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The envelope arrived in April: The Toronto music festival North by Northeast was inviting us, the members of the Portland new-jazz band Freight Train Casanova, to play a prime showcase during the three-day June event. We were flattered. We were excited. Then we read the fine print: We'd have to pay $350 as a band just to enter Canada--NXNE would only pay $175 for our performance. As further disincentive, we had to sign a contract stating that we would not play anywhere else in Toronto that weekend, virtually assuring a financial loss. We couldn't even sell tapes or T-shirts because of the border tariffs. It seemed like a fool's mission. What can we say? We're a band of fools. None of us had ever been to Toronto, and this trip sounded like fun. We did everything we could to make it affordable. We sold T-shirts around Portland. We staged a fund-raiser in May at Produce Row. We signed on as a replacement for late cancellations at the Cobalt Lounge. Finally, we dug into our own pockets. On Wednesday, June 10, one day prior to the festival, we caught a prop plane to Vancouver, British Columbia. Our one-hour layover turned into eight hours when we were held up by customs--not because we were smuggling drugs, but simply because the officer labored over our paperwork, impervious to the movement of time. The other airport personnel felt so sorry for us that they raced us across the terminal in motorized carts. We arrived just in time to watch our connecting flight leave the gate. There was nothing to be done but curl up on the floor with a couple of bottles of duty-free liquor and wait for the next flight in the morning. After finally arriving in Toronto, we rented a van and drove to our discount dormitory in the red-light district. Our showcase was at the Rex Hotel, a Toronto jazz landmark on Queen Street, a long, hip night-life strip near downtown. The street was hopping and the club was packed. Four women in NXNE T-shirts showed us where to put our equipment. We'd had little sleep and no showers in 24 hours, but the adrenalin pumped, and when we walked out on that stage at midnight to a standing-room crowd, we were one band, one mind, one purpose--this is why we went to Toronto. We don't know what we did, but when we got down off the stage after an hour, the crowd was impressed. Everyone was talking to us like we were rock stars. They didn't seem to know we had never played out of Portland before that night. The event satisfied more than our egos. Freight Train made this trip in part to see what other bands from different parts of the world are doing, and we discovered an amazing new scene popping up, a rebirth of new-school jazz. We think of it as jazz interpreted for an audience raised on punk, integrating the raw emotional experiences of bands like Nirvana, the Sex Pistols and the Pogues with the cool stylings of Mingus, Charlie Parker and Eastern European gypsy folk. If forced to cite influences, Freight Train would list Tom Waits, Dr. John and Captain Beefheart among them. It turns out we're not alone. We even played on the same bill as a band with identical instrumentation--accordion, clarinet, violin, cello, saxophone, bass, guitar and junkyard percussion. The Providence, R.I., act calls itself Amoebic Ensemble. Margaret Wienk, the band's bassist and co-composer, says that she and her bandmates have felt isolated in their hometown, where club owners want to play it safe and book only straightforward power-pop bands. Another group we encountered, the Articles, play alterna-jazz with a driving horn section and a heavy ska beat. They have found that audiences are much more appreciative of their sound outside their native Detroit. Because of this, the Articles are permanently on the road, happily peddling their three CDs directly to audiences. Each member receives room and board and $10 a day on the band's self-managed tour. Not exactly the most encouraging news, but it's hardly deterred us. We are now back in Portland, a closer and stronger band for the experience. We're booked through September, and we've decided to cast our recording lot with some of the excellent indies, studios and producers right here in Portland. The bands we met seem to think that the West Coast and this city in particular is where it's happening. We wouldn't want to disappoint them. |
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