TRUBACI MCGILL

I came back to Montréal from Guca in 2014 determined to immerse myself in balkan brass band tradition. I had an overwhelming response from my brass colleagues at McGill and we formed our own “Trubaci”, a brass orkestar I started where we would learn from the field recordings I took while I was in Serbia. We recorded this one song I picked up from a young band who was competing at Guca and named it rather arbitrarily as is the custom when names are unknown, or simply because it is more common to identify songs by the origin. Nonetheless, my travel-mates and I named it Power Shower. We lived in the basement of a local lady’s house up the hill from the festival where many of the competing bands were also staying. The bands would practice outside our shower and this tune stuck with us the most.

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Women’s Day Tromboning

For International Women’s Day, So Wrong It’s Right wanted to make some serious noise for female artists from medieval and pre-medieval times. We broke ground at National Sawdust musing on three remarkable women who formed a deep bedrock of source material for our recording session that evening. For each woman, we dedicated a station that showcased their work, a quasi-installation which dotted the room and formed a route for our exploration. The evening began with a feminist found object jam, a playground of private items from our loved one’s arsenals.

At the first station, we paid tribute to Comtessa de Dia (1175 A.D.) who wrote the earliest surviving work by a trobairitz (female troubadour). Following this, we interpreted three poems by the Greek poet Sappho (630 B.C.) from the island of Lesbos. The third station focused on a beautifully preserved kufic script by the Islamic calligraphist Fadhl Mawlat Abi Ayyub (~907 A.D.)

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