Beach Ball

I almost missed Retrocity's 80s a cappella show at The Beaches Jazz Festival on Saturday afternoon because of numerous traffic delays. With summer construction, subway closure for system upgrade, and other head-aches, taking transit to the East end was a nightmare. However, it gave me a chance to see what's been happening in other parts of Toronto that I don't visit that often.

Parts of Queen St. E have completely gentrified, especially starting from just over the bridge at the DVP all the way to The Beaches. The section between there and Yonge St. was an odd mix of new development and run-down buildings, indigents and chi-chi pedestrians.

Retrocity's audience is, seemingly, skewing older and older with each show. On the other hand, the 80s is more than 30 years ago now. As always, they have a wonderful variety of arrangements of tunes. One negative was the amount of time doing soundcheck. They had time to do this before their show. It sounded like the sound-tech was fairly green as most of the instructions came from band members. On the other hand, when you have so accomplished singers, you listen to them when they tell you the feedback is coming from the 80 Hz range.