For 2012, the festival takes place Saturday September 15th. It's starts at 2pm at Coronation Park across from the CNE gates before moving on to liberty village and Christie Pits.

The Schedule includes The Lemon Bucket Orkestra, The Complete Street Band and Rae Spoon.

He also is a DJ under the name FZero. you can get a taste for his style through his BitBang! podcast. Here's the mix he released today:

http://bitbang.ca/audio/BitBang68.mp3

It's a free monthly event, open to all, held in a Photographers loft space.

This summer look for the jams happening in outdoor spots like the island.

There is a great review of the event on gailatlarge.com:

"There is no protocol other than a simple sign-up sheet so people know when they’re up next, the same as what you’d find at a pool hall or a dart board. The only difference is it’s all self-serve: BYO drinks and snacks. It’s like going to a house party except a third of the space is covered in guitar cases, percussion instruments, speakers and cords leading to an amplifier."

I do wish there was more artists making music at this level. The lyrics are poetry of the highest degree, fiercely honest, open-hearted and thoughtfully crafted with healthy doses of love and compassion.

Check out the full album here. It really is a work that deserves to be heard in full. You might also want to check out the video on the Beautiful City post which contains a great live performance by Kamau.

http://www.archive.org/download/GivenTheSpeedOfTrees/Given-the-speed-of-trees.mp3

'Right click' + 'save as' to download the mp3 or download all aduio stems as a zip (331MB) if you want to make a remix. It's 100bpm in the key of B.

It's a song I composed using the Creative Commons sample library at ccmixter.org. I then found a couple of poems in my old note books dealing with change, rebirth, the tention between the individual and culture/tradition, and creating in the digital age.

As CCmixter lists samples by tempo and key I thought it would be easy to mix something together. While that is probably true, I ended up working on and off on this for the past few months. I May have been a little over-ambitious in how many different sounds I tried to blend together but it was damn fun. Hope you enjoy the results. I also encourage you to dive in yourself and be an active participant in the free culture Creative Commons encourages.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0).

List of samples

Ana (Instrumenta... by Vieux Farka...
B Calm Violin 2 by Dimitri Art...
Code plays shaku by Nitropox@CC...
Guitar Harmonics by DoKashiteru
music improvement by FORENSIC
010908 cordes 01 by Morusque
Groovy Tom Hop by PorchCat
Unwind, unwind (... by debbizo
Waffer Thin by Alex
Surprise ME by mykleanthony
Waiting for... by projectQUES...
Waiting For by BarryMorgan
Percussion Loops... by annabloom
Baptism (Re-engi... by debbizo
Emerge from Dish... by snowflake
Jazz/Blues In A ... by unreal_dm
By Slapbass http://www.freesound.org/us...
REGGAE WAH GUITAR RIFF NORM.wav http://www.freesound.org/sa...
By DKifer http://www.freesound.org/us...
uke_bminor_strum.wav http://www.freesound.org/sa...
By Anton http://www.freesound.org/us...
fast_8bar_key-d1.wav http://www.freesound.org/sa...
 

Accompanied by a guitar the group sings a few songs each week.

Their repitoire includes a wide range of popular music from the last 50 years.

I was blessed to see her perform from Spin on a recent Art Spin. She was the first stop in the art crawl. After the performance, amazed by what we had just witnessed, my partner and I looked at each other and wondered: "How is anyone else supposed to top that?"

Go see her perform as soon as you get the chance! Take a listen to the songs on her web site on your way.

The result is one of the most intimate music experiences you are likely to enjoy in Toronto. The space itself, reminiscent of an art gallery, with it's white painted walls and large scale paintings, is a pleasure for the senses.

While proper seating is limited, there is a plethora of cushions. This means lots of room for dancing and the sweet joy of lying sprawled out on the floor while listening to live music.

They offer the space to musicians for free about once a week, but allow the musicians to charge a cover if they wish.

They use hip hop culture to help empower youth and strengthen community engagement.