A ran into my friend Tom Nagy a couple weeks back at the Jane’s Walk of public art in DTK. I know Tom from around The Jazz Room, around CAFKA, around Little Libraries KW, and the many other places our orbits intersect. I asked if Tom was gigging any time soon and he mentioned a new trio he was in called Trilencia with Juneyt and Don McDougall. They played their first gig together at The Boathouse in DTK last Sunday, so I took my entire crew down to see them.
The first thing you gotta know about Tom Nagy is he is a helluva nice guy. We both came out of BlackBerry where I knew his name only from email threads. It wasn’t until I started hanging around The Jazz Room that I put a face to the name. Here’s a younger version of Tom playing with Jason White.
Click through for a moderately unreasonable number of photos…
Everyone loading in. Trilencia was opening for Kite Trio out of Montreal.
Don McDougall setting up.
Juneyt, in the house, rounding out the trio.
Juneyt is a master of promotion. You gotta be in this biz!
Yo!
Sound check.
Trilencia is styled as nuevo-flamenco, but I never get too hung up on naming a genre. When you get talented players together, music happens and I just take it was it comes. Sounded great.
Music is a great deal.
Don told me after the set that if he was going to continue to play percussion with his bare hands like this that he’d have to toughen them up.
My friend Stephen Preece tells me Don is an excellent drummer and that’s what I heard through the set.
Releasing the magic.
Get it out! I really liked “Midnight Train” by Juneyt. Hadn’t heard that one before. It was written as a musical rebuttal to the 1970’s movie Midnight Express that had painted Juneyt’s home country of Turkey in such a negative light.
I have seen Juneyt play venues like The Duke uptown where the job demands a certain amount of familiar cover tunes and a certain approach. He’s good at it: always entertaining. It was only in 2011 that I learned how wickedly talented he is in his native domain of flamenco.
Later in the set, Craig McNair joined in as a special guest.
Something I especially loved about this group, beyond the great music, was their super-chill vibe and relaxed sense of humour.
Craig.
Picked up a CD of Juneyt’s work for my Mom who is a fan. And as I was going over to talk with him after the set, my daughter shouted: “Get me one, too!”
Meta.
I hung around for a bit of Kite Trio. I think I’ll be seeing more of The Boathouse this summer season. Good to see Tom and Juneyt as always. Nice to meet Don and Craig. Play on, guys.
On Jubilee Drive in Victoria Park, this is Kitchener.
DW