Last night at the Holy Oak left me a fuzzy warm tingle on this fine rainy spring Monday day, it was a Sunday last night, and I was at Wavelength, listening to music with my friends, and my newly befriended friends, again. It was wonderful. We at Wavelength HQ have been and shall be organizing some strange and amazing Wavelengths in strange and amazing locales, in beautiful courtyards and in massive movie theatres and in cities where people speak en francais, alongside windswept beachshores and even Wavelengths that will happen on Twitter. Even our shows at our semi-official playpen the Garrison tend toward spectacular weekend must see events these days, all well and all good, and the resulting shows have been sweeet. At the risk of misusing the word Regular, it was just dandy to have a regular Wavelength again.

The charm of last night’s off-night off-MajorEvent Holy Oak Wavelength tasted and sounded as refreshing as a lemon wedge in a pitcher of lemonade. Betty Burke hit all their marks and harmonized like the Carter family singing into distant thunderstorms after a fine paycheque dinner, and lead barker Maggie McDonald hit all her burkenotes with polish and panache. Hobson’s Choice were so utterly indescribably mesmerizing they had me pinned to the floor in a nook by the door, in a little pocket near the glockenspiel, basking in General Chaos’ pastiche of light, sitting in uncharacteristic speechlessness as I listened to voices and trumpets dance in perfect balance weaving trails behind their tunes in the sky like wrens at sunset soaring after beetles at the edge of the eye’s sight, gliding then darting, nimble in the sky and tethered by a bedrock of guitars and glocks.

It was a stroke of booking clairvoyance for Wavelength to create and celebrate a Manitoba-motif’ed Idus Maia. During setup Maggie and I were reminiscing about the Steve Kado era of Sneaky Dee’s, when he would do sound and I would do Kermit the frog at many Wavelengths, and our evolution of talkback mic arguments, some appropriate, some leaving the audience more than a little uncomfortable, and that subconscious memory of Kado and I led to a wonderful onstage quarrel last night between your humble emcee and a table of Winnipeggers chock full of Shoal Lake juice about the eastishness, westerliness,  and southerliness of the Manitoban water table, or rather the Manitoban pancake saucer, the significance of the killings at the 1919 general strike, and the general effect of Grid pattern surveying upon river drainage patterns, the resultant economic redistribution, and it’s subsequent effect on the prairie’s original inhabitants. All worth the pay what you can, all too difficult to describe other than to say you had to be there to be here.

Thanks Wavelength for being so unique and wonderful, and also thank you Wavelength for sometimes being as reassuringly regular as my favourite bowl of Red River cereal.