Chasing the feeling of being a newcomer

On Tuesday, September 9th, a minute before the 8:00 PM start, I sat down at the bar next to a stranger. It was Stringband Tunesdays at the Heatley: three sets of bluegrass, old-time, and country music. The series had just returned to East Hastings' honky-tonk from its summer break. In the house band were guitarist and primary vocalist Mark Kilianski, fiddler Trent Freeman, mandolinist John Reischman, and bassist Joseph Lubinsky-Mast.

The stranger didn't talk to me during the first set, but as soon as the set ended, she asked in an English accent if I could watch her drink while she went to the washroom. I honoured the request, and after she came back, we ended up talking through the rest of the night. She was indeed from England, in her mid-twenties on a Canadian excursion, staying downtown. She wasn't a big fan of country and whatnot, but she told me about how her dad had plucked the Heatley from some transatlantic algorithm and suggested it to her over text. She didn't have any personal connections to this night of music, but she came on a whim as a part of the broader search for good times.

I realized that I felt the same way. I know enough about fiddle music to be dangerous, but not enough – and certainly not enough about country music – to be any closer to the Tunesday stage than its ten feet of separation from my barstool. (On the other hand a guest artist, Danny Eberhardt, got a deserving nod to come play one of his original songs with the band later on.)

But I could recognize "The Teetotaller", a fiddle-tune standard of sorts, when Freeman's violin launched into it. I could recognize some other instrumental tunes and maybe half the songs, like the traditional "Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms", "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" (hey, Harry Bartlett!), and "White Freightliner Blues", a Townes Van Zandt song I know best via Molly Tuttle's flatpicking arrangement.

They played a medium boom-chucking arrangement of "High on a Mountain", originally written by the Appalachian singer Ola Belle Reed. Kilianski's vocals rose over his own low flatpicking guitar licks on the haunting, rolling song. Reischman's expert mandolin chugged along like a drumkit, and Freeman and Lubinsky-Mast played sensitive complementary roles on their string instruments.

I know this song because the Dave Douglas Quintet recorded a more upbeat version on their 2012 album Be Still, featuring Aoife O'Donovan on vocals and her own guitar accompaniment.

My new English friend and I shared our life stories, as one does with someone whom you're confident you won't ever see again. I used "High on a Mountain" as a jumping-off point to talk about the pivotal email I got from that bandleader in my darkest year. "Jazz" and "folk" had been mixing in the pit of my stomach ever since the start of covid, when I came back from playing the Canadian folk festival circuit to do Rhythm Changes and figure out the rest of my twenties.

When I started Rhythm Changes, I felt like a newcomer all over again to the scene that raised me. Things are quite different now. But sometimes I want to feel like a newcomer again, and when I step into the Heatley on a Tuesday, I do.

I'm one of many who crosses between the musical traditions. As for the Tunesdays band, Lubinsky-Mast plays with Bonnie Northgraves and with the surf-rock group The ReViberators, who played the 2025 jazzfest's closing day at Ocean Artworks on July 1st. Freeman brought a creative ensemble called Bolo Bolo to the China Cloud opposite Sam Davidson's Skim Milk project in early June. And all three of the songs I mentioned earlier were in the repertoire of my CapU-mates when they worked what was at the time a common summer job for students of the program: shifts at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, in period costume, where you guided tours and also played sets of music outside the gift shop.

The current format of Stringband Tuesdays has been running, with seasonal breaks and sub-outs when individual acts take over for the night, since around November 2022. That pre-dates by a year Infidels Jazz's very brief stint presenting there:

New Heatley series w/ Alvin Brendan & Dean Thiessen

The Infidels’ Threesomes series launched Oct/Nov with 2 trios

Rhythm ChangesWill Chernoff

Infidels continues to present at the Painted Ship, another bar under the same ownership umbrella. In fact, when I came back for a second Stringband Tunesday on September 16th, Ron Samworth and the Pat Pending Trio – Bradshaw Pack, Karlis Silins, and Jesus Caballero – were playing across town at the Ship.

At the second fall Tunesday, I didn't have my English friend, who is probably back home by now. Patrick Metzger was in on bass. Metzger seems to have also played in most of the same bands as Lubinsky-Mast: a rockabilly-ish band that used to hit at jazzfest time called The Rocket Revellers, the aforementioned ReViberators, and the band Viper Central that features fiddler Kathleen Nisbet.

Reischman wasn't there. Instead, clawhammer banjoist Cello Lukey stood stage left, where she sang lead and harmony vocals on most of the songs while contributing understated solos.

The Stringband musicians get the job done with a familiar flow. They call pieces of well-known repertoire, nod each other into solos, and hit common endings together without need for deliberation. One of the songs Lukey called was "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels", recorded by Kitty Wells:

Freeman played another fiddle tune I thought I recognized – it was in the same key as "The Teetotaller" – but I couldn't pin it down and didn't think to ask him. There's a website that's been around for decades, The Session, where you can search strings of note-name letters and see if you find a match in their database of fiddle tunes. I tried that there (my search: "babc bagd") and found this tune instead, which definitely wasn't it but is perhaps even cooler. It's "La Contredanse", which the group Les têtes de violon plays at the time 1:51 in this track on their album Airs tordus / Crooked Tunes.

Tomorrow, I have a gig with the North Shore Celtic Ensemble: the non-profit that took me in as an 18-year-old university dropout, gave me a bit of work, and met me through a lot of my growing pains. It's my 13th straight year of playing at least once with their violin youth ensembles. I'll be on guitar, accompanying tunes like the ones Freeman called, sounding nothing like Kilianski's fluent flatpicking. (I don't yet have an old-time bone in my body. My playing in the genre is heavy British Isles with a Quebec finish.)

My next music project will be a merger of Celtic-based folk traditions with an improvising ensemble. But on the other hand, I'm happy to just go to the bar and chill and listen. Maybe meet a stranger. I wonder what other inspirations I'll find when I'm back at Stringband Tunesdays to chase the feeling of being a newcomer; I won't make the next two, so we'll have to see what October brings.