Ode to the Bella Vista

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This article was published 11/06/2022 (1207 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Count Scott Nolan among the many Winnipeggers who long for one more great night out at some of the famous Winnipeg restaurants that have served their last meal.

For the city folk singer, songwriter and producer, the Bella Vista restaurant wasn’t just a mainstay of Italian cuisine at the corner of Wolseley Avenue and Maryland Street from 1976 to 2019.

For years the stage that Bella Vista owner Armand Colosimo set up in the lounge became Nolan’s musical outlet.

“I spent my 30s there doing Wednesday nights. I had so many great bands,” Nolan, 47, says. “Yeah, it weighs on my heart when some of these great places disappear, but it’s kind of the way of life.”

Nolan says nostalgia and melancholy led him to pen an elegy to his old hang. Bella Vista is the opening track, a tasty appetizer on an eight-course musical menu titled The Suburb Beautiful, a long-awaited album he’s created with Winnipeg composer and arranger Glenn Buhr.

“Every now and again / like the sound of a sad violin / I’ll whisper your name / words never change / Bella Vista,” Nolan sings in a hushed voice in the waltz.

Nolan and Buhr, along with musicians from the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra performed Bella Vista at a 2019 concert, and Nolan remembers Colosimo’s reaction.

“When we performed with the orchestra (in 2019), Armand came to the show; he rarely (went) anywhere outside the Bella Vista and he was quite emotional.

“He called me the next day and said, ‘We need to keep the restaurant open for the song.’ He was so touched by the song that it compelled him to keep going instead of retiring.”

Colosimo eventually did retire later that year — the restaurant has new owners and has become Shorty’s Pizza — but the Bella Vista will live on in song at the West End Cultural Centre Sunday at 2 p.m., when Nolan and Buhr give The Suburb Beautiful its official launch and perform the album in its entirety.

The Penderecki String Quartet, which is based at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., where Buhr taught for 36 years, will join Nolan’s band, which includes bassist Gilles Fournier, percussionist Joanna Miller and Paul Balcain on sax, on the stage.

Buhr will be behind the piano on Sunday as well, and he says he’ll fill the same role Duke Ellington played with his jazz orchestras for decades, as arranger and conductor as well as performer.

“It’s a hybrid show with a band and the classical musicians, so I think it’s going to be a treat for the audience,” he says.

While Nolan sings a sad farewell to the Bella Vista in the opening song, he pays tribute to other places in and around Winnipeg that have clung to his memories.

The Yellow Lights of Moray combines his imagery of the bridge that connects Charleswood and St. James with an arrangement that would be at home at the Winnipeg New Music Festival, which Buhr helped found in 1992 when he was the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence.

Nolan also sings about Annabella Street and the province’s vast horizons in a song titled Manitoba Skyline. On the wistful Arlington Street, he seems to channel the weird sounds of rock great Tom Waits.

“I’d like to attribute that to Glenn’s beautiful orchestration. When I play that song alone, it’s quite a simple three-chord song,” Nolan says. “This is where Glenn really began doing expansions, rather than just arrangements. He would expand it in the most incredible ways, giving it a landscape.

“There’s absolutely no way I would have created that without him.”

The Suburb Beautiful is Nolan’s first album since 2016, but he’s been keeping busy since as a record producer, helping put the finishing touches on albums by Stephen Fearing, Little Miss Higgins and William Prince’s three records.

Moving to the other side of the studio control panel is a bit awkward, he says, but the team that’s been put together for The Suburb Beautiful has helped him along.

“I do have some trouble with it,” he says. “I find sometimes a good producer has many roles to play, and sometimes one of those is (to gain) the confidence and trust of the artist, willing to be their champion and remind them why they’re in the studio in the first place.”

Some recording time was done at home as well, like so many other pandemic-era albums. Nolan would put together a demo, just him singing and playing guitar, send it to Buhr via email. Buhr would then transcribe the song and create a classical arrangement for a later studio session with the Penderecki quartet.

The result are tunes that defy genre, where folk and classical sounds ebb and flow and sometimes disappear altogether or emerge at the same time.

“Those songs, what do they use, melody and chords are just like classical music,” Buhr says. “If it was just him alone it wouldn’t be that and if it was just me alone it wouldn’t be that.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall