Jazz in a concert hall? It’s a trend and can appear contrived and devoid of the spontaneity that’s the essence of jazz music. This was Redman’s challenge as he and his quartet performed at the Maison Symphonique de Montreal, an acoustically rewarding venue that on most dates is the home of Montreal’s acclaimed Symphony Orchestra. Backed with strings and performing from his latest release, Walking Shadows, Redman’s quartet made use of the acoustics by playing compositions that employed an orchestral landscape. 

Hedley is a popular Canadian pop-punk band that has been performing since 2004. They just released their fourth album, Storms. “Through thick and thin we are a band, but we are brothers. If we are not having fun doing this, there is no point in doing this at all.” Their new smash hit “Kiss You Inside Out,” continues to climb the charts. The YouTube video itself has more than 1.7 million hits. Hedley released four consecutive double-platinum albums in Canada and their songs are in demand more today than ever. Guitarist Dave Rosin recently spoke with Highbrow Magazine.

When T.S. Eliot wrote, “Mankind cannot bear much reality,” he inadvertently (“post-rock” hadn’t reached Oxford yet) described Montreal-based Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s bombastic sound. The band’s music is classically structured and is often lumped into a genre called “post-rock,” though the band dismisses this as a pretentious term. “Post-rock” is used to describe instrumental groups that include the traditional rock n’ roll instrumentation -- guitar, drums, bass -- but breaks from pop song structures. Instead, post-rock draws from a diverse array of influences, most evidently jazz and classical music. The detached, introspective sound of many “post-rock” bands is nonexistent in Godspeed’s music. 

The details of small-town life in the American West are, as always in Richard Ford's work, richly imagined and closely observed. These details, along with looping meditations on luck, the follies of heredity and the tragedy of bad choices, occupy much of the story in Canada, and would become tiresome if not for the narrator's poignant and elegiac voice. 

As political maneuvering continues over the fate of the controversial proposed Keystone XL pipeline, one of the world's largest energy companies -- BP -- is already signaling the direction it plans to take: it's positioning itself to tap the burgeoning supply of Canadian tar sands oil. BP announced it will divest from its oil refineries on the Southern West Coast -- in Carson, Calif. -- and Texas City, Tex., and expand its operations in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest.