Ears a Little More Open
Can you imagine a 73-year-old prairie product that people receive free but happily pay $1.3-million a year for simply because they like it so much? Something demanded by operating room surgeons [...]
By Geo Takach
Music
Music
300 Kids Create an Opera
The argument started over a game of kickball on the school playground. Two popular kids, Nick and Laura, were declared captains and took turns choosing players. When the teams were complete, the [...]
The New National Music Centre
I’ve known about the National Music Centre for a long time. I helped dig pianos out of the mud there after the flood of 2013. Their old building hosted a collection of odd but memorable musical [...]
By Glenn Dixon
The Long View
There must be a rule that you’re not supposed to ask executives at a commercial country music awards show to think about the oil companies in their stock portfolios. Corb Lund broke that rule. [...]
A Dose of Song
They enter the room in ones and twos, choosing spots around the semicircle of music stands while the pianist repositions her instrument for a better view of the action to come. This could be any [...]
Prodigal Band
When Nils Edenloff was a high school student in Fort McMurray, there was a minor scandal one summer involving a gaggle of teens who decided to ride their bicycles to Edmonton. It was received [...]
By Chris Turner
Both Sides Now
The winter of 1970. In “Room at the Top,” a coffee house about seven storeys up in the frigid night sky of Edmonton, a couple of folksingers are tuning up their guitars while their drummer is [...]
One of Our Own
At first the music sparkles with energy, the orchestra generating dazzling colours and frenetic movement. The solo pianist inscribes razor-sharp chords, echoed by fluttering gestures in the high [...]
Westbound Train
In the summer of 1970, a 12-coach train painted with day-glo hippie flowers carried Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, The Band, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Buddy Guy and other folk-rock and blues icons [...]
Healing Sounds
She sits on an office chair—the kind that swivels around in all directions—and suggests starting the session with a piece by Joni Mitchell. An audience of 10 wheelchair-bound, brain-injured [...]
By Kim Gray
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Reducing the Harm
It's a little after 10 o’clock in the morning and Taylor feels like she’s climbing the walls.
When her name is called and the door to Lethbridge’s supervised drug consumption site buzzes open, Taylor moves quickly on her crutches. She settles into a chair at the second booth from the end ...
Should All Drugs Be Decriminalized?
Hakique Virani says yes.
Twelve-step addiction recovery programs teach that it is irrational to “do the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” This should be a lesson for legislators too. As the 4,000 Canadian families who lost a loved one to an opioid overdose last year know, our ...
Holy Healthcare
Just tell them we don’t have it here.” That’s what the nurse told me in Killam Hospital, an hour east of Camrose. I’d asked what would happen if a woman came into our ER asking for the morning-after pill. The nurse wasn’t being self-righteous, but simply explaining the policy.
As ...