Once in a while it’s good to take a chance on a concert or play that’s outside one’s normal sort of thing. Sometimes that turns out really well. For example, I’m no great fan of musicals but I loved Tiger Bride at Soulpepper. So t was in that spirit that I went to see Council at Walter Hall on Monday evening.

Council is a duo made up of American singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane who plays piano, electric & acoustic guitars and harmonium and Finnish violinist/fiddler Pekka Kuusisto who plays violin, harmonium and four-string electric violin. Both guys sing and do various things with loops and electronics and both are clearly very accomplished musicians.

The concert was a bit confusing with no printed playlist and pretty sporadic (and I think incomplete) information from the stage on what they were playing so I’m going to write about general impressions of the concert as a whole rather than individual numbers.

I liked it best when Pekka was playing with traditional Finnish material. He’s a really idiomatic fiddler and the use of electronics definitely added atmosphere. The singer-sonwriterish stuff was less to my taste. It was mostly in that quiet, angsty mode. “It’s raining in Brooklyn and the dog ate my last cigarette” kind of thing” (1) or “Here’s me on a scale of caring. I’m at zero”. (2). Just not my thing but perfectly fine if it’s yours! You win some. You lose some.

(!) Not a real quote. I made it up.
(2) A real quote.

Photo credit: Lucky Tang.