Recording: Willi Williams and New Chance

Artist: Willi Williams and New Chance

Song: Home

Recorded at The Music Gallery (X AVANT XIV: Forward – Night 3), October 19, 2019.

Willi Williams and New Chance - Home

One of the main subtexts of this year's X Avant was the awareness that it would be the last programmed by the Music Gallery's Artistic Director David Dacks, who had recently announced his stepping-down from the position in a thoughtfully-choreographed transition. The Festival's theme of "Forward", considering what's coming next, was thus personal as well — and it gave the broader community a chance to consider the work Dacks has done in his tenure at the Gallery.

This show, for example, could be considered a signature Dacks move, bringing together several of his consistent interests: giving a larger platform to artists like Victoria Cheong, whose emergence has been facilitated by the MG in several ways; putting together an intergenerational soundclash, bringing different communities to the same show; and foregrounding the work of Black musicians in Toronto in the MG's context of "creative music" — all while taking the gamble that two artists who had never met before could click on a personal level to create a festival-headlining collaboration.

The whole thing paid off quite wonderfully, creating a platform for Williams' voice that did more than just pour Cheong's productions into a reggae template (although, to be sure, this is a terrain where she has already done some extensive mapping). The collaboration went both ways, so not only were there some rearrangements of Williams' older songs (and even a delightfully-unexpected cover of "This Magic Moment") but a tune called "Father" that matched the New Chance atmospheric/dancefloor "sound" with Williams' soulful vocals. In a perfect world, that would be the lead single on a collaborative album from Soul Jazz or some other label for curious heads — there were murmurings that this collaboration could continue beyond this show, so hopefully there's more to be heard from this pairing.