> CONCERT SAMPLER SPECIAL FALL PREVIEW
Live music fans in Toronto have about 600 concert nights to choose from for the next four months. Though you could easily come up with more depending on tastes and budget, here’s the Sampler’s six picks — the 1 per cent, in other words: Mount Eerie It’s been more than a decade since Phil Elverum spun off from his freewheeling Microphones band to go solo as Mount Eerie and make music and art that asks big questions as it evokes the spirits and rain-soaked landscapes of his coastal home ground in Anacortes, Wash. And with latest LP A Crow Looked At Me, Elverum downshifted again, telling documentary-style stories of grief, memory and healing written and recorded in the wake of the death of his wife, musician-cartoonist Geneviève Castrée. In a simple acoustic guitar-and-voice setup on a short touring leg that ends here, one of the year’s most acclaimed albums is the centrepiece — prepare to be moved. (Wednesday, Sept. 20, Great Hall) Madame Gandhi, Weaves, Lido Pimienta T.O. band Weaves’ debut LP is among the final 10 for the Polaris Prize being handed out Sept. 18, and its followup Wide Open is being readied for an October launch. So win lose or draw on awards night they’ll have much to shout about a few days after via Jasmyn Burke’s punky vocals at the front for this hometown slot at the inaugural Venus Fest. But there’s more on the line and up and down the bill. The festival’s this-ain’t-your-mama’s Lilith Fair mandate — surely we can come up with a better word, no? — is feminist, queer-friendly and underground. It includes another Polaris shortlister and past Sampler fave in the beguiling Lido Pimienta, as well as headliner Kiran Gandhi, an L.A.-based graduate of Harvard and MIA’s band whose Madame Gandhi electro project figures to keep the joint awake and dancing right to the end. (Saturday, Sept. 30, Daniels Spectrum) The Paco de Lucia Project The warmth and accessibility of flamenco guitar soundtracks fill many a coffee shop and among the reasons for that kind of global ubiquity is the late Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucia, whose fiery talent, improvisational approach and collaborations with fusionists of many stripes took Andalusia’s biggest export to new places. De Lucia died in 2014, and now the band of young guns, who served as his late-period accompanists, have reformed under the direction of de Lucia’s Grammy-winning producer Javier Limon. Nephew Antonio Sanchez, who served as second guitar for the final few years of his uncle’s long career, sits in thus well-schooled in the main man’s old seat, and dancer Farru has all the moves — with Miles Davis’ electric band holdovers playing a week earlier at the same place, the heirs rule. (Saturday, Oct. 21, Koerner Hall) Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile Halloween night brings a surprise package of shredder-songwriters breathing life into rock’s sclerotic carcass, and among the most anticipated of new collaborations this fall. The titular duo met up on the festival circuit and Vile has said it was Barnett’s characteristically droll “Depreston” that moved them from talk to action over getting together — Barnett counts Vile’s “Peeping Tomboy” as her corresponding choice. As of this writing, the LP hasn’t even been teased yet, but such is the pedigree: They’ll come with a touring band dubbed the Sea Lice drawn from Sleater-Kinney, Warpaint, Wild Beasts, the Violators et al. — and even sounds unheard and sight un- seen, that would seem to make this pretty much can’t-miss. (Tuesday, Oct. 31, Massey Hall) Jay Z Among the fall season’s big-top, bigger-ticket stadium shows, Hov’s November stop for two ACC nights is the standout. Among the known quantities for the live presentation of June record 4:44 — and a host of earlier familiars — is a 40-foot balloon-dog backdrop created by artist Jeff Koons and hints at “surprise appearances” along the way by Beyoncé (unlikely as is the notion of Bey actually showing up somewhere by surprise, she at least did that with last year’s Lemonade, didn’t she?). Expect a few more of those teasers, including perhaps corporate branding of the balloon dog, as this one draws nearer. (Wednesday, Nov. 22, and Thurs. Nov. 23, Air Canada Centre) Diamanda Galas Galas’s mighty vocal range, creative spark and intense awareness and activism makes this rock hall landing, even one as good as this, seem a tad conventional. This is a composer and pianist whose 2013 piece “Espergesia” was performed in an Oslo mausoleum with a natural 25-second delay “in complete darkness.” Of late, she’s released two albums — one a smoking live record of “death songs” from Jacques Brel and the like, the other ( All the Way) offering up radical reworks of familiars. It’s probing like that around the outer edges of opera, jazz, blues and classical that has her sitting in rarefied air among pop’s most piercing avants. (Sunday, Nov. 26, Danforth Music Hall)