ALLEGRA CHAMBER ORCHESTRA: festivELLE
SUNDAY, 16 MARCH 2025 | DOORS at 19:30, Music at 20:00
This is a TICKETED EVENT
Janna Sailor hosts this Allegra Chamber Orchestra concert featuring Saina Khaledi on santur and Katie Rife on percussion. Katie will be performing on marimba and vibraphone. Her set will showcase pieces written for her by local composers Jennifer Butler, Dorothy Chang, Anna Höstman, Saina Khaledi, and Jocelyn Morlock. festivELLE always manages to find introspective and exquisite works by female identifying composers and Allegra remains one of Vancouver’s most thoughtful and superlative cultural institutions.
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TONY MONTAGUE tells the story of THE RENOWNED BILLY WATERS
THURSDAY, 20 MARCH 2025 | DOORS at 19:30, Talk at 20:00
This is a FREE EVENT
Journalist and cultural historian Tony Montague tells the fascinating story of Billy Waters, the first Black American performer to gain widespread fame. This multimedia presentation traces Waters’s roots as a freeman in cosmopolitan, late 18th-century New York, to his service in the Royal Navy at the climax of the Napoleonic Wars, to his musical career busking on London’s streets. By Tony’s reckoning, Waters represents a vital link in the development of African American music, a full century before the emergence of ragtime, jazz, and the blues.
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THE ELLIOT FREEDMAN GROUP – QUINTET LIVE ALBUM RELEASE
SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2025 | DOORS at 19:30, Music at 20:00
This is a GIFT ECONOMY EVENT
The Elliot Freedman Group presents harmonically elegant, rhythmically detailed, and uncompromisingly original, non-canonical jazz based in Elliot’s own compositions. The rich, sweet tones of Elliot’s baritone guitar accentuate his instinctive harmonic vocabulary and fondness for unique chord voicings. Along with vibraphonist Nick Apivor, pianist Winston Mastushita, bassist Dan Howard, and drummer Paul Mason, Elliot lays down lyrical melodies and complex harmonies, detailed interplay and exciting improvisation, propelling rhythms and rich textures, collaborative creation and individual expression. The group will be celebrating the release of a live album recorded at a special concert in Nanaimo last summer, Bands of Merriment, Vol. 1 (WEST COAST QUINTET LIVE).
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TSUNAGARI TAIKO
FRIDAY, 11 APRIL 2025 | DOORS at 19:30, Music at 20:00
This is a gift economy event
Tsunagari Taiko features two superbly powerful, balletic drummers, Koji Hada of Aichi-based Wadaiko Unit KOH and Keita Kanazashi of the Tokyo-based HA•YA•TO. You may recall Keita’s thrilling performance here last spring, alongside tsugaru shamisen shredder Hanawa Chie. This will be absolute thunder!
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DROWNING THE MICE
THURSDAY, 29 MAY 2025 | DOORS at 19:30, PERFORMANCE at 20:00
This is a FREE EVENT
This is a wonderful opportunity to see theatre in the making, a solo show that is both in the process of finding its shape and, we suspect, already beautifully drawn from Avi Dolgin’s substantial body of thinking and writing. Avi’s contemplations tend toward theology, politics, and his own mistaken choices — he has written two contemporary monologues based on biblical characters — and he might be described as a “theatrical midrashist”, exuding Talmudic, exegetical good humour and lessons learned from the trial-and-error of life. He is offering this performance as a free event; but he will ask the audience for thoughtful criticism he can use to polish “Drowning the Mice” into its final form.
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AL QAHWA
WEDNESDAY, 23 JULY 2025 | DOORS at 19:30, Music at 20:00
This is a gift economy event
Al Qahwa will guide you on a musical journey you may not take frequently, bridging Middle Eastern cultures and hearts. Led by Maryem Tollar on vocals, qanun (Arabic table harp), and riqq (Arabic frame drum), the band features Ernie Tollar on wind instruments, Naghmeh Farahmand on percussion, and Waleed Abdulhamid on bass, vocals, and percussion. “Al Qahwa” is Arabic for “The Coffee House”, inspired by cafe culture in the Middle East, where people go to hear the latest news, music, poetry and stories. Their repertoire includes both traditional songs from Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan, as well as compositions by members of the band.
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