CR Avery’s cross-Canada tour to stop in Perth

Q: What does Perth, Ontario have in common with Halifax, Courtney, BC, Victoria, Vancouver, Sunpeaks, Kelowna, Canmore, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Kingston, Hamilton, Windsor, Guelph, Peterborough, London, Toronto and Ottawa?

A: They are all stops on “beat box poet, punk piano player and outlaw harmonica player of hip hop” CR Avery’s 2010 Dead of Winter Tour with the Legal Tender String Quartet.

Avery and his string quartet back-up band were hit of Perth’s 2009 Stewart Park Festival and kept the mainstage pulsing long into the night at the Blue Skies Festival this past summer. They’re back in Perth on February 18th with Avery’s indescribable blend of spoken-word, beatboxing, hip-hop, punk folk, slam poetry jazz and country blues.

With fifteen albums and seven operas to his credit, Avery’s resume is impressive by anyone’s standards. Last year, he headlined his own tour of France, opened on major tours for Billy Bragg and BUCK 65, as well as appearing at folk festivals across Canada. He’s been a sideman for such acts as Po’ Girl, Tons of Fun University, Sage Francis and Tom Waits. Jolie Holland, formerly of the Be Good Tanyas, recorded his song “Crazy Dreams” on her album Springtime Can Kill You in 2007. He counts among his many influences Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Lucinda Williams, Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen, and the aforementioned Waits.

Avery played to a standing-room-only crowd after hours at Stewart Park and his encore at Blue Skies had to be performed standing on a chair, so he could be seen above the heads of the fans who swarmed the stage.

Danny Sullivan, who along with Peter Dixon is producing the upcoming show in Perth, says of Avery:

One minute he’s storytelling, next he’s ranting or rapping or howling at the moon, then before you know it, he’s leading the audience in a chorus of “town to town on the greyhound” – the refrain of a hip-hop homily that channels the ghost of Hank Williams. When he launches into his musings about Pierre Trudeau, he makes us acutely aware of just how much self-respect that one man gave us as a nation and just how much of it we’ve lost since we lost him. When he slyly conjures the ghost of Jimi Hendrix – not on the stage at Woodstock or Monterey, but in a crowded Harlem discotheque years before he made his mark on the world – we are transported to that time and place by the magic of Avery’s voice and words alone. When he caresses the keys of a piano and softly sings “read over my shoulder” it is at once a plea and a prayer, an invitation, an exhortation and an incantation. When finally we rise from our seats, stand up and sing with him, “there’s a door by the river, there’s a window by the sea,” we know – each of us – that we have been transformed. And we know that everyone else in that room has been transformed with us.