pregnancy Loss Support Initiative. Run by the organizer of the sold-out awards evening, Blaise Hunter, Footprints champions reproductive health awareness and advocacy. The organization provides care packages and support to women who have miscarried and are in grief—a much-needed service for every community.

Award recipients honored at the February event included representatives of the entire Nanaimo community, including members of its business, social services, arts, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and trades sectors.

In the Zone: Rick Kilburn documents the life and career of the multi-JUNO/East/West Coast Award-winning jazz bassist and producer, who has performed with artists ranging from Chilliwack and Mose Allison to Dave Brubeck and Chet Baker. As a bassist-composer, Kilburn spent over a decade in New York learning the craft of production while playing with some of the icons of U.S. jazz.

McDowall is a cross-media champion for jazz and the arts whose TV shorts and self-produced and -hosted radio programs—as well as her own accomplishments as a guitarist—have earned her 15 awards from around the globe, six of them from the USA.

She mentored as a volunteer in television from 2015 to 2022, directing for five to six years and hosting and producing for seven with the brilliant Shaw Spotlight team of Cameron McLean, Todd Jones, Jocelyn Matwe, Stas Bobkov, and volunteer Doug Tombe. With their assistance, McDowall released her first documentary short on March 17, 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

That first outing as a documentary filmmaker netted McDowall an award for Best Director from the Seoul Short Film Festival in South Korea and the Best Web and New Media award at the IndieX Film Fest in Hollywood.

In the Zone: Rick Kilburn also won the 2021 Best Short Documentary award at the Hong Kong International Short Film Festival, the Outstanding Achievement Award for Best Web and New Media at Hollywood’s Indie Short Fest in June 2021, and an Honorable Mention Award for Best Web and New Media at the Independent Shorts Awards in LA in March 2020.

At the 2021 Milan FFI Film Fest International, Kerilie and technical supervisor Jones (her directing mentor) picked up an award for Best Editing of a Short Documentary. The film went on to be named Best Short Documentary at the Japan International Film Festival in October 2022. Later McDowall received two more awards of prestige at the Vegas Movie Awards, Best Inspirational Film and Best Short Documentary, as well as another award from Japan and a Best Short Documentary award from London, UK. McDowall and the team and crew were delighted to receive the Best Canadian Short Documentary from the Toronto Independent Film Festival of CIFT.

Upon the release of the film, Kilburn peaked at 11.3+ million hits on IMDB Pro’s STARmeter; McDowall herself hit 8.7 million hits while the doc was screening in Japan and Hong Kong. Monthly hits for the film peaked at 12.7 million in September 2023 and February 2024.

An accomplished musician in her own right, McDowall holds a degree from York University in guitar/composition. She began performing professionally as a guitarist at age 16/17, and by 23 was leading a jazz quintet in Vancouver, BC. That gig lasted from 1989 to 2000.

“Well, there may be 8 million guitarists in the world, but Kerilie McDowall is certainly one of the best,” remarked Paul Grant, host of Vancouver’s CBC Hot Air, after a 1999 recording session of McDowall’s quintet by producer Neil Ritchie. “Guitar Player magazine calls her playing ‘smooth and elegant’—to which I would add ‘intelligent and original.’”

As the owner of Canadian Online Guitar Lessons (& Creative Services), McDowall now enjoys teaching and mentoring student guitarists and other musicians. She works with rising stars and JUNO Award and Order of Canada-winning recording artists and aspiring young players. Beginner and advanced guitarists—and even the newly curious—are welcome to join and participate in her new Facebook group, How to Play Guitar for Beginners & Guitarists.

“I have been thrilled to just hear that a gifted jazz artist I have worked closely with in the past has just been nominated for a JUNO award,” McDowall reports. “That artist worked very hard, is brilliant, and earned that status. I am so happy that national judges are highlighting Canada’s best to the globe. We have a lot of exciting talent in this country, and it is an honor with my business Canadian Online Guitar Lessons (& Creative Services) to work with such fine artists. As a Polaris Music Prize judge, I have discovered that our Canadian musicians are some of the best artists in the world.”

McDowall is committed to helping students in multiple areas maximize their potential for success, which is why Canadian Online Guitar Lessons welcomes inquiries from not just players and other musicians, but also aspiring filmmakers, writers, businesses, and non-profits.

In 2024, McDowall ranked 39th in the Alignable contest for #1 Biz Person in North America and #1 in Nanaimo. In March she ranked #20^th in the top 20 women ranked in North America with 94 votes she had received while networking in February. Alignable is a business networking site with 8 million North American members.

A former music publicist, McDowall is also a freelance and national music writer who was a monthly contributor to DownBeat from 2016 to 2020 and still judges in their DownBeat Critics Poll. More of her music writing can be found at All About Jazz, Canadian Musician, Inspired 55+, and other publications.

To hear further news and insights from McDowall, subscribe to her blog, In the Zen, at In the Zen (beehiiv.com), where she writes about Canadian jazz and other creative music, and shares stories, and tips as a director, host, and producer in TV and radio. The blog also features interviews with high-profile personalities, as well as McDowall’s tips on lifestyle, health, organic gardening, filmmaking, and guitar playing.

You can also catch McDowall on her new YouTube channel, How to Play Guitar for Beginners & Guitarists. From March 8th-21st, 2024, she is a speaker at the Women’s Spirit Festival .

Film festival invites continue to flow in for 2024, yet McDowall herself has been off the circuit since 2022—ironically due to the unexpected and overwhelming response to her first effort. Seeking solitude from a continuous stream of global emails and social media messages, she retreated to the peace of her Canadian mountain home to focus once again on all things music, including her bucket-list agenda item of releasing her past recorded work as a jazz guitarist-bandleader.

At one point during Christmas 2022, after posting about her favorite sitarist, the late Ravi Shankar, McDowall received hundreds of foreign-language messages in just 12 hours. Despite it being Christmas Eve, she tried to reply by using Google to translate her words into various African languages and Hindi. The task was so overwhelming that it strengthened her resolve to step back and take a break from the computer for a while.

“I can’t believe how wonderful 2024 has been,” McDowall says. “It has brought me much joy to be acknowledged by the Women of Influence Awards and the Nanaimo community, and by business colleagues from the USA on Alignable. I am very honored and grateful to the Nanaimo community, Blaise Hunter, and the Alignable team and community. I am very excited to be working on a special treat with some wonderful upcoming interviews for readers to bring to you at All About Jazz and In the Zen. And there will be more surprises to come.”

Learn more about McDowall and her services and workshops at her current website Services | In the Zen (beehiiv.com).

Which Way To The Flip Side? Double Single Shows Two Faces Of Janet Panic

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

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Which Way To The Flip Side? Double Single Shows Two Faces Of Janet Panic

One of the hardest decisions a recording artist has to make is which single to pull to accurately represent their new album. For Indigenous, Sechelt, BC-based folk-popper Janet Panic, the ultimate answer was “Why choose?” That’s why she’s heralding her latest record, A Mighty Rip Through the Page of My Life, with a double-A-sided release that showcases two distinct aspects of her highly compelling musical personality.

On one side, we have “Goodbyes”—which, given the title of the album, might seem to portend a seriously bitter kiss-off. But this is actually an exquisite breakup song that’s exactly the sort of loving benediction you’d hope to receive from a partner when things finally reached their end.

“May all the troubles that you spoke of/ Be blessings in disguise,” Panic coos, with the utmost sincerity. “And the obstacles you face/ They shrink as you rise/ And I wish you goodbyes/ Goodbyes.”

Panic’s husky yet tender voice is the perfect conduit for her message of good will, and so is the musical arrangement—the kind of gospel-tinged, dirty-fingered country rock Sheryl Crow learned from the Rolling Stones after they had borrowed it from Gram Parsons.

On the other side, “I Forgot” strikes a distinctly more downbeat tone, telling the first-person tale of a child who was ripped from her family and raised among strangers. The almost playful singsong of the vocal melody is in direct contrast to the mournful lyric and the accusatory drums that slam like jailhouse doors shutting off access to the past.

And I don’t remember freedom
Don’t remember how to talk
I don’t remember my family
I forgot

Panic says the song is based on the real experiences of some of her own friends and relations. “They were each placed with well-meaning families, but of a completely different culture and skin colour,” she says. “One thing I noticed that they have in common is deep remorse for forgetting any memory of who they were and of their times before. They long for the missing pieces of their identity that can never be known.”

That’s a tragedy of particular relevance to Panic, whose heritage is Métis from the Red River and Fort Carleton area and whose maiden name is Pruden – Panic is the surname of her Serbian first husband.

The double single is a tantalizing appetizer for A Mighty Rip Through the Page of My Life, a 10-cut collection of folk-roots numbers Panic calls “raw as road rash, bare as your birthday suit, and melancholy as first love.” They’re “songs about relationships,” she says—whether the relationship in question is with a hoped-for soulmate (“Live to Grow Old”), a lover whose habits are starting to grate (“Critical Slow”) or just a certain illicit substance (“Mary Jane”).

In keeping with the theme, the relationships between the players were particularly tight-knit. Janet’s husband, Will, plays bass on the record, and the drums are by one of his old friends and bandmates, Craig Wright (who now plays with Nashville singer-songwriter Eric Church). Some of Wright’s colleagues were brought in to augment the album’s acoustic sounds with electric guitar and pedal steel. At the writing level, the kinship was even more baked-in: Panic co-wrote songs with her husband, her father, and her brother-in-law.

“This album is about connections both in terms of the lyrics and in terms of how it was made,” Panic says. “Everyone chipped in to make a family.” Even the ones who weren’t already related.

A self-described “Bohemian-Métis” artist, Panic already has more than four solo records under her belt, multiple appearances on major Canadian TV networks to her credit, and a slew of awards honors on her CV. In 2011 alone, she was nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award and an Aboriginal People’s Choice Music Award. Her subsequent release, Samples, was named Best Folk Album at the 2012 APCMAs and netted her a nomination in the 2013 JUNO awards.

The new record is bound for even greater glory. It’s economical of sound yet expansive of mood; clever of thought yet never taken with itself. And with “Goodbyes/I Forgot” as its striking introduction, it’s certain to turn heads. For the legion of new fans she’s about to earn, the relationship starts here.

Properly Tailored: Rapper Bently Boy Stays Clothes-Minded With Three New Takes On “Alexander McQueen”

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

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Properly Tailored: Rapper Bently Boy Stays Clothes-Minded With Three New Takes On “Alexander McQueen”

Everybody should have more than one outfit, no matter how swank it might be. That’s why rapper Bently Boy is dropping three brand-new mixes of his sartorially oriented single “Alexander McQueen” featuring NLE Choppa and Elise Estrada — each version perfectly suited to its own particular occasion.

There’s an amped-up club mix for when you wanna get on the floor. A funk mix to make your ride bump and rattle. And a sinister, sinuous trap mix that whispers “Time to creep.” As produced by Adam H. (DJ Khaled, Ne-Yo, Ray J), the three reimaginings on Alexander McQueen: The Versions couldn’t be more different from one another. But each one is just the right ensemble to throw on once you’ve decided what you’re in the mood for. No matter where you’re headed, the cut, so to speak, is always gonna be perfect.

What all three mixes have in common is a lyrical thrust that exalts the sharp-dressed man as a paragon of triumph over adversity:

I got that drip
From head down to my toes
Hopped in the B and I flooded the scene
I’m soakin’, I’m drippin I’m like a marine
I’m mindin’ my business so don’t intervene
Designer on me: Alexander McQueen

The 24-year-old Bently Boy is a lot closer to that personal ideal than he was back in 2020, when he first started freestyling the number over a beat he had ripped from YouTube and pasted into Garageband. Back then, he was just an Iraqi-born Australian transplant trying to weather a severe culture clash while avoiding the dead ends of drugs and the other pitfalls of the street life. Oh, and all of it while enduring one of the most protracted and isolating COVID lockdowns the world had seen.

But he had faith in the trap-based track he had come up with, so he saved money from his day job in construction to record a studio version with producer Opentil8.

And he reached out to Memphis-based rap luminary NLE Choppa—who had already graciously retweeted some of BB’s prior efforts—to contribute a verse. Happily, the answer was “yes”—it just took two years to finally get it done.

In the interim, Bently Boy had been trying to get into the United States to take his nascent music career to the next level. But his cultural and personal background didn’t exactly make him the darling of the visa board, so he spent a good deal of time cooking his heels in Mexico instead. (When he finally made it to the States, a thank-you visit with NLE Choppa was naturally one of the first items on his itinerary.)

The true turning point was signing a distribution deal with Canadian music mogul Adam H.—who in addition to being a multi-platinum hitmaker is also a film producer, songwriter, record executive and artist manager. Thinking like a producer and not just a distributor, Adam H. took it upon himself to rip the track apart at the seams and sew it back together in three different ways. Most crucially, he added the voice of Filipino-Canadian pop icon Elise Estrada on the choruses, which gave the track a simply irresistible hook. A mixing job by five-time Grammy winner Orlando Calzada (Destiny’s Child, Lady Gaga, B2K) lent the entire project the commercial sheen that says “ready to wear.”

Now all that’s left is for the various markets and programming formats to follow, um, suit. Bently Boy hopes listeners will see themselves in at least one version of “Alexander McQueen”—and hopefully something of themselves in all three. Not everybody is an Iraqi citizen of the world who’s fluent in Chaldean, Arabic, Spanish and English, and neither can everyone claim to have found their life’s calling from an early appreciation of Kodak Black, 21 Savage and DaBaby. But everybody knows what it’s like to aspire to something better—and to want to wear the evidence on your back.

“I’ve decided to dedicate my life to music and have no Plan B,” Bently Boy says. “Even though it has been very hard and a tough journey, I cannot stop now. I didn’t get this far for nothing. I know that I was not born to be average. I was born to break the generational curse in my family and give my family and kids the life and opportunities I never had.”

Sounds like we’re all going to need a bigger closet.

Lunachicks’ Gina Volpe Finds “Delete The World” Is Her Key

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

0

Lunachicks’ Gina Volpe Finds “Delete The World” Is Her Key

It’s never too late to disassociate. So says New York City postpunk philosopher Gina Volpe on “Delete the World,” the latest track to drop from her debut solo album of the same name.

A hymn to the life-saving power of escapism, the song finds Volpe with daydreaming on her mind. A detuned, eighth-note chunky guitar riff ticks away like the steady march of time while the singer impatiently imagines missing out on a world that “could vaporize before our eyes.” Then everything explodes in an old-school rave-up that declares a path to victory over humdrum reality:

And I fall, then slide
Weightless like a dream
On top of earth goes by
Disappear into the blue again
Delete the world
Forget your plans
Let’s waste some time with idle hands
Delete the world
Delete the world

Like the other 12 tracks on this loose concept album, the song pushes back against what Volpe calls “the dubious assumption that humans are in control of anything. One of my favorite aphorisms is ‘relax, nothing is in control,’ which I actually find incredibly comforting,” she says.

It’s a creatively liberating modus operandi, too. While Volpe made her name as lead guitarist for seminal punk outfit the Lunachicks, and later furthered her street rep as the founder and frontwoman of power trio Bantam, her solo career—begun on 2017’s Different Animal EP—has seen her follow her muse basically wherever in the hell she feels like chasing it. The music she’s released under her own name has brushstrokes of indie pop, alt rock, ‘80s synth and heavy rock—any sound she hears in her head and can keep the forces of predictability at bay.

And she’s doing it largely on her own, having played every instrument on the new album save for the drums on six tracks (Jeremy Kinney on five of them, Sam Warfield on the other) and bass on two (by Bantam’s Doug Oosterhouse). Production is by Barb Morrison (Blondie, Franz Ferdinand), with mixing by Jonathan Jetter.

Most artists trying to establish themselves as a solo performer may be sticking to a stricter career path timeline but here, too, Volpe feels no need to toe somebody else’s line or adhere to any rigid timetable. Since coming off the road with Bantam in 2006, she’s pursued a million and one creative outlets, including scoring films, making visual art, composing and producing an off-Broadway show (Homo The Musical) and even doing the motion-capture modeling for the female guitarist and bassist in the video game Rock Band. Then there was the Lunachicks reunion in 2019, and a book she co-penned about the band in 2021, and a documentary in 2023 … well, let’s just say the time can fly by when you’ve cut the cord with obligation.

“I don’t have any creative overlords or collaborators to piss off, so I get to color outside the lines and be as messy as I wanna be,” she shrugs. Yes, there’s nothing quite like that feeling of truly letting go. Delete away, Gina.

Rock-Revivalists Original Pairs Warn Us About The Dangers Of Aging Out On “Not Grow Old”

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

0

Rock-Revivalists Original Pairs Warn Us About The Dangers Of Aging Out On “Not Grow Old”

When you hear a band has penned a concept album about the natural flow of a grand love affair, your instinctive reaction might be “Aww, how sweet.” Now meet Original Pairs. The Toronto rock-revival outfit have chosen to herald the arrival of their new collection, Long Play (OPLP), by releasing “Not Grow Old,” a relationship inventory with a—shall we say—quirkier bent.

Lyrically, the song finds a smitten narrator rattling off a series of things his woman could do that he promises wouldn’t scuttle their union—from staying out all night to putting him on hold to talking with her mouth full. But the loping, dark-rockabilly menace of the music hints that there’s going to be a crucial exception:

Don’t say you ain’t been told
You better not grow old
You better not grow old

Alllll righty then. This isn’t “I Will Always Love You”; it’s more like the answer to “When I’m Sixty-Four” McCartney was always dreading.

The song is the stealth-bomb Valentine of OPLP, which traces the evolution of a partnership from its earliest days in a Toronto apartment (“Concord Avenue”) to its inevitable rough spots (“Love Collision”) to the panicky prospect of living out the sunset years together (yep, that selfsame and troublesome “Not Grow Old”).

“The ‘Long Play’ of love isn’t always pretty, but it’s never boring,” the group understates.

And this bunch should know. When they met nearly two decades ago, the group’s Andrew Frontini and Lisa Logan decided to be not just a singer/guitarist and his drummer but a committed couple as well. Lest you assume, though, that OPLP represents some sort of twisted catharsis for the duo—well, they already mined that terrain on Original Pairs’ first album, Forbidden Fruit, whose romantic pop rock documented their “scandal-ridden” courtship.

The real scandal is the way Original Pairs have been setting the Toronto scene on its ear since 2008 with their electrifying brand of rock ’n roll, which incorporates elements of folk, country, pop and psychedelia. Over the years, they’ve settled into a winning lineup of Frontini, Logan, bassist Lynda Kraar and keyboardist Jon Loewen—the perfect vessel for the off-kilter yet accessible songs that flow from Frontini’s pen.

For this third album, the band chose to replicate its in-concert sound by recording “live off the floor” at Lincoln County Social Club, laying down all eight tracks in a frenzied four days. The aim was to recapture the feel of the early-’80s rock scene in Frontini’s native Kingston, Ontario, where he played in a band with Gord Downie, later of The Tragically Hip. It was a time, Original Pairs recall, when the revival of ’60s rock and rockabilly was dovetailing with the development of punk into new wave and postpunk. OPLP attempts to ape that synthesis by harkening simultaneously back to what the group pronounces “rock’s greatest years” of 1965 and 1980.

You can absolutely hear it on “Not Grow Old,” an endearingly retro number that sounds like the mutant cousin of a theme song a surf-garage band would have written for a TV spy show. Webb Wilder cultists will be in twang-guitar heaven. So the question has to be asked: Is the real love affair here the one between the star-crossed paramours on the album? Or is it with rock itself?

Take your time answering. As long as you’re thinking about it, you truly haven’t gotten old.

My SiriusXM Show This Week: Beau Bridges, Rob Mayes, Alisyn Camerota, Robbie Nevil, and Tilly Kingston

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

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My SiriusXM Show This Week: Beau Bridges, Rob Mayes, Alisyn Camerota, Robbie Nevil, and Tilly Kingston

My SiriusXM show: Interviews with Beau Bridges + Rob Mayes from The Neon Highway movie; Alisyn Camerota, CNN anchor + author, Combat Love; Singer/Songwriter Robbie Nevil; Punk alt.rocker Tilly Kingston! Sat 8am + 4pm + 7pm, Sun 12pm (all ET), Channel 167 + on the app anytime!

Watch Metallica Cover Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

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Watch Metallica Cover Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”

Metallica performs “Turn the Page” live on the Howard Stern Show. Drummer Lars Ulrich explained that he heard the song and immediately knew James Hetfield could do it justice.

“I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge up in San Francisco and I heard the live version of Turn the Page and I could just hear James singing that. The first thing that popped out was just James would fucking nail this vocally and just the lyric element, I think it felt like it would speak on his behalf and to the situation that we were in…and there was just something about the vocals.”

My Next Read: “The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence” by Robin James

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

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My Next Read: “The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence” by Robin James

In 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous range of genres and artists while being staunchly committed to local independent art and media. In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone’s “Last Great Independent Radio” stations. The station projected a philosophy that prioritized such independence-the idea that truly progressive, transgressive, futuristic disruptions of the status quo were possible only when practiced with and for other people.

In The Future of Rock and Roll, philosopher Robin James uses WOXY’s story to argue against a corporate vision of independence-in which everyone fends for themselves-and in favor of an alternative way of thinking and relating to one another that disrupts norms but is nevertheless supported by communities. Against the standard retelling of the history of “modern rock,” James looks to the local scenes that made true independence possible by freeing individual artists from the whims of the boardroom. This philosophy of community-rooted independence offers both a counternarrative to the orthodox history of indie rock and an alternative worldview to that of the current corporate mainstream.

The Eagles’ “Hotel California” Reimagined On The Traditional Chinese Guzheng

Music

Eric Alper

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Mar 16, 2024

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The Eagles’ “Hotel California” Reimagined On The Traditional Chinese Guzheng

In the hallowed halls of music history, few arrangements rival the timeless allure of the guitars in “Hotel California,” particularly in the iconic 1994 live rendition. Stripping away the vocal layers, Hong Kong’s Moyun’s attention zeroes in on the guitar solos that bookend the piece—the haunting prelude and the electrifying finale.