Mervon Mehta & Canada’s Global Orchestra Kuné

Mervon Mehta – Kuné - Canada’s Global Orchestra

We as a nation have become adventurous in our tastes for music, cuisine, fashion and long for a cosmopolitan lifestyle. The faces that pass us on the street, or in transit, look new to us. Children come in many colours and sound the same high-pitch joy through moments of play and delight. We are the world and are slowly embracing it.

At the centre of much of this activity is Koerner Hall executive director of performing arts at the Hall and the Royal Conservatory of Music, Mervon Mehta.

The programming is about as eclectic and accomplished as any major metropolitan centre where investment in the arts is a vital strategy and measure of the intellectual and physical well-being of its populace. I dropped in on Mehta at the Royal Conservatory for an update on a personal project he’s been touting a good decade or more – Canada’s Global Orchestra. Here’s that conversation.

I’ve got the CD in hand. Canada's Global Orchestra. What was the inspiration for putting together a band of so many universally talented young players?

It started to rumble around my head ten years ago when I first came back to Toronto after twenty years in the U.S., and I began to understand what the diversity of this city really means. Because we all talk about it, but what does it really say?

And then I started meeting musicians and being asked to provide an Indian tabla player for some group, or a Latin American sax player for another group, or put together a band. I thought, there are so many incredible musicians in this town that come from elsewhere and bring their talent with them and are massively trained or conservatory trained or in the trenches trained or street trained - beautiful players. I then started to think - what if we put them all together and form a band that kind of looks and sounds like Toronto or looks and sounds like Canada? The sesquicentennial year seemed to be the opportune time to do it.

We had a new kind of energy in Ottawa and there was a moment during one of the debates between Harper and Mulcair and Trudeau where Trudeau said something vaguely left-wing, vaguely socialist. Harper looked down his nose and said, “Well Justin, that may work for your people, but it would never work for old stock Canadians’. I’m watching on TV wondering what is ‘old stock Canadians’? What does that even mean?

Is that a dog whistle politics kind of thing? And then I start thinking, well I'm an immigrant, and I've been here in Canada for 56 years, and I’m now 58. Am I old stock or am I new stock? Am I a new Canadian or am I old?

My mother's third generation Canadian but my father's born in Bombay. So, what does that make me? It's just troubling to think about and why should we pigeonhole each other, so I thought about putting a band together that's made up of all these people from everywhere that are beautiful musicians. We started auditioning and had a plan for a one-night stand. It's now grown and grown and grown.

Everybody is drawn from this area?

Everyone is drawn from Toronto. I mean, it would have been ideal to have it drawn from all over Canada, but we had to rehearse, so we rehearsed here over a year. We started auditioning in October of 2016. The band was together by December of 2016 and the first gig was June 2017. So, for those six months we had to get to know each other. We had to understand each other's genres and instruments and how to play modal music and how to play African rhythms and how to play Iranian modes and how to play Cuban modes and somehow put that into something that sounds like it's not a train wreck. And that took a long time.

Essentially, when you put all these parts together, you must find a compatible music in all of that.

It could be a lovely thing on paper, but music doesn't work like that. It was very important to find a way to work together and to put the music together and that's when I hired David Buchbinder to be our artistic director. He was in from the ‘get go’ of this project. Not only is he good at putting multicultural music together but he's also very good at putting multicultural people and kind of laying the table, if you will.

The first time we all get together as a band, the first quote, unquote rehearsal dinner was at Lula Lounge. And we just talked, and we told some stories and not everyone speaks English. I remember everyone went around the table and had a glass of wine and toasted each other and their tradition with their language and we just started to know each other. The second rehearsal I think or the third we still hadn’t taken our instruments out of the cases and we went up to a farm near Kleinberg somewhere and hiked in the woods in January and it was 10 or 20 below zero. We stood around a fire and told more stories and eventually we took the instruments out. The bamboo flute player from China was showing her flute to the Ukrainian sopilka player and how did these two instruments work and what's the dynamic range of them and how could they match if they play around harmonically. One flute on top and one above and how would they actually work together, and we figured out which one works, and which ones didn’t. It developed from there.

Does everyone have input in the arrangements?

Everyone brought at least one tune to the table and some were proficient in arranging their tune for the full ensemble. Some don't read music. Some don't do Sibelius or Fidelio notation software or any of the music composition tools. We had to bring some people to that. David Buchbinder arranged probably about half of the tunes. Some of the musicians arranged their own. Cuban pianist/composer Hilario Duran arranged two of them and a couple of other people came in when we needed help.

One of the things that really was central to the way we put the music together was; we have twelve people from twelve different countries, but we couldn't say everyone’s going to play an African tune now and we're going to play it as well as any African band. No. We only have one African guy who really gets that music in his bones and we couldn't similarly say OK, now we're going to play a Peruvian tune because we have a great Peruvian musician because no one really knows that Peruvian music. We had to figure out how to play the African tune. At the core of a tune would be the African rhythm of the African melody. But then how do we add a sitar to that and how do we add a Cuban sax to that or how do we add a bass to that? How do we add Brazilian percussion to that and match the African percussion so that it becomes not an African tune anymore? It starts as an African tune and blossoms into, if you will, a Toronto tune or a Canadian or something that speaks of this orchestra.

I know you love this city and your role in the arts and have really taking the lead here. At the helm of Koener Hall you bring people together in the music you support and have a keen eye for talent.  You must think that at this time with all the places in the world that you could be, this may be the best place to do what you're doing.

I absolutely 100 percent agree. I mean, I remember when I came back to Toronto now ten years ago. Some people, not many but some people said, like I was living in Philadelphia and before that I was living in Chicago, ‘why would you come back to Toronto,’ with some disdain in their voice. And I said, ‘are you kidding me? Look around what this city has to offer’. Not to mention the fact that I have a wife and a teenage son who wanted to go to school without guns and everything else that goes along with living in Canada. Look at the richness we have, not only in music, in film and theater and cuisine in neighborhoods. You know, the staff in this building comes from all over the world and shares whatever they have to share. It's not lost on me that I'm I still feel like an immigrant. I've been here for so long. I still feel like an outsider.

I think you will always sense that. I've been here 48 years and am very much Canadian. But I never lose touch from where I was born and where it started. Every evolving cultural centre finds it’s time and place in history.

David Buchbinder and I often talk about Toronto being a place not so unlike Andalucía in the 14th and 15th century where you had a huge Muslim influence; Arabic influence. You had a huge Catholic influence clearly and you also had a very big Jewish influence.

You go to Seville or Granada in Spain and you see the buildings that look Arabic with Arabic architecture and you taste the food which is fairly spicy - still kind of Western European but with more spices added - more than the jambalaya they do. And then you look at flamenco.

The vocal part of flamenco is absolutely Arabic. The dance part is absolutely taken from Kathak dance in India and the music and the guitar is taking from Western guitar players from Bach's age on and that all mixed into Andalucía. That’s the kind of a situation that we're living with in Toronto now. I see that not only in world music, quote unquote, but you know an artist like the Weeknd who is, very Toronto but also very much from Africa in his background. Drake's Jamaican. Half of his family absolutely influences the kind of music that he's doing which is now you know, number one in the world. But it's a very Toronto sound.

It’s Scarborough too, another region in our broad community.

It is because of him and The Weeknd and others that this has now blossomed. You have some of the best producers in hip hop living in Toronto and similarly with Kune. I think it sounds like the sound of Toronto or the sound of Canada. It's not nearly as commercial, I wish.

But would you want it to be commercial at this point?

If it became the next Buena Vista Social Club, no one would complain. That's not why we did the project.

To find these artists, was this David’s challenge?

We all did. Some of them we didn't know at all. The ‘tar’ player from Iran, no one had heard of her. She had only been in town for a couple of months. She emigrated after seven years of waiting for visas etc. and came with her family.

We had a lot of Syrian immigrants come and audition for us. Some of them are known. I mean, there are some people in the band that have been here for ten or fifteen years and we knew them. But everyone auditioned. No one was given a spot. We had about 150 people audition from I think they said, 47 different countries and we had a lot of people around the table.

Dave and I were certainly there but we also had some of our partners from Batuki Music. Nadine McNulty and Ann Mackeigan from CBC and Alan Davis from Small World Music. They were all part of the committee that listened to people.

The most important thing clearly was that people had to be able to play at a certain level but maybe even more important than that they had to be able to have an openness to playing with other genres, other cultures so that their voice wasn't going to stick out, but it was going to blend.

It was more difficult trying to find people who could do that as well as play at a high level. There was the certain very, very high level playing people that we didn't accept into the band because they were not as adventurous in their thinking.

The concert is April 7^th?

 It's also now part of a new festival in Toronto called Global Toronto which will go from April 4 to 7 with concerts at Lula Lounge, Hugh's Room Live, Aga Khan Museum, Small World Music Centre, The Rivoli and here in Koerner Hall. I think there are sixteen different Toronto based global music artists that have collaborated to put this festival together and quite a few concert programmers with bookers from across the US and one from France coming in for the week to see all the strong talent and hopefully book them.

An American in Paris

The average North American views France as a hub of artifacts and illustrious history, sometimes contrary and combatant when it comes to world affairs yet portrayed on film as a country of and for lovers, unlike any other. I thought about that as I tapped the icon displaying classic in-flight movies on the back seat in front of me and brought up the film, An American in Paris, clocking in at 113 minutes, for the first stage of an eight-hour flight home late September 2014.

Listening to George Gershwin’s rhapsodic crescendos and traffic-jam dissonance played deftly by pianist and literary wit Oscar Levant, who also plays the role of Adam Cook, a struggling concert pianist in the film alongside French ballet dancer Leslie Caron as Lise Dassin, ballerina and choreographer, and actor, and dancer Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan hints more to the urban chaos of New York City during the ‘jazz age’, than Paris, and yet still resonates six-plus decades later.

Parisian music of the day was more sweet-tempered and less blue noted; accordion, acoustic guitar, violin; Piaf, Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel – French chanson, tangos and gypsy music influences.

An American in Paris staging captures the essence of Paris in impressionistic terms along the lines of the pastoral and surreal landscape paintings of the 18^th century, Alfred Sisley. Even Kelly’s character, Jerry Mulligan, feigns being an artist living in tempera coloured surroundings.

Kelly and Caron dazzle and dance their way through one of the finest musicals of all times. One experiences the sympathetic chemistry between two polished dancers through Gershwin originals, “Our Love is Here to Stay” and “Embraceable You.” It’s the fluid body movement, up on the toes, smooth glide across the floor, soft embraces, and charming interaction that arouse emotions.

Kelly wisely chose Caron and cast her for this role. He also choreographed the closing scene which is estimated to have cost $500,000 to shoot the seventeen-minute dance sequence to Gershwin’s American in Paris. Remember, this was 1951.

Throughout, Kelly plays the part of a starving artist, yet so athletic and masculine he could be mistaken for a high-priced fitness instructor at a posh Beverly Hills fitness club. In fact, lack of funds doesn’t seem to impede his undiminished confidence or iron-will pursuit of the most desirable female in Paris, Lise Dassin (Caron).

To further my appetite and anticipation for more Gershwin, I resurrected recordings of rare piano rolls that surfaced in 2004 – Gershwin Plays Rhapsody in Blue, ‘An American in Paris,' 'Oh, Lady Be Good,' 'Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,' ‘S Wonderful', 'Promenade,’ and others on Shout! Factory/Biograph.

To imagine all this translating to a stage musical was more than the head and heart could envisage.

The stage adaptation is much different from the sunny ways of the Academy Award celebrated movie. This is Paris, 1945 during liberation and at the end of the Second World War - struggling with its darkest decade. The remnants of war are still visible in the surrounding buildings and wounds still festering between those who were collaborators with the Nazi regime and the resistance. That tension spells out in the opening dance number with full company and Gershwin’s 'Concerto in F.'

The opening scene finds Adam Hochberg (Matthew Scott), a composer, situated at an ornate grand piano with drink in hand and the silhouette of the Arc de Triomphe far in the background. Hochberg sets the stage and begins retelling the life story of his old friend Jerry Mulligan and narrates throughout.

The story remains much the same. Mulligan, an American serviceman and aspiring painter, decides to spend more time in Paris and pursue his art and falls in love with ballerina Lise Dassin. Mulligan dances, prances and sweet talks Dassin into a date even with Dassin committed to marrying song-and-dance hopeful Henri Baurel (Ben Michael.) Hochberg makes it a three-man struggle to win over the hand of Dassin. It becomes apparent that romance, music and art medicate and addresses the city’s long-suffering afflictions.

The stage adaptation of Craig Lewis’s book brings the full ensemble front and centre. Kelly was the focal point of the grand movie and tap dance, the story. Set designer Bob Crowley illuminates the stage in ravishing colours all perfectly synched. From the flickering lights of buildings in near ruin to that many moveable parts and projections. This is eye-popping wizardry.

Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon captured a Tony award for his ballet-to-Broadway treatment. The stage adaptation is light and  is absent the snap and dazzle of Gene Kelly’s footwork. This An American in Paris is more akin to Bernstein’s West Side Story, with it’s smooth, eloquent lifts and soft landings.

Canadian McGee Maddox, a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, assumes the role of Jerry Mulligan. Maddox plays Mulligan from a ballet stance. All parts are executed with grace and athleticism, yet as an actor and singer, he is less convincing. Both the Broadway version with Robert Fairchild in the lead role and screen version with Kelly easily transmit real affection and the passion of that first encounter. You readily embrace the tension of the moment and play for the new girl.

This is still one compelling and accomplished cast from Allison Walsh’s Lise Dassin, to Kirsten Scott as American philanthropist Milo Davenport, who takes more than a patron’s interest in Mulligan’s paintings and virile presence, to both Ben Michael as Henri Baurel and Matthew Scott as Adam Hochberg.

An American in Paris won Tony awards for Best Choreography, Best Lighting Design of a Musical, Best Orchestrations and Best Scenic Design of a Musical in 2015 and is playing at Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto until April 29, 2018.

A Conversation With .. Mike Bendixen (Newstalk 1010)

For Ted Woloshyn and me, it’s season number eight of Saturday’s with Ted at Newstalk 1010.

When I got the invite from Ted to be music director in 2010, I had not a clue how this would roll along. The opportunity to give music artists a solid shot at talking about new releases and concerts on a prime-time Toronto radio station appealed to me.

A good six years we filled four hours every Saturday afternoon. What a blessing for a news junkie pianist like me. Dignitaries, politicians, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, authors, and comics all made the rounds. John Byner, Ron James, Kenny Robinson, Sandra Shamas, Jamie Farr, Eric Peterson. Singers and players such as Arturo Sandoval, Roberta Gambarini, Marc Jordan, Ian Thomas, Jimmy Webb. On-site with sports icons like Cito Gaston, Sandy Hawley, George Chuvalo, Johnny Bower, Russ Jackson. The list is endless.

On the frontline for all of this is program director Mike Bendixen. Often I'm asked, 'Who or where in the world does a piano player besides yourself get to play for three hours live on air every Saturday afternoon?' I truly don’t know – but I thought it was imperative to sit down and have a chat with the boss and see what makes him tick. Enjoy!

So why radio?

Do you want the honest answer?

I've talked to some who say they were five years old and got a Mr. Microphone as a gift and started yelling at family.

That was not me. I never had a passion for it as a kid. I was never one of those guys that was out buying the latest albums and checking out the newest music. All my friends were into music in a big way.

My earliest kind of recollection of being around a radio quite honestly would be as many kids my age would have done as you know, recording your favourite song on like a Casey Kasem Top 40 and hitting pause and record and hoping to get the song and then make a mixtape. But quite frankly, the way that I got into radio was, I didn't do well in school.

Essentially, if we didn't go into some sort of formal education after high school, my parents would lose all this money. And so I had to go to college or university. I wasn't smart enough to get into university, and I remember sitting in my kitchen at home at my parent's place and looking through this course calendar at different colleges and then looking into this radio program I had no idea existed. I thought, well that can be fine. That doesn't sound like work. So I applied. I applied to all of these programs, and I couldn't get into any of them. And then thankfully, I eventually got into the radio program at Humber. It was more of a desperation type move for me than anything else. That was kind of my first footstep into trying to find out what radio was all about.

When you signed up for the radio program were you thinking 'I want to be on air,  in management or somewhere else' in radio?

One thing that I found interesting was - we had to do a documentary. I enjoyed doing this kind of radio doc I did on homelessness in Toronto, and I did enjoy walking around the streets of Toronto talking to homeless people and trying to figure out their story; where they came from, why they were on the streets, etc. That was interesting to me. Getting stories out there if you will. But I was fuckin lost. And part of it was being born and raised in Scarborough.

Humber College is on the other end of town. So while a lot of the students stayed out in the west end at the school, I was doing this commuting thing back and forth and working and doing all these other things. I was a part-time student there. I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong. Humber was great for me. But it wasn't until I got into that building at Yonge and St. Clair that I figured it out.

How did you get in there?

I got in because I had some time and I needed to get an internship. I spent an evening one night at my then girlfriend's dorm room, she was at university, and I wrote e-mails to every radio station in the city saying I need an internship.

I heard back from the promotions director at CFRB who said, 'listen I just started as the new promotions director and I need a clean slate of interns, so why don't you come here.' Of course, I did.

I hadn't listened to CFRB, to be honest with you; it wasn't my thing. I walked in and sat down with the promotions director and got an internship in the promotions department.

And that felt good?

It felt good enough that I was pursuing what I was supposed to be doing from a college perspective. I don't know what the right word is, but I decided that I wasn’t going the announcer route or news route. I was going to go the sales and promotions route because I was always told, if you want to make money you go into sales.

I sold some airtime for Humber College and made some decent money doing it. So that's where I was like, OK I'm going to go into promotions. That was what I thought I was going to do -become a promotions director.

I remember speaking to my girlfriend and saying, ‘Hey! Listen, you know what? There's this promotions director gig at CFRB, and I think he makes 60,000 bucks a year. If I can get his job, I'm set for life’. That was my goal. I was like' I'm going to become the promotions director somewhere' and 'I'm going to make sixty grand,' and 'I'm going to be living the high life.' But it didn't take me long to figure out that that was not something I was passionate about.

If you look at sales guys and one of the great staffs in Toronto, go no farther than CHUM and Jack Addis and Gord Kidder. Those guys lived the life. I mean they lived the hard life and did incredibly well.

Those days are long gone.

I caught a glimpse of it when I first started in the business. Ron Hewitt, who I think we both know was a phenomenal salesman and just a great guy. Fun loving. And one of those, in my opinion - the ‘last’ of a dying breed of that era of sales guys. You could say to Ron at nine o'clock in the morning, not me, but someone else of higher importance, ‘Hey Ron, my car broke down. I need to get to the Muskokas this weekend. Can you hook me up?’ And within an hour - a new BMW would be sitting outside for you to drive up to Muskoka for the weekend. That was the kind of thing that today is totally different.

How does a sales team function differently today?

I don't know that much about the way it was before. There are stories I've heard.

Back in the day, you would sit in your office, the phone would ring, and someone would say, 'hey I want to make a buy on radio.' And it was like 'OK, I'll take your money,' and then you spend the afternoon out drinking.

Nowadays, you're chasing every nickel and dime there is because you're competing with so many more media outlets and there are so many more options.

Let's not even talk about the Internet and how much that has changed advertising. You know the shiny little object that becomes the flavour of the week, where all of a sudden all these ad agencies are like, ‘oh, we've got to be on whatever it is? Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, all these and Snapchat. All these are shiny objects.
For radio guys, you gotta fight tooth and nail to get a slice of that dollar that before was a no-brainer. Oh yeah, for sure we're gonna buy radio, for sure we're gonna buy television and print. So, you were always guaranteed a portion of the pie. Of course, you had to be on the radio. Now, it's like you have to be on digital.  You have to be on social media, and then it's like, 'oh well, do we have any money left over? Let's think about radio and television and all the traditional mediums that are out there.' These sales guys today, I tell you, I would not want to do their job.

It is a fight, and the other thing that's changed the landscape so much is this little term we've become more familiar with called, ‘value added’ which basically means like OK, you know Bill, you've got a hundred bucks to buy airtime. Great. But then you want an additional hundred dollars-worth of ‘value added’ stuff which is essentially, 'I've got to give you free exposure on the air. And if I don't give you that value-added, the guy down the street definitely will.

Back in the day, we used to be able to say OK, for your hundred dollars I'll give you another twenty dollars-worth of value. Got it? And you would go, oh my god that's fantastic. Thank you so much, I'll be loyal to you. Now, it's like everyone has to give you something. And it's so bizarre to me because it's kind of as if I was to walk into a store and want to buy a pair of shoes and I said, ‘how much are those shoes?’ They're like 100 bucks, and you say, ‘great and by the way, can you throw in the T-shirt and socks?’ Because that's the ‘value added.’ It doesn't work on any other platform when it comes to selling things. I think we’ve done ourselves a disservice where over the years we've started adding in these ‘value-added’ things and now it's no longer’ Value-Added.' It's just expected and mandatory.

Was the next step, show producer?

Yes, I mean I continued as an intern and one day I wandered around the station and asked 'are there other jobs I can do other than promotions?' And I ran into Nick Maiorano who was the board op for the Ted Woloshyn Show at the time, and he said listen, 'we don't have a full-time morning show producer. We have interns that come in and help put the show together.'

Ted had probably been there for two or three years, and there was no full-time producer. The job didn't exist, ironically. And so I started interning a couple of days a week and then that turned into five days a week of me coming in and helping Ted. And I knew fuck all about producing radio. Nothing! I learned by saying, ‘Hey Ted, what do you need, what do you want?

As Ted's show evolved we'd open up more airtime and did more interviews and then we would come up with new ideas like, let's take the show on the road, let's do this, let's do that. Eventually, that internship turned into a full-time position where they said OK, you know what, we need a producer on the morning show. It's an important show obviously. And so, I got hired as the first producer of the morning show at CFRB.

Did Wally Crouter have a morning show producer all of those decades?

Wally had a technical producer, but he didn't have a producer in the way that Ted’s’ show did. It was so much different than Wally’s. Ted’s show evolved into very much a news magazine if you will show, similar to what our morning show is today. A lot of interviews, a lot of guests. You know the premier pops by. The police chief pops by. There are other guests that you know, like celebrities coming to town. Can we get them on the show?

9/11 happens and that changes the dynamic of everything. That allowed me to get my foot further in the door and a full-time job. Then from there, thankfully, management, and other people in the building allowed me to do different things. I did some reporting. I did a talk show for a little while.

The big break for me as I see it and as I've said many times the story is, when the tsunami happened in 2004 I was asked to go to Sri Lanka and produce for Taylor Parnaby, who was being sent over there. I went along and stayed in one part of Sri Lanka and then went to another part of Sri Lanka. I was reporting essentially for our radio stations in Canada from the devastated parts of Sri Lanka and learned a lot and saw a lot of unbelievable things.

When I came back from that trip that's basically when Gary Slaight probably thought, 'there's more to this kid than we're allowing him to do. He did some really interesting things when we sent him to Sri Lanka.' Through the blessing of Gary, I would imagine, I got a job as a news director and program director for our sister station in Montreal, CJAD.

How long was the stay?

I was 26 when I went there. Here's what I tell a lot of people. People who reported to me - I was the program director there; a lot of the staff there had worked at the radio station longer than I'd been alive. So, it was a unique dynamic for a young guy from Toronto to go into Montreal and start telling people what to do. You know what I mean? You can imagine that it wasn't the easiest of transitions. Over time I got to love working with the people there. I had great experiences and as you said, what a great town. CJAD is like an amazing radio station along with working down the hallway from folks at CHOM and Terry DiMonte and all these guys and Rob Braide and just some phenomenal people. It was a blast.

Did you get out much with Rob and the folks?

Listen, this is the difference between working in Montreal for Standard Broadcasting and what it's like today.

Rob Braide would announce over the P.A. in the building, ‘Hey it's Friday everyone: at 3:00, I expect to see you over at Ziggy's on Crescent Street. You know, Gary's in town and the bar's open' kind of thing. That would be a regular occurrence. Here again another difference between then and now.

I had an expense account at Ziggy's, at a pub where I was encouraged to take people and write off expenses for a night out drinking. That doesn't exist anymore today. Those were the fun times. A lot of learning. And then when Astral bought us things changed a little bit and then of course when I came back to Toronto things changed a lot more and now its Bell, things have changed even more.

It goes without saying for me that the days of working for Standard Broadcasting were phenomenal because you could do and try so many different things. Not to suggest that I can't today, but back then you know, if Gary and others thought this is a good idea, let's give it a shot, you could go and do it. It was so much fun being able to work for a real family. And that's how it felt. When I went to Montreal, it felt like a small family that you worked for, and whenever ‘Big Daddy’ came into town, it was even more fun.

For me, as a guy that started out as an intern and being able to sit around a table and I do remember sitting around a table having dinner with Gary Slaight, Terry DiMonte and Rob Braide in Montreal, I was like, oh my god like how the hell did I end up here? I still have those moments in this business where I'll be in a meeting, and I'll be like, 'what the fuck am I doing in this room right now?'

Do you have those moments?

Oh yeah, I literally had one two days ago while I was sitting in the biggest boardroom that this facility has, overlooking the parking lot on 299 Queen Street. I'm sitting in a room with Randy Lennox, the president of Bell Media and a bunch of other VIPs of the company, and I'm just like,’ what am I doing here?'

I remember taking a day off school to come to 299 Queen when City TV used to do an ‘open house’ once a year where you could come in and do a tour. I took a day off school and did this nerdy tour of the City Pulse newsroom, and there are moments when I walk in those front doors off Queen Street, and I'm like, 'I can't believe that I work in this building'. I have those moments all the time.

Not that long ago I was in my office, and I was sitting talking to Gordon Martineau, and Marilyn Dennis walked in, and the three of us are sitting in my office shooting the shit about stuff. And at one moment I said, ‘guys you have to understand I'm having an out of body experience because the two of you are sitting in my office and we're chatting as high school friends, so to speak, and my mind is going somewhere else.’

To have a boss like Randy Lennox, who actually has a music background, can bridge those divergent worlds. Music and entertainment and media.

I think a lot of that goes to what you see through Randy's influence on the company overall in terms of producing musicals like Bat Out of Hell as an example. Obviously, the television show, The Launch.  You know you see these integrations of how to promote talent and how to promote music.

Just the other night we had a live music performance at Young-Dundas Square with Arkells. There are influences of Randy throughout. But the fascinating thing for me, is I’ve worked under a couple of heads of Bell Media since I've been here, but the exciting thing with Randy is more often than not he will turn to others in the room and say, ‘what do you think?'

For someone like me, it’s too cool. I mean it's just cool to have someone turn to someone that you look at with high regard and someone that's done a lot of great things in this business, and so enjoy it. And for someone like that to turn to you and ask, 'what do you think?' And not only say it but listen and give a shit about your opinion. To me, it's another one of those mind-blowing moments when you're like OK thanks - you know I mean, I don't know how to describe it, but it's like, yeah!

Talk radio. We're coming up to Ontario provincial elections, and we’ve seen what happened with Sinclair network south of us and how they manipulated local news. How do you try and deliver balance knowing this will be a volatile election? You've got a premier whose approval rating is running at a low 12 percent and a candidate that's far to the right and someone we know who thrives on chaos and bullies.

The answer to that question goes back almost eight or nine years. Since I've come back to CFRB, and the one thing that I wanted to do when I came back here was get away as much as we can from one guy on the air with one opinion. And what we've tried to do is - yeah ok, you can have a guy on the air that has a view, but I also want to hear from the guy that has the opposite opinion. And then the guy that has the whatever bizarre other opinions as well. And I think we've done a good job of that on the radio station. That's why we've instituted some roundtable discussions, so there are other opinions allowed to become part of the conversation. That's why we have a variety of views on the air between the morning show and evening show.

We’ve done things intentionally so that the radio station has a broader appeal to it; so I don't have to worry so much about if we are going to be considered the Doug Ford supporting radio station or the Kathleen Wynne supporting radio station or whatever. I think if you listen to us over the course of the entire day, you'll get a balance.

Do you miss John Tory?

 Oh yeah!

He was remarkable on air. I’d listen to John Tory and outside of being our mayor, I thought I've never heard anybody recite from their head two pages in length without breaking a thought or bumbling a word. What a rare gift!

Here's the other rare gift that John Tory has. He loves to learn.

I did air checks with John every two weeks, right. And if you ask him to this day, he'll tell you the story that still pops up in his calendar and his BlackBerry that he's got a calendar reminder that says you know, Mike Bendixen aircheck and he keeps it in there as a reminder and laughs every two weeks.

But John would be the guy that would be at the mic check five minutes in advance. He was taking copious amounts of notes and wanted the feedback. At times there were heated exchanges about what I thought he should be doing and what he thought he should be doing. But he loved to learn. He was engaged in the craft of how to become a better talk show host. The other thing that John has that nobody else in this market had was that he's got unique life experience.

There’s no one else in like him on Toronto radio. When Ronald Reagan died, I sent John a text saying, ‘hey John, have you ever met Ron Reagan?’ He said 'yes, I’ve been in the Oval Office three times.' Name me one other personality that's on the air that can say they've been in the oval office three times? It just doesn't happen. That was a unique skill set that he had because of his life experiences. And what made him unique was that he was able to translate those experiences onto the air.

When Ronald Reagan dies, who would you rather listen to, a guy on the dial that's just telling anecdotes or a guy that's like – ‘you know the first time I walked into the Oval Office and set eyes on Ronald. OK. That guy wins.’  It's much like sports in my opinion. I'd rather hear from a guy that used to play professional baseball than a guy that just watches it sitting on the couch.

Which brings me to sports and how much sports broadcasting has changed. Athletes are in the broadcasting pre-game seats and in between segments that used to be filled by pundits. It’s now the residence of jocks. I find it fascinating: Charles Barkley sitting next to Kenny Smith sitting next to Shaq. Great players with first-hand insights into the game.

That's why you know John Tory works - we're in the same business right. Former politicians are now doing radio. John Tory is a good example of that. Tim Hudak who does work with us now is growing into a great talk show host and again learning a lot of things.

We’ve got former communications directors that work with us. Rob Ford's former chief of staff works for us. There's a lot of that transition as well. And for me, that's where I often will go to when I'm looking for some talent for the radio station. I don't go necessarily to colleges or down that route. I'm looking for who's got experiences, whether they be a former politician or former communications director or whatever, that can translate that experience onto the radio. Right. I'd rather hear from someone that says no no no, I've been there. And this is what's happening as opposed to someone that just goes, 'I think this is what's happening'.

By 2019, ‘millennials’ will be the driving force in the country. Do you keep that in mind?

No! Here’s what I do keep in mind. We can get dragged so many different ways. What I try to keep in mind is at the end of the day - we are still a very vibrant radio station.

The numbers are great.

Yes, but we can't start being all these other things and then you lose focus of – ‘no we're still a fucking radio station.’ You’ve seen numerous businesses that try to dabble in all these other things, and then eventually they fall apart. And I think that's what we focus most on is the day to day, are we delivering compelling content? Most days, I think we probably have a good sixty to seventy when we hit it out of the park seventy percent of the time.

We're still far off from being 100 percent.

I think eventually you come to a stage in your life where you realize you need to be more engaged in what's going on in the world and that is what we try and do here. And we try and do it compellingly and entertainingly if you will.

And I think much like I've grown up in this business and others have. I think all of a sudden you go, enough of the kind of pop culture music stuff.

That's great, and there's a part of that, that will exist in my life but at the same time, I also need to realize what does my future look like?

Where are my taxes going?

What are the politicians doing?

What's the environment?

All that stuff.

I don't worry about that. I worry more about whether we are delivering the right content at the right moment.

A Conversation With ... Royal Wood

Your home town, Lakefield, Ontario – college town?

Yeah, Lakefield College School is there, and it's also sort of a centre for a lot of great hockey players in the world as well.

And the family farm is there?

Yes. We had a farm growing up, a cattle farm and a hundred and eight acres that went dormant when I was a teenager. They got rid of the cows and tried to keep it as a hobby farm. And then I bought it a few years ago.

My dad got sick, and they were going to get rid of the farm, and I wanted to keep it for the family. I wanted it for my dad in his final years. I have it and have turned it into an organic farm and gave it to a bunch of young, idealistic farmers to run for me. There are also rescue horses there.

Do you spend much time there?

I spend as much time as I can. When my dad was sick, I was there as much as humanly possible. He passed away about a year and a half ago. So, I'm there a little bit less. I have a condo in Toronto with my wife, and I’m always on the road. But, we make regular plans to be there even if it's just for a night.

It’s now an organic farm. How far away is produce distributed?

Just in our region. It goes into Lakefield and Peterborough markets.

What’s grown there?

Anything that can. They try to keep it seasonal and knowing it’s organic, they're doing every possible procedure they can without breaking their rules. They've introduced us to a lot of vegetables I had never even seen before.

You must go there and think, ‘wow’, look what they have done with this land.

I do go there and am ‘wowed’ when I look at what they’ve done. But I also go there and think, ‘wow, so much work’. Farming is hard enough as it is. And even as a kid growing up seeing farmers - but that was industrial farming and seeing what goes into organic farming the way it should be done is even more toilsome now.

I remember the massive flooding in Lakefield. An online search says, 2004?

We were thankfully OK through all of that. Most of our farm is up on a hill, and there's a valley below that feeds into a pond that has never looked better.

What was growing up in such idyllic surroundings like for you?

It was like Walton's Mountain.

I had three older brothers and a younger sister and anyone who doesn't know that reference to Walton’s Mountain – that is making me seem old. We sat around the table at night where we always had dinner together and played music, and we always spent our summers together. It's like our friends didn't exist once summer started. It was just my brothers and me and my sister. We’d work all day and do our thing at night.

Music has a history with the family. And the foundation for that is?

My parents.

My dad played the guitar, played the piano and played the harmonica. He didn't play the piano well, but he loved it. He played guitar and harmonica his whole life, and my mom took piano lessons and then they put all of us into lessons. We all studied piano and music was everywhere for us.

My dad was smart enough and encouraging enough to have instruments in the house. There was a banjo, and there was a violin. It’s like having a hockey stick or a baseball. If they have an interest in it, they will grab it.

Just make it available.

My dad had paints and canvases. He was a father wanting his kids to be exposed to everything and then let them find their path.

When I was four, we had a piano, and it just made sense to me. Music just made sense. Even before math or sports, I could play a song on the piano. I was fortunate to have them as parents.

Did you study privately?

I did. I played by ear for years. First piano and guitar and then when I was around eleven or twelve my parents put me in piano lessons; proper study. I did that all the way through high school, and then I was in any music program in school they had. The jazz band and large ensemble – anything I could get my hands on and then I had my band and played around town. That made me cool.

You know you've got to take Mr. Handsome out of the house and try it out of the public.

I'm not saying one iota that I'm a handsome man, and I certainly wasn't in high school.

Only the athletes. I think the fact they were running all the time, smacking into each other, made them the coolest. What was that bond between you and your father then?

It was larger than father and son. I will say that.

I think it was that my dad and I were just good friends and we were mentors to each other, and we taught each other a lot. We would trade books, and we'd trade movies, and we’d talk politics; we just talked about everything. He was the dad you could sit down and have a whisky by the fire with and talk about anything. And not everyone gets to do that, but we did.

When my dad passed my mum and me, and the same with all the kids, continued to hang out with our family. It's always something we look forward to and I know over the course of my life and the relationships I've had and friendships I've had, people look at us as an odd family. I remember that realization when I was a kid and thinking - even in high school that, I was the odd one because my parents weren't divorced, and everyone liked each other. It's a weird thing.

The new album, Ever After the Farewell, is about your father?

It's about my father. I didn't want it to be too morose and melancholy as that’s not what my father would have wanted. My father was ready to go, and my father wanted to go, and we wanted it. I wanted my dad to be at peace. He had Alzheimer's for years. He also had what's called COPD which is a lung condition that thankfully took him way before Alzheimer's was going to. He still had a lot of his faculties. I could sit by the bed and talk with my dad, but his lungs failed in the end. He had made up his mind to go. We wanted him at peace. I didn't want to make a record that was woe is me I've lost my father. That wasn't us.

Have you ever spoke with Jann Arden about this?

I haven't talked to Jann in a long while.

She is very open about this and has written a book, Feeding My Mother, about her relationship with her parents and having them living next door – keeping them close by. She also covers that in a song she wrote, ‘The Long Goodbye.’

It's part of life, and you can't avoid it.

There is that side of the recording, and at that same time I met my wife and fell in love and got married. It was a strange time because my heart was so full of joy and crazy passion and excitement meeting someone that just changed my life, at the same time that I was losing my dad, so there was guilt on both sides. I would feel guilty when I was so sad about my father because I'm not enjoying his time with my wife and then I feel guilty for enjoying time with my wife because I'm not grieving properly for my dad or something. I had to put all that away and just embrace making a record because my dad was my biggest fan and my wife is my biggest fan.

What would you say is the attitude and soul of the recording? Does it have to do with the name Royal?

I was born John Royal Wood, and Royal Wood was my great grandfather's first and last name. He was a good Irishman.

We are a product of everything we've heard before and I was raised on obviously, a lot of music. My dad loved everything from Sinatra to jazz to blues to Johnny Cash and my mom loves classical music. What really raised me were having three older brothers who got to filter all of the bad music out of my life because they went through that first and then just picked the really good stuff. And then my uncle passed away when I was a kid in a car accident and he was my dad's closest friend. Dad got his old reel to reel tapes along with this old Sony reel to reel player and all these dusty crates full of vinyl. Instead of listening to New Kids on the Block, I was listening to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens and his crazy collection of stuff at a super young age and I feel like that's when I felt like a kid of the 70s, that's what I wanted to be. I grew up wanting to be an awesome incredible artist that makes people feel things. I wanted to do that with a guitar and piano.

Tim Buckley?

He was one of the artists who was on Wayne's old mixed reel to reels. I remember the moment someone handed me a Jeff Buckley record. Grace, I think its the first one. And I thought, Buckley, that's one of them, that's dad, yeah. Few people now would know who Tim Buckley was.

Do words carry weight with you?

Words mean everything to me. They started that way, and they certainly have become even more important to me. One of the things I just let go of though is not being precious about them. Believing in the words that come out and write the song. Some of the greatest artists I love could say it in the most simple of words. It was genuine and heartfelt from a Leonard Cohen to Paul McCartney - they could state a simple sentence and man is it profound. It's just about the context of where they put it. And it's hard to do. It's the marriage of those two things. If you can do that, you've got it.

You say this; I read once that you can't get wet from the word water. That it isn't the word that allows for the knowing to take place but rather the experience itself that removes the veil.

That sentence was taken from a philosopher named Alan Watts. But that idea stuck with me. The rest of that is just me riffing on something I believed about the record - discussing both falling in love and getting married with my wife and then the grief of losing my father. Those are things that you read about. Talk about. You see your friends fall in love - you see your friends lose a sibling or a loved one and you think oh, that must be hard or that must be quite an experience but until you jump in the water and feel the water and experience the water, it's just a word. Grief is just a word until you feel it. Love is just a word until you feel it. And that's really the antithesis of this record. Those two polar opposites simultaneously just merge together. That is why it's Ever After the Farewell. I wanted it to be something that just continues - just continue to so much joy ahead. But there's always that farewell as a part of it. There just is.

Where did you meet Allison?

 Good research. I met Allie in Saskatoon.

What a great place.

Oh my God, it’s one of my favourite places.

Just get outside of Saskatoon and go for a drive. It's unbelievable.

And also, the people of Saskatchewan are a perfect representation of what it is to be Canadian. They're just good people. They're just good; there's no other word. It's like Saskatchewan's ‘good’ - that should be their bumper sticker. I don't know if it is because I spent close to twenty years coming in and out of Toronto and I love Toronto, and this is my home, and this is where I'll be, but it's like being in New York. It's big, and it's loud, and it's noisy and there's horns and there's rudeness and mixed within all of that are amazing people and there's kindness and gestures and you see that in the city.

It's a city in constant motion. It's a machine.

Exactly. I was just in L.A. and its the same thing. But when you slow it down and there's no autonomy, and everyone knows everybody, man, people can be nice.

It’s the way the land speaks to you.

Big time.

I once made the drive from Saskatoon to Swift Current - it was in January, to play a gig. The way the sun lit the fields; that amber glow and blackened sky on the horizon encroaching right before a storm and seeing broken-down farm houses from another time in deep repair dot the landscape, was a visual feast.

You're right about the geography affecting their culture. It's like God only had a few colours on the palette left and he was like, OK, what I do with the basic stuff here. I can make something beautiful. And then I’m done.

Massey Hall, you're playing Massey Hall May 11th. What can we expect for that night?

This one's a little bit pared back. Or maybe not. It's me, bass, drums, two vocalists and a string section. It’s just a quartet for this one. I've done larger ensembles with this string quartet.

A ninety-minute show?

I’m going to play the hits with some songs off the new record I'm excited about.

Massey has been years in the making.

Is this your first time?

It's my very first time headlining, and I think it's going to sell out.

Doesn't the thought stress you?

You know what? There are certain things in life that just don't go away. And one of them is this fear of uncertainty right now. That's just part of it and just part of life. And the one thing I've learned is to embrace it and to tell myself that fear is actually excitement and discomfort and you lean into it.

This is my seventh record. And every time I hand in a record to the label the whole team sits down goes, we love it. Not sure if we hear a single.

You will never top Beyonce?

Well, it's what it is. Do your thing, and it's the same with shows.

Each tour I've gotten bigger. I'm proud to say - venue size, and this one is no exception. I'm headlining Massey - the Winspear Centre in Edmonton. The Rebecca Cohen Auditorium in Halifax. This is a big beautiful tour, and so far selling well. When you accept the offers and you see the tour rolled out before tickets start to sell, you hope this works.

You do this every two years. We spend all of this money, and I make this record and the tours booked, and everyone’s hired – publicist, musicians, social media and it’s like crazy. My team is massive and do it every time. But you never get used to that feeling - It's almost like you want to dig your heels in and not do it. You have to get all the stuff ready.

I was talking to my wife about this last night and a little part of me is like, maybe you won't. Maybe I don't want to do this. I don't know. I don't know. Do I wanna do it again for the next eighteen months of my life? My calendar is blocked off. Then it’s off to Europe.

It’s all great stuff! The other ninety percent is sitting home thinking; there's nothing much on the calendar.

You get used to the activity but as someone in my profession, which I've had to explain to my wife and family for years, the mind is not only busy, the mind is completely and totally uncertain in an ever-changing landscape.