Toronto’s amazing month continues, to the point that I cannot think of a better place to be, in June, if culture is the thing that you want to devour. The Griffin was followed by Luminato, featuring new works by Robert Lepage and Murray Schafer, and its corollary of the New Waves Festival at the Young Centre; then by the North by Northeast Music Festival and ReelHeART, the International Film Festival of independent features, and now the Jazz Festival.

At North by Northeast I went down to the Courthouse, on Adelaide Street, and caught an amazing performance by the various bands of the Arts & Crafts collective, including Jason Collett, Charles Spearin, the Apostles of Hustle and, of course, Kevin Drewe’s Broken Social Scene. Feist, apparently fed up with counting one to ten, made her own rocking appearance and played up a storm next to her ex-, band leader Drewe.

At New Waves at the Young Centre, a host of families were able to see a variety of shows, all of them performed in the various nooks and crannies as well as the theatres and studios of the Distillery arts complex, all of them for free. Many of the short shows featured the Centre’s ad hoc ensemble of really quite extraordinary Toronto artists thrown together in spontaneous combination to see what happened: David Cox, an outstanding tap dancer, with the beat box performer Subliminal and musician Waleed Abdulhamid (a child television star in Sudan, in a previous life) in a percussive jam; the extraordinary trumpeter of The Flying Bulgars, David Buchbinder, as part of each evening’s “Collaboratory Jam,” with Brecht diva Patricia O’Callaghan and the a capella singers of Suba Sankaran’s “Retrocity” .

Each room had a different flavour—cell-phone plays and, in the ‘Espresshow Room’, a stage where patrons could perform for free shots of coffee. And they did. A music class that had travelled down from North Bay, with an earnest young high school lad who made the inadvertently funny comment that: “This is what I do when I’m able to shut the door and play by myself”, before going on to play a touching composition of his own. Other performers were in their seventies. Another, a stand-up comic (with the help of a stool), was just ten. In another room, just one of a plethora of combinations, fiddler Miranda Mulholland (of the Rattlesnake Choir) joined dancers Andrea Nann and Brendan Wyatt and poet Robert Priest. Priest read a subdued love poem that will probably never have as good a reading as it did on the Saturday afternoon when Nann and Wyatt followed it with a duet that stunned the audience into a breathtaking silence the likes of which I have rarely heard. (It was so quiet it was deafening.)

With Andrea’s permission, here’s my amateur recording of Trick Rider, another of the ‘Divination Duets’, one of 11 performed to music by Gordon Downie. Performed by Wyatt and Nann—whom some will remember as having choreographed and danced to music animating the poems of Michael Ondaatje’s year 2000 collection, Handwriting.

Click here for video clip: andrea-nann-trick-rider-for-web