teabowl

French-trained master baker Marc Thobor of Celestin fame has recently taken over the restaurant’s bakery counter and renamed it Thobors Boulangerie. It offers mostly beautiful standard French breads - baguettes, boules, fancy savoury or sweet variations, some croissants and a small variety of danishes, pains au chocolat and the like.

As an immigrant, I’m constantly in search of great bread in Toronto. Being German, I feel drawn to solid, chewy, darker sourdough and/or rye breads. Which are hard to come by: the Russian/Polish rye loaves are too light and fluffy, the Jewish varieties often have caraway seeds. Nice, but not pleasing to the German palate.

Discovering Thobors comes hot on the heels of a recent trip to Germany where we ate great bread - all kinds: seed-covered buns that were light and substantial all at once, the densest, moistest, most smooth-crusted rye bread you can imagine, and lovely 3, 5 or 7 grain breads that easily blew anything Whole Foods Market has ever made out of the water. To date, Dimpflmeier’s packaged rye breads have been the most consistent option… but they pale a little when compared to Thobors’ crunchy, fresh goodness.

I’m particularly enjoying the seeded baguettes (sesame and poppy), which have a pully, chewy bite. I like my bread to put up a bit of a fight. Pair these with a nice and simple cheese - maybe something like a Morbier - and you’ve got a very European-style quick meal.

Highly recommended. It’s actually worth making a trip up Mount Pleasant for. You could easily combine it with a visit to Bayview Avenue and its little food boutiques. But while there are now at least four bakeries in a one-block radius near Bayview and Millwood, you won’t find break as good as Marc Thobors’. My recommendation on Bayview is tostick with Alex Farm Products for cheese and Passion Fruits for excellent produce.

Best Music Writing 2008 (Da Capo Best Music Writing)

Nelson George (Editor). Da Capo Press 2008, Paperback, 360 pages, $7.85

Best Music Writing by Da Capo Press has been an excellent series over the years. Each year’s volume covers the best music writing (pop, jazz, not much classical), and for me, it’s proven a very useful compendium as I simply don’t have the time to sleuth out all those sources myself.

Stars

Simply Red. East/West Records 1991, Audio CD, $5.00

British soul pop at its finest. Mick Hucknall came from a reggae and soul perspective, but was really always a crooner first. This is an incredibly strong collection of songs, and it’s still puzzling to me why this never took off more in North America. I loved this when I was 21; it’s still a very, very strong album whose loose, 70s soul stylings and Beatles-esque harmonies have held up well. And it was a record that took the world by storm - at least the UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa… in England, it was the album of the year in 1991 and spent something like 20 weeks at the top of the charts. This incarnation of Simply Red featured Gota on drums - a very talented Japanese jazz/fusion/house drummer and producer who would later released a number of interesting instrumental discs. In a way, this fit well into the developing nexus of sound that was springing up in England around this time… pop musicians were being influenced by the nascent dance scene, and this CD is somewhat of a precursor to Emergency on Planet Earth and The Return of the Space Cowboy by Jamiroquai which came out a few years later - and also had virtually no success at all in North America.

Carried to Dust

Calexico. Quarterstick 2008, Audio CD, $10.59

And while I’m busy clearing the backlog of “CDs I must mention on my blog,” here’s a definite contender for 2008 Record of the Year. Calexico is an Arizona-based outfit that makes an interesting blend of indie pop and Mariachi/Rock en Espanol, full of deep rumbling basses, accordions and nimble, brushed drums. For me, this music evokes the desert somehow. (I can say this with slightly more legitimacy than someone who’s just seen too many spaghetti westerns because I actually grew up in a desert country. But that’s not strictly relevant.) I can imagine driving on a night-time desert highway and be carried by these sounds. They have a certain intimacy that makes you want to focus entirely on the music. Another observation - for me at least - is how similar parts of Carried to Dust are to some of Chris Isaak’s post-surf rock, music that should be talked about much more than it is (sadly).

There’s been much to love in Calexico’s music for many years. I’m especially fond of the Mexican influences - Calexico’s embrance of another culture’s music is a much-needed widening of indie’s prevailing young-white-man aesthetic (these days, the young men don’t even seem particularly angry). At times, Calexico sound delightfully like a less rocky Los Lobos. Is this as ‘authentic’ as Los Lobos, who have an impeccable East LA pedigree? When you listen to Calexico’s incredibly funky electronica/ranchero “Inspiración,” does it matter?

There’s a theme in Calexico of embracing other cultures and actively adding to the ‘Americana’ song book. Joey Burns, one half of Calexico, has recently produced L’Entredeux by Marianne Dissard, a French singer-songwriter based in Tucson. Unlike anything I’ve heard come out of Quebec (which, you’d think, would produce all kinds of North-American-cool pop music sung in French, but doesn’t, presumably because it’s trying to be Frencher than anyone in France), this is an excellent blend of French chanson with Americana, conveying the sort of low-key sophistication that makes it perfect for a dinner party with smart people who’d like some continental flavour but don’t want to risk the new album by Carla Bruni.

I think Calexico is one excellent way for indie to stop gazing at its own shoes and start to take notice of what else there is in the world. Joey Burns and John Convertino discovered that the world is right on their doorstep. 66 miles due South, to be exact.

On an irrelevant but related side note, Ready Made magazine’s October/November 2008 has a whole page about how Calexico made its own drum brushes out of bamboo. Unfortunately, the piece doesn’t seem to be online. The magazine’s not worth buying, but the article is worth checking out as an example of truly superb spin doctoring. Getting your act’s do-it-yourself project mentioned in a do-it-yourselfer magazine to coincide with your record release is completely awesome.

Oh (Ohio)

Lambchop. Merge Records 2008, Audio CD, $10.59

Despite the recording industry’s continuing contraction (not unlike the financial system’s), the world is full of beautiful music that’s worth hearing. One result of the long tail economy has been that there’s so much more music being released independently but not necessarily distributed or marketed. It’s a lot of work reading all the relevant magazines and sites to get ideas and stay on top of things. All of this as a preamble to establish some sort of reasonable way for me to say that I hadn’t ever heard Lambchop before today. I had read about them and they were on my must-check-them-out radar for a while. Now, though, there’s a new album, and New Release Tuesday put it in front of me so that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. In a handy listening post, no less.

This is spectacularly beautiful music. It’s immediately engaging and fits right into the Americana-country-folk-jazz gumbo I’ve been listening to lately. It’s a sort of downtempo alt-country (but alt-country not in a twangy way - more in a “what if Elvis had lived and regressed back to his glam country roots” kind of way), sung by singer-songwriter Kurt Wagner in a dispassionate, minimalist, low voice while an eleven-piece band plays some of the biggest quiet music you can imagine.

Some of it sounds a little like a loungy, countrified, downtempo, ever-so-slightly electronic version of Marvin Gaye’s late period slow burners. Then, there are pieces that somehow marry Neil Diamond and REM (if that makes any sense). Despite being very different vocalists, Kurt Wagner also has something of Bryan Ferry’s theatricality.

This is a very ‘technicolor’ record - incredibly big and very focused and economical at the same time. The quality of the recorded sound is beautiful throughout: a ramarkably sparse ‘widescreen’ experience where power comes from practicing restraint. This is quite a different band from, say, the Arcade Fire - there, more musicians means more sound, more space of the spectrum taken up by noise. Here, it’s the opposite: it’s a fun guessing game to see if you can spot what instrument/musician might have produced the barely audible murmur in the background.

Another good game would be to come up with theories as to why Kurt Wagner needs eleven musicians at all. Not that I’m complaining. I would highly recommend this, and I’ll be exploring more Lambchop.

The New York Times, in its fascinating blog “Measure for Measure,” currently has a great piece by Suzanne Vega about how her song, “Tom’s Diner,” played a key role in the development of the MP3. The engineers at Fraunhofer Institut in Germany used it to iteratively eradicate noise artifacts from the MP3 compression algorithm.

One day in 2000, I dropped my daughter, Ruby, off at nursery school and was approached by one of the fathers I didn’t know very well. Imagine my surprise when he said, “Congratulations on being the mother of MP3!” he said.

Full story at New York Times.