In the midst of Earthbound Trio’s set, a sudden explosion of noise cuts Bob Fitzgerald’s upright bass short. It’s the sort of noise reserved for Michael Bay films; not what you want to hear during a show, and especially not during the Galaxie Rising Star competition at Fredericton’s Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival. I had come to interview the opening act and presumptive winners, Tomato/tomato, who had garnered themselves a full 50% of the online vote, though admittedly I was rooting for both teams, and that noise caused the bottom of my stomach to drop. Mike ‘Mumble’ Humble, percussionist extraordinaire, tells me things were even worse from his perspective, “My ear drum dropped out. That was the loudest thing I have ever heard. Like wow, man. That monitor was set up nice and loud for the loop to come in later, and then, all of a sudden, it’s killing me with nowhere to hide. But you just keep playing, and you play through it, right? It’s not the first time that pedals have made whacky noises.” Continue reading Earthbound Trio’s Rising Star
Tag Archives: Saint John
Tomato/Tomato Confirm That It Is Pronounced ‘Tomato’
Tomato/Tomato’s John McLaggan wants to be invisible. It’s an unexpected sentiment to find in a showman, certainly from one of the forerunners in the 2014 Galaxie Rising Star competition; but it’s something that his love of music has inevitably overcome. “I’m a bit of an introvert. I guess I should have prefaced it with that. See, any other super power and people are going to want stuff from you; if you’re super-strong it’s like people are, ‘Hey, come pick up this thing for me’. If you’re super-fast it’s like ‘Hey, can you run over here and get this?’ Now invisibility…” But that was the Old John, and I’m told he has improved significantly with age, even if invisibility still has its appeal. Continue reading Tomato/Tomato Confirm That It Is Pronounced ‘Tomato’
The Saint John Stone Sculpture Symposium
The Saint John Stone Sculpting Symposium began with fire and brimstone, and massive flows of lava moving across great scathes of our fair province. Fortunately for everyone involved the last 390 million years has given things plenty of time to cool down; bystanders and artists alike have little more to be concerned about than the lingering clouds of Devonian by-product that have come to replace the usual harbour-front fog each morning. It was on the far side of one of these that I found Alison Gayton, a returning intern, finishing her lunch inside of the site’s many small tents. She offered me a cherry tomato, but the twenty seconds it had taken me to cross the lot had already filled my mouth my with a fine dust. Continue reading The Saint John Stone Sculpture Symposium