I met up with Miles Hearn and his nature walk group this morning at the foot of Beechwood Drive. This is a section of the Don Valley which was once very polluted by industry along the river. The industry is long gone and the river and the valley it flows through continue to recover.
We watched Pacific salmon jumping up over a small falls on the river for a while. These Coho and Chinook salmon have been planted in Lake Ontario for as long as I can remember.
Here are some of the highlights of this morning’s walk in pictures:
Little butterfly on FleabaneDryad’s SaddleHighbush CranberrycaterpillarDowny WoodpeckerDowny Woodpeckera turtle in disguiseMilkweed PodsCockleburrGrey CatbirdGrey CatbirdGrey Catbird
I’m not even sure now, what year it was we went to San Antonio. Maybe it was 2015? The occasion was the International Accordion Festival. Our flight got canceled so we got into town a bit late, and when we finally found the festival, the music was already happening. Santiago Jimenez (yep, Flaco’s brother) was on stage working magic with his squeezebox, and our pals Candy and Stagg were already on the dance floor.
That was quite a time. We heard the amazing Yuri Yunakov, performing Bulgarian wedding music, and Yves Lambert et le Bébert Orchestra, representing Quebec. There was some Indigenous Chicken Scratch Music, and also a fab party band called Los Texmaniacs. There was as much accordion music as I freak like me could digest. Last I heard, the International Accordion Festival was ancient history. Too bad.
The new episode of The Agency Podcast is now available. Listen right here or find it at all the good podcast places.
This week: Candy goes to Georgia Crazy chess scandal Making the Cut Thirteen Lives Lizzo’s Watch Out For the Big Grrrls Delhi Crime Season 2 ….and more
This morning’s nature walk with naturalist Miles Hearn took us to The Guild Inn Estate in Scarborough, near the Bluffs. I haven’t been there in many years. I recall back in my university days in the early 80s there was a huge sculpture exhibition on the grounds there. I don’t think I’ve been back since until today.
The property was initially a residence. It was a seminary for a short period. Then from 1932 to 1979 it was the Guild of All Arts, which was like a arts cooperative. In 2017 it became the Guild Inn Estate, a wedding and special events space. With plenty of woods and lots of shoreline, it’s also a great spot for a nature walk.
The highlight of this morning’s walk was a beautiful Chicken of the Woods, growing on a stump. Here are some other highlights….
New England Aster
There are many asters in flower on the property right now including New England Aster, Panicled Aster, Calico Aster, Large Leaved Aster, and Arrow-leaved Aster and more.
We’re used to seeing Jack-in-the-Pulpet in bloom earlier in summer. This time of year, it is identifiable by a tell-tale clump of red berries.
Black-capped Chickadee
We saw and heard a few birds, such as some Black-capped Chickadees, hoping for handouts, but with not so many birds around, botany was the focus of this walk.
Miles Hearn talking Horsetail
Scattered across the Guild Inn grounds are remnants of historic Toronto architecture. Here are some examples….
I came across this fab film while surfing around the YouTube. It’s a documentary about the friendship and musical partnership between blues great Champion Jack Dupree and a guitarist from Denmark named Kenn Lending. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I’m sharing this from Kenn Lending’s YouTube channel. Looks like he has many excellent videos up over there. I’ll be coming back for a longer visit soon.
I’ve been watching some of Ben Zanders music interpretation master classes on the YouTube. They are all fabulous, and this one in particular I love. I know little about classical music but this cello sonata seems to me to be out of this world fantastic. Zander opens doors for the players in this series in so many surprising ways and it is wonderful to watch it happen.
“What’s missing from your playing is the weirdness….” “Have you ever watched a bullfight?” It seems at some points as if Zander is going to explode into the music, and what a performance by Nitzan Gal, cello and Moriah Trenk, piano! Who knew classical music could be this exciting?
As I’m getting a little better at playing fiddle, I’ve been feeling that it was time to upgrade my bow. I decided to sell one of my banjos to fund a bow purchase. It was time to part ways with my Bart Reiter Standard banjo, a great instrument I’ve been playing for several years. I managed to sell that banjo at a fair price, and I hope the fellow who bought it enjoys playing it as much as I did.
I made an appointment to try out some bows at the Sound Post. I asked to try bows at various price points from a couple hundred to about $800. I also wanted to try both pernambuco and carbon fibre bows. They were very accommodating at the store and had prepared for me several bows to try.
The first thing that struck me as I tried the various bows was that all of them were a big improvement on the one I’ve been using. I started listening closely as I played the various bows and managed to eliminate some of them fairly quickly. I did all this without knowing the price or details of any of the bows. It was visually obvious which were the carbon fibre bows vs wood but that’s all I knew.
My selection was down to 3 octagonal wood bows and 1 carbon fibre bow. I liked one of the wood bows particularly. The person who was helping me also gave me her assessment of the various bows with my fiddle. It turned out the 3 remaining wood bows were all the same model but the same manufacturer, Knoll, from Germany. I learned that with wood bows, each bow is a little unique, even compared to others of the same model. Carbon fibre bows, on the other hand are apparently more consistent from one to the next of the same model. I guess that is because they are manufactured to tight tolerances.
I thought the carbon fibre bow was a close second to my favourite of the pernambuco bows. When I played the wood bow the sound seemed maybe a bit warmer. It isn’t so easy for me to describe the differences. The carbon fibre bow felt to me maybe a bit grittier. I’m talking about a small difference. I think I would have been perfectly happy with the carbon fibre bow as well. It turned out the wood bow I liked was considerably less expensive than the carbon fibre one, and that’s what I ended up purchasing with my banjo money.
The new bow feels and sounds great. It brings out much better tonal range from my fiddle than the one I’ve been learning with. As well, it has much more power, and I feel it is working with me, not against me.
27th Street 