The Violin Concerto has a strange history. Beginning as a work for Violin and Piano called Fading Light, written when I was a student at the University of Toronto. It was shelved. The student who asked me to write it wasn’t able to perform it—I forget why. Then, during a reading at an event called Classical Social (which was a Classical music jam session that existed for about a year back around 2013-14) with only a few people in the room, one of whom was an accordionist who

The thought of putting it down, of putting the bass down—my bass—after all of these years is something I have been reflecting upon more and more recently. I will stop playing at some point, we all do, but the question is: what would picking a date to stop playing mean? When I was in grade school I had a friend, Lori. We, along with a few others, had a group that hung out together at school. On the last day of school I was standing with her before she got on the school bus tha

My friend and artist, Doug Stone, just packed up his art show, which he presented at the coffee shop at the end of my street. Neighbourhood coffee shops are their own unique social system. Like neighbourhood bars everyone who spends time there has a different story, everyone came from a different place, but the common thread is: you want to get out of yourself, out of your head, out of your mood—you want to connect with something beyond yourself; at least this is the case for