There Are Four Lights!

For the Luminato festival, I attended a number of free concerts at the Yonge-Dundas Square. First up, a night of latin music. The "house band" was a group of Torontonians of various hispanic background who usually plays at the Lula Lounge in my neck of the woods. The music was catchy, polyrhythmic, and lively. Once again, I was left wondering why my musical heritage (Vietnamese music) involve such depressing styles. There were a few groups of dancers here and there. Caucasians are inept, though shamelessly enthusiastic. There were are few male Asian dancers but in my view, they lacked elegance in their own movements and seemed to be primarily showing off how to throw their partners around. They reminded me of a certain middle-age Asian I've seen at a number of Toronto street festivals over the years who was a dancing menace to any women he could get into his spinning clutches ... oh wait, there he is! The latin dancers showed the most grace and feeling. I didn't stay for the main act, the singer La India.

I then returned for some Bollywood music. The audience fared better this time around when the dancers on-stage walked them through some steps. Bollywood dancing is essentially aerobics with tablas. There was a demonstration of more traditional styles such as Kathak. Unfortunately, the clueless cameras were always focusing on the wrong close-up: they showed feet when they should have shown the hand movements, and vice versa. The headliner of the evening was Suzanne d'Mello who belted out english and hindi songs including "Jai Ho" from Slumdog Millionaire. The main fault of the evening were the hosts who kept over-promising and under-delivering. Look, we understand that most of the performers are locals from Toronto. By hyping them to the moon, it made their act seemed ordinary and underwhelming.

Next up was 80s night with a trio of vocal impersonators. First was Luisa Marshall as Tina Turner. She had the hair, the moves, the mannerism, the short skirt, and the voice. With her back-up dancers and band, she did all the big Turner hits including "Simply the Best", "What's Love Gotta Do With It?", and "Proud Mary". Oddly, she left out "Private Dancer" despite some pleas from the audience. The evening deflated for a good 45 minutes as Heartless did some Heart tunes such as "Alone", "What About Love?" and "Barracuda". There's a reason music left behind all those 80s rock songs with their interminable guitar solos. But the evening ended on a high note as Vogue Madonna took the stage. Elly Jarmain did all the big Madonna hits: "Like A Prayer", "Like a Virgin", "Holiday", "Vogue" and so on. But she also included new Madonna songs such as "4 Minutes (To Save the World)". There were even multiple wardrobe changes for her and her dancers. Her band also included skinny rockers with too much gel and eye-liner. The only incongruity was her 6-month pregnancy, which showed clearly through all those tight Madonna outfit and lent a certain cheesy irony to "Papa Don't Preach".

I was going to catch some J-Pop but there was stormy weather that night. Also, I like my J-Pop to involve large groups of saccharinely cute girls doing dance choreography. It looked like it was just a couple of typical bands.