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TD Markham Jazz Festival Announces Spectacular Sunday August 18 headlined by Brandi Disterheft

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2019 TD Markham Jazz Festival announces spectacular Sunday performances headlined by Brandi Disterheft.

Sunday, August 18 brings another incredible day of jazz performances of all genres by our magnificent roster of professional musicians, with a festival-closing show featuring bassist and singer Brandi Disterheft. All outdoor stage performances are free!

Bassist, singer, composer Brandi Disterheft has been under the apprenticeship of Miles Davis’s bassist, Ron Carter, since she relocated to NYC from Vancouver. It’s not only her fiery bass playing, it’s also her innovative live shows as she sings in both English and French, showcasing her ambient, dreamy voice. Winning a JUNO for her “Debut” album, Brandi has performed with Benny Green, Cyrus Chestnut, Jeremy Pelt and Renee Rosnes to name a few. Brandi is a Canadian staple of the NYC jazz scene.
www.brandidisterheft.com

Check out the full roster of artists playing at the Pfaff BMW Millennium Bandstand on Sunday, August 18. Come and join us for an incredible day and evening of music!

1:00 – 2:30 p.m. – Heather Bambrick
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. – Kollage
5:00 – 6:30 p.m. – Brandi Disterheft

Kicking up a party at the Watford Group – McKay Wine & Beer Garden will be:
12:30 – 2:00 p.m. – Jerome Tucker Band
2:30 – 4:00 p.m. – Hector (with Chris Gale)
4:30 – 6:00 p.m. – Bywater Call

And at the Source Office Furnishings – Varley Art Gallery Patio we feature:
12:00 – 1:30 p.m. – Virginia MacDonald
2:00 – 3:30 p.m. – Kristin Fung
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. – Viper’s Cloud

The TD Markham Jazz Festival is a not-for-profit organization with a mandate to enrich cultural life in the region by bringing emerging and established jazz artists to Markham for all to enjoy. Established in 1998, the festival draws more than 25,000 residents and visitors to the streets of Unionville during the third weekend in August. Local and international artists deliver over 30 open-air performances during the weekend as well as in selected “hot spots” and at a ticketed opening-night concert. During the year, the festival hosts “Hot Spot Concerts” at selected venues in Markham. TD Canada Trust became its title sponsor in 2014.

Upgrade Your Audio Experience with These Music Streaming Apps

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If there’s no day that goes by without your favorite music and you could easily call yourself a music buff, you’re most probably interested in enjoying the best audio quality when it comes to your favorite albums and artists. Thankfully, more and more music streaming apps and services make that possible for little money.

Some of these services have been around for quite some time now and they’ve gained their popularity for a good reason that is called premium audio quality. Moreover, some of them couple that high-quality audio with user-friendly features and the possibility to enjoy thousands of tunes even offline.

A classic for a reason

Apps to improve the quality of one’s life are now available in great numbers and when it comes to music apps, there’s no exception. There are a few streaming music apps and services that remain favorites despite the emergence of newer such products. YouTube, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, and Spotify are some of them.

Each of them comes with features and rich music archives that enable users to search for and find an overwhelming variety of artists based on different genres. The filters available significantly simplify the user’s experience when searching for favorite artists and their albums. All of these services are available for web and mobile use and offer free features.

New music apps you might want to try 

You might read really interesting piano books but if you want to hear how popular piano players sound like, you can also try some of the newer music streaming apps. Tidal is an app worth adding to your music app kit if you’re on the lookout for high-fidelity music and a rich library of songs. You will get around 25 million songs, to be more precise.

Even if the app is not free, its features are a great reason to try it. You can watch more than 75,000 videos without ads interrupting them, use discovery tools to reach that album that delights you so much, and even enjoy exclusives.

In case you relate to classical music, you want to feed your passion for opera and orchestral performances, and enjoy the various benefits of listening to classical music, Idagio should not go unchecked.

For only $9.99 per month, you can enjoy a rich library of new, rare, and exclusive recordings of such performances. The quality is high and the variety offered is remarkable. Plus, you can use various filters to enjoy custom search results such as composers, soloists, or orchestras.

Deezer is also popular among music buffs interested in enjoying their favorite tunes even when on the road and offline. This music streaming option allows users to download high-fidelity tracks for offline use, which is a feature that, at least in our case, makes it a winner even if this possibility is available with the premium subscription.

Online radios

If listening to the radio sounds like something you’d almost always go for but you’d like that experience to come with a custom touch, then rest assured that the music streaming service market does not run short when it comes to such options.

LiveXLive is one of them. The streaming service replaced Slacker Radio but you get to enjoy many of the old features as there is a variety of stations you can listen to depending on the genres you like. Pandora and TuneIn are very much the same. They offer the possibility to listen to various stations after you’ve selected the genres and subgenres you’re into.

Pandora, for example, offers the Pandora Plus subscription which enables users to enjoy unlimited replays and skips and even download stations for offline use. Other noteworthy personalized online radios include Jango Radio and iHeartRadio.

Greil Marcus interviews D.A. Pennebaker about filming Bob Dylan

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8 years ago, New Video’s Docurama Films released the first Blu-ray release of Dont Look Back, newly mastered in high definition and featuring this brand new and exclusive interview with D.A. Pennebaker, the film’s director, and renowned rock and culture critic Greil Marcus.

When acclaimed documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, The War Room) filmed Bob Dylan during a three-week concert tour of England in the spring of 1965, he had no idea he was about to lens one of the 1960s most iconic feature films. Wanting to make more than just a concert film, Pennebaker decided to seek out both the public and private Bob Dylan. With unobtrusive equipment and rare access to the elusive performer, he achieved a fly-on-the-wall view of one of the most influential musicians of any era — and redefined filmmaking along the way.

Greil Marcus interviews D.A. Pennebaker about filming Bob Dylan from New Video Digital on Vimeo.

This Beatboxing by B-ART is astounding

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Get ready for another judge showcase by the one and only B-art. Witness how he wins over the crowd and brings them to a whole new energy level.

Late Night With Conan O’Brien’s Remote Segment with Hunter S. Thompson in 1997

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Shooting machine guns and drinking hard liquor. Living his dream, that Hunter.

What’s the Difference between a Digital Piano and a Keyboard?

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Do those black and white keys fascinate you? Fancy learning the art of making music with them? Pianos have forever been grand. But with all the advancements and fancy musical instruments ruling the industry, keyboards have been stealing the thunder.

In a dilemma about what to purchase? It is only natural for a beginner to be confused about which one to trust more – A digital piano or a keyboard?

But before you go splurging your money, we are here to help you decide the best for you.

Folks, there’s no denying the fact that each of them has certain unique features that make them stand apart.

However, let us narrow down things a little bit and give you a clearer picture, shall we?

Mobility at stake or not?

Well, if you knew, digital pianos are modern day doppelgängers if the good old acoustic pianos. With the size so grand and the body carved out solid wood, these get a tad bit difficult to carry around. Turn off, right?

However, a keyboard wins this round. Designed specifically to be portable, this one comes with a lesser number of keys comparatively. There’s no doubt that this one is the choice for all those musicians who keep touring with all the feels. Why? Well, they are light weight and extremely suitable.

Sound Quality

Coming to one of the most important factors, a digital piano is wired to replicate the sound of an acoustic piano. Yes, the sound works grand. Why? Because it is made by taking the sound samples from a charming acoustic piano and recording it.

On the contrary, keyboards come with a myriad of sound features. With accompaniments, rhythm section, and different sounds simulating various other musical instruments, keyboards take music production on a whole new level.

Tap and voila!

Keys are an integral part of both the instruments. However, digital pianos differ a lot when it comes to how tapping keys feels. With a set of graded hammer keys, a digital piano is sensitive to pressure. You gotta tap harder.

On the other hand, the feel of the keys of a keyboard is soft. There is almost no resistance or weight on the keys. All you need to do is press oh – so – lightly and voila!

Pedals for the win

While a keyboard comes without a pedal, a digital piano comes with a set of 3 pedals to improve the sound experience. The pedals work to sustain sound whenever there’s a need.

These three pedals are namely soft pedal, sustaining pedal, and silent pedal.

However, if you feel like giving a touch of grandness to the sound of your keyboard, you can get yourself an external sustaining pedal.

Prices

Alright, let us address the elephant in the room, shall we? It is only imperative to talk about the weight of it all on your wallet. A perfectly functional and portable keyboard is less expensive as compared to a grand digital piano.

A decent fully functional keyboard would come at 250$-400$. Whereas, a basic digital piano starts at somewhere around 350$. I’d suggest you to read digital piano reviews on reputed sites like Piano Nadu before purchasing!

Take your pick, folks.

Well, in the battle of the best, there’s no one absolute winner. With different perks that come with both the digital piano and keyboard, it is for you to pick one that suits you the best and fits your style like nothing else.

However, if you dream of becoming a concert pianist someday, a digital piano is your best bet. Why? Well, it perfectly simulates the sound of a fancy good old grand acoustic piano. That is the real deal, no matter how much you deny.

But then again, if you wish to tour in the future and want something more flexible, portable, and stuffed with electronic sound and rhythm effects, a keyboard should be your best friend forever.

Hope this helps. Go splurge some money already!

Have you cried today yet? No? Good. Watch Pixar’s “Kitbull” short film

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Kitbull, directed by Rosana Sullivan and produced by Kathryn Hendrickson, reveals an unlikely connection that sparks between two creatures: a fiercely independent stray kitten and a pit bull. Together, they experience friendship for the first time.

15 years in the making… Orillia-based REAY release debut album, ‘Butterfly Tongue Revisited’

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Some species of butterfly spend their entire existences in migration, journeying to the ends of the Earth on nothing more than sheer determination and undeniable instinct.

Sean Murray can identify. The veteran Ontario musician has also devoted a vast portion of his life to the all-consuming pursuit of a distant, seemingly unreachable goal: The completion of his magnum opus Butterfly Tongue Revisited, a long-gestating labour of love whose arrival also heralds the birth of his new alternative indie-rock project Reay (pronounced Ray, after his grandmother’s maiden name).

“This has been a project of perseverance,” the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer understates. “It’s been in the works for close to 15 years. Right from the beginning, I knew these songs were special. And since then, I have put so much time and effort and sweat into finishing them. It’s been weighing on my shoulders for so long. There have been so many times I wanted to give up, but my soul would never have rested. I could never have gone to my grave without putting out these songs. It would have been the biggest regret of my life. So I just kept coming back to it whenever I had the chance — and now it’s finally finished. And it’s the most soul-cleansing experience of my life.”

It’s also a listening experience you are unlikely to forget anytime soon. Unlike the insubstantial bits and bytes of automated musical fluff that stream into your playlist one day and vanish without a trace the next, Butterfly Tongue Revisited is music that grabs you instantly and holds fast. It’s an album in the organic, old-school sense: Expertly and artfully crafted, carefully arranged and thoughtfully sequenced to deliver a moving musical experience that is simultaneously transcendent and transfixing, timely yet timeless, familiar yet fundamentally unique. There are sonic, stylistic and songwriting elements of everyone from Pink Floyd to The Verve, Death Cab For Cutie to War on Drugs — all topped with Murray’s soulfully raspy pipes and poetic lyrics, and filtered through an adventurously stylish, multi-layered production sensibility reminiscent of Canadian legend Daniel Lanois’ groundbreaking work with the likes of U2.

“It drives me nuts to listen to an album where every song sounds the same, so we deliberately made every song sound different,” Murray explains. “Every single song, we tore the drum kit down and set it up in a different space. Sometimes we used a different snare or ride cymbal. A lot of the songs have two drum tracks, one on either side of the mix. There are a lot of delays and hypnotic beats. In some cases, we recorded over a dozen guitar tracks that we edited down into two or three performances. We used a real cello. We had a trombone player and a flautist come in to do parts. Putting it all together was like painting a picture. It’s definitely an ear massage. And now, nobody can really put their finger on who it sounds like. It’s all over the map.”

The beauty and diversity of that sonic landscape is united and anchored by Murray’s powerful, grounded songcraft. The swirling, radio-ready rocker Halo opens the proceedings on an uplifting note of romantic yearning. The thundering drums and cascading guitars of Rain presage an emotional storm that builds in intensity until the squall passes and the glowing sun emerges. Eternally topical and sonically scratchy, Poison points the finger at our world of con artists, broken promises, false advertising and “bullshit-baffled brains.” Single Lemondrop Girl is a bittersweet, bluesy ballad fuelled by B-3 organ. Badside kicks back with some groovy soul-funk and falsetto backups. Peacemaker raises the stakes again with noisy guitars and lyrics decrying hatred and tribalism. The atmospheric, semi-acoustic Junkyard Hill paints a sombre scene in a post-apocalyptic world where the last man standing rules over a global pile of garbage. The haunting Spirit maintains there is hope even in the depths of emotional darkness. And the epic, richly textured Travelling fittingly completes the album’s richly rewarding emotional and musical passage.

Of course, for Reay — which also includes guitarist Ryan Smith, bassist Chad VanDusen, drummer Matt Copeland and Murray’s son Bayze on guitar and keyboards — the trip is only beginning. With Butterfly Tongue Revisited finally taking flight September 6th, 2019, Murray — whose extensive resume includes everything from opening for Glass Tiger to playing glam-rock at CBGB’s to gigging with a Grateful Dead tribute band — is already looking down the road for the next horizon to chase. “I’ve got a lot of songs in the works,” he says. “I can’t wait to start writing new stuff and recording again. My goal is to make four or five more of these.”

This butterfly isn’t touching down anytime soon.

Butterfly Tongue Revisited is available September 6, 2019. “Lemondrop Girl” is available now.

TDMJF’s Opening Night Concert  featuring “Oakland Stroke”  –  Wednesday, August 14 at 8:00 pm!

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The TD Markham Jazz Festival proudly announces its 2019 Opening Night Concert and Party.

Join us for some uptown funk on Wednesday, August 14 at the Markham Museum. Groove to the Lou Pomanti Project “Oakland Stroke”, a 10-piece band known for its ’70s horn hit repertoire highlighting the likes of Tower of Power, Blood Sweat & Tears, Earth Wind & Fire, Chicago and more.

Tickets are available in advance only at the link shown below.
http://www.markhamjazzfestival.com/

Date and Time:
Wednesday, August 14. Gate opens at 7:30 pm; music starts at 8:00 pm; event ends at 10:30 pm

Location:
Markham Museum, 9350 Markham Road, Markham, ON – located on the northeast corner of Hwy 48 and 16th Ave.
Easy venue to reach – FREE parking

Ambience:
Beautiful outdoor park setting with gazebo and pavilion; It’s a party!
Sit and listen to great music under the stars. Get up and groove if the spirit moves you.

Silent Auction:
Discover excellent items in our silent auction, which raises funds for our annual Festival.

Worried about the weather?
Don’t!  Contingency plan is in effect.  Concert moves to inside hall on the Museum grounds if the weather changes.

Cash bar and food available.
Enjoy wine or beer at our cash bar, as well as tasty food options, all at modest prices.

The opening event of each year’s Festival has become a sought-after way to launch a weekend of outstanding music. Visit our website at www.markhamjazzfestival.com to reserve your tickets!

 

Postmodern Jukebox cover of the Elton John Song ‘Bennie and the Jets’ done Sinatra-style

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Here’s the always entertaining Postmodern Jukebox teaming up with singer, songwriter, and trombone player Aubrey Logan to perform the classic Elton John song Bennie and the Jets.