loading...
Canwest News Service
In Concert
Vinyl Café Christmas
Tour 2009
Where: Vancouver Centre for the
Performing Arts, 777 Homer St.
When: Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $25-$50, call 604-280-4444
We all have a root memory of what Christmas really means to us, sometimes good and sometimes not so good at all.
For the Montreal-raised and Toronto-based Stuart McLean, urbane and witty host of CBC radio's Vinyl Café, that memory is outside his hometown, up north in the Laurentians at the family's lake-side cottage. He remembers walking around the lake in the snowy silence, recalls lacing on his skates and the way the ice crackled under his blades.
It all sounds as homespun and simple as the tales he tells about Dave and Morley and the kids, Sam and Stephanie. Theirs is a world completely spun out of McLean's imagination but as real to many Canadians as, well, that winter outside the front door. It's part of the Christmas season now to have McLean's Vinyl Café caravan pull into town and dispense the stories and, not incidentally, the ever compelling musical guests.
Over the years I've picked up on a lot of singers and players from the Vinyl Café, such as Suzie Vinnick, Jason Fowler and Reid Jamieson. For these three Vancouver shows, McLean will be presenting singer/songwriter Jill Barber and bluesman Matt Anderson.
Keeping his ears open to new music wasn't all that easy for McLean at first.
"I made this decision about seven years ago that I wanted to shine a light on young Canadian musicians," says McLean. "It was interesting, I made the decision intellectually and I told my producer [Jess Milton] and our music producer [Julie Penner] and they started bringing me stuff and I kept saying, well, yeah, that — but not that. Because I had stopped listening to music.
"What happens is you turn 30 and our lives get busy and we stop listening to new stuff. We listen to the stuff that makes us feel comfortable, the music we grew up with and I had stopped listening to new stuff. But we kept at it and finally I was re-educated. For me it's one of the real gifts of this show."
Long before McLean was spinning tales and presenting new music, for a decade he cut his CBC radio teeth as a researcher and writer for the brilliant Sunday morning current affairs show that ran for 20 years until 1996 called, directly enough, Sunday Morning. The job entailed a lot of travel, both international and all over Canada.
And now, it's been 10 years since he started regularly touring Vinyl Café throughout the country.
"When I arrive in Vancouver, I like to go out and pound down through Yaletown and walk along the seawall. That's what I like to do the best."
jpmac@gmx.net
