Jazz guitarist’s Juno just as sweet sans gala

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This article was published 09/06/2021 (1900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jocelyn Gould took no steps on a red carpet and missed out on a gala ceremony, but the reward is just the same.

The Winnipeg guitarist earned a Juno Award for Jazz Album of the Year on June 4 for her debut record, Elegant Traveler, and celebrated with a pizza party at her Winnipeg home and an appearance on the livestream broadcast via Zoom, the video-conferencing app.

“I did not see this coming when I started playing guitar in my bedroom as a teenager,” she said when accepting the award.

Her cellphone and social media sites have been abuzz ever since with congratulations from family and friends from “every corner of my life,” she says.

Gould, who also a professor at Humber College in Toronto and the head of its guitar department, is looking forward to the day she can return to the stage. She has dates scheduled for August in Charleston and Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, and in France in September, but her tour plans are dependent on how effective the world’s vaccination programs will be against the coronavirus.

“Going to one place might be easy, but with quarantines, you can’t really be bouncing around from country to country at the moment,” Gould says.

In a normal year, Gould’s Juno win might have made her a star attraction at the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival, which takes place in mid-June, but she’s content with waiting her turn in to perform on a Winnipeg stage again.

“It’s funny because last year at this time, I had a gig at 15 jazz festivals in Canada, and it was like, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, ‘cause they’ll happen next year,’ and now we’re here and it’s still not happening,” she says with a laugh.

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Everyone has had their way of coping with the emotional challenges brought upon by the pandemic’s prescription of social distancing, isolation and quarantines.

For Winnipeg synthpop duo Ghost Twin — Karen and Jaimz Asmundson — they were able to channel the constant wave of dread into the new album Love Songs for End Times, which hit streaming services and the group’s Bandcamp site June 4.

The album, which follows up Ghost Twin’s 2017 debut Plastic Heart, mixes Jaimz’s dark, industrial-sounding new wave keyboards and guitar with Karen’s classically trained vocals that soar above the heavy bass beats. The result is a melody with striking contrasts.

Jaimz says the album’s apocalyptic title began with two of the album’s songs, Blue Sunshine and We Are the Damned. The first song is a love song he wrote to Karen “about this looming dread I was feeling of societal collapse and irreversible climate change to the point we’ll be living in parched deserts in a few decades,” he says.

“What is weird is that we decided to call it this before 2020 happened,” he says. “What we thought would be a bit tongue-in-cheek just became kind of normalized in how we’re all feeling right now.”

He says the future won’t be all doom and gloom. “The positive is that at least we’ll have each other and can get through whatever scorched future awaits us.”

Ghost Twin was able to test out many of tracks from Long Songs for End Times during the group’s U.S. tour in 2019. The Asmundsons were able to put the finishing touches on the songs with help from Winnipeg producer Michael Falk in 2020 when the pandemic ebbed and businesses were allowed to open.

Working on the songs, many of which have dark themes, provided a bit of a release during long stretches of isolation, they say.

“We went through these same turbulent times as everyone else; the album suddenly feeling less important as we were all overhauling what day-to-day life meant,” Karen says.

The two team up to write Ghost Twin’s songs and both put together video projections that are a background component of their shows.

“Karen and I are constantly mining clips from old VHS movies that express an emotion, symbolic or archetype in our lyrics,” Jaimz says, adding they have plans to release a VHS mixtape with visuals to go with the album.

Singles on the way

● The TV network AMI, which provides described-audio versions of television shows and movies as well as features on Canadians who live with blindness, partial sight and medical conditions that cause accessibility challenges, has recorded a profile of Winnipeg reggae singer Rickson Makwe that is shown on the channel and on its website, ami.ca.

Makwe, who was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was blinded as a child in 1996 in an explosion at school during the First Congo War, emigrated to Canada and has settled in Winnipeg, where he has launched a music career. Earlier this year, he released a single, My Love, and he plans to release a French-language single in July.

● Winnipeg singer-songwriter Joey Landreth released a new single, Twilight, June 4 and will come out with a new EP on July 30. Titled Songs I Love, it will be an acoustic collection of cover tunes that was a pandemic collaboration with his wife, Anna Salgadoe, who is a video producer. Go to wfp.to/twilight to view the video of Twilight.

● Dance floors have been empty for months, but Winnipeg songstress Olivia Lunny has a new single ready when the pandemic allows moving to the beat again.

The 22-year-old Lunny released Who Could Say No on May 28, and has teamed up with Grammy winner Boi-1da, the in-house producer at Drake’s OVO Sound label, for her first full-length record, Album No. 1, which comes out July 9 with Universal Music Canada.

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall