13. Guelph's Renaissance man

ELENI KOPSAFTIS

With an array of titles spanning from singer to instrumentalist, and theatre director to cultural leader, Andrew Craig is the Renaissance man of southern Ontario.

Having created orchestral arrangements like “United We Play,” organized a multimedia concert of “Global Marley,” and even produced plays like Portraits, Patterns, Possibilities: A Black Canadian Trilogy, Craig consistently draws in stellar reviews through a collection of musical experience.

Craig told The Ontarion that he has “extensive training in Western European Art Music, more commonly, yet mistakenly called ‘classical’ music, and deep experience in jazz, funk, R & B, soul, [and] West African music.”

He has also spent years studying the Carnatic music of South India, but in terms of local music, he toured much of the world playing Cape Breton music with Ashley MacIsaac, a Canadian fiddler, singer, and songwriter from the island.

“My artistic focus has been centred in the African diaspora, but I consider myself a world citizen, and while being careful not to culturally appropriate, I feel the influence and impact of anything that’s authentic, meaningful, and demonstrative of devotion to craft, superior skill, and an abundance of talent,” Craig said.

Craig also founded the Toronto-based Culchahworks Arts Collective which develops social justice programs and produces commemorations like the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. The organization focuses on celebrating stories drawn from African and Caribbean-Canadian/American cultural legacies.

On top of that, he was a resident at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, a member of the board of directors at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, a recipient of York University’s Bryden Award and the African-Canadian Achievement Award for Excellence in The Arts, and a consultant to numerous arts institutions like the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils.

In all of his leadership efforts, Craig is led by his passion for art and music.

“I grew up in suburban Toronto in the early 1970s. This was the era when vinyl was king. Our family had one of those old wooden stereo consoles, with lids that flipped up on either side to reveal the turntable and radio controls,” he said.

Craig reminisced on the console, saying his father had installed locks on the lids since Craig would reach in and scratch the records as a toddler.

“Perhaps I missed my calling - maybe I was meant to be a turntablist,” he said.

Early report cards from school indicated a love for music too, though he recalls “significant bullying” which “took quite an emotional toll” on him.

“Eventually that pattern of bullying started to cause negative behavioural changes in me. By this point, my parents had separated, and my single mom could see the path down which her only son was headed. She decided to make a significant change, and ended up enrolling me in St. Michael’s Choir School. She had to take on a second job to afford it, but she felt it was worth the sacrifice.”

At 13, it was his school’s annual winter musical tour that shifted his view on music. When he was not selected to attend, Craig asked himself for the first time: “what would happen if I took music seriously?”

From then on, Craig pursued his musical career as if he were “a gun for hire,” striving to sing and perform whatever his clients needed. But in his 30s, he began to realize “just how much talent we have in this country that, at the time, was not getting properly recognized.”

“Our nation’s ongoing preoccupation with our neighbour to the South meant that truly worthy Canadian artists were getting passed over routinely, in favour of American artists.”

With this in mind, Craig started producing live shows and content that celebrated local talent. But most of all, Craig emphasizes his desire to create positive change.

“I strive to create art that strikes a balance between satisfying my muses, and offering some benefit to my community, and society in general.”

When Craig moved to Guelph with his wife 16 years ago, it seemed “miraculous” to him that a city of its size could boast five major arts festivals. He expressed particular interest in both Hillside Festival and Guelph Jazz Festival as being “world-class” with “cutting-edge programming.”

Craig says he wishes he could be more involved in the Guelph music scene, and hopes that the pandemic “doesn’t permanently force out” many artists.

“We are losing something extremely valuable with the onset of [COVID-19] and its attendant restrictions: the ability to gather. There is something very primal, very integral to our humanity in our being together, shoulder to shoulder, to engage in a shared, ephemeral experience. This is as old as humanity itself, and we would do well as a society to realize the importance of this.

“I am certainly not suggesting we ignore the science that says distancing keeps us safe. I am, however, acknowledging that in staying apart, we are suffering in other, deeper, less tangible, but critical ways — ways that the establishment fails to recognize, much less validate,” he says, adding that “in the course of protecting ourselves from one peril, we open ourselves up to another.”

Craig states he is “endlessly impressed” by artists’ consistent ability to shift in light of such crises, praising it as “the very essence of creativity and resilience.” While online mediums aren’t familiar to all artists, Craig says, “give us time, and we will create a whole new class of art, using the internet as our canvas!”

Hillside Festival collaborated with Silence Sounds, a local venue for musical workshops and concerts, to do just that. The virtual format of their Unmuted performance event offered a way to celebrate powerful voices through music and spoken word across Ontario. It began in Oct. 2020 and will continue into Feb. 2021.

Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. was Craig’s time slot for the event, so he “performed a combination of old and new songs that [he] felt were appropriate for the times.”

Specifically, “Fight The Good Fight” recounts real stories of hope and resilience that Craig compiled during the pandemic, and “Forgotten To Love” was inspired by an exchange between him and a friend on social media in which they found common ground despite disagreeing. “It’s a reminder not to forget to love,” says Craig.

“I am so very honoured to have been asked to participate in the Unmuted Festival. Being afforded this opportunity means that my artistic voice and message have yet another avenue for egress, and that the curators feel I add value to the festival’s overall artistic output. I am also honoured to be in such fine artistic company.”

Despite not feeling very involved in the local community, Craig has maintained his musical presence here in Guelph aside from his virtual performances with Unmuted.

This past June, Craig performed and spoke at the peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Guelph. There, he had told The Ontarion, “we’re 60 years past [the civil rights movement of the 1960s], one would have hoped that something more substantive would have occurred in that time.”

“I’ve had the privilege of performing for many thousands of people before,” Craig says. “But never in a context like that.”

Between his performances, Craig says he “spoke of a very tense encounter [he] had with Guelph Police, in which the officer ultimately judged [him] by, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, ‘the content of [his] character.’

“I thanked him then, and I thank him now, for my life would have been very, very different had he treated me the way that so many BIPOC people are treated by police and how I also have been treated on other occasions.

“Though the officer I referenced represents the institution of policing, his actions that night with me were unfortunately not representative of the norm. That story is the exception, not the rule.”

Craig states that Black-identifying men have been “painted with the same brush” for centuries, “to say nothing of Black-identifying womxn, or Black-identifiying members of the trans community.” However, he maintains that if he does the same to those in positions of authority, “then [he] is no better than [his] oppressors.”

“Some say that anyone who chooses to go into policing, regardless of their character, is complicit in the system of oppression. I hear this perspective, and respect it as a valid viewpoint, for we now understand the patently racist and oppressive foundations of these institutions. But if we use this metric, we must then apply it equally to religion, and to politics.”

Craig explains that he doesn’t believe everyone who enters religious or political life is inherently evil or intends to do harm. He holds this same position in regards to policing, believing that some people do work to change the system from within.

“All this said, there are a great many urgent, critical, and dramatic reforms needed in policing, and in the criminal justice system as a whole. It is a well-documented fact that the so-called justice system is routinely unjust to the BIPOC community... I, for my part, strive to be a positive changeagent — an artivist (artist + activist), and I hope that events like the protest back in June truly indicate that the tide is turning.”

Craig’s future plans include re-posting piano improvisations he performed earlier during the pandemic lockdown called “Placid Piano for Pandemics,” while also working on a Culchahworks Arts Collective documentary about Toronto’s ‘Little Jamaica’ and its Reggae music from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He has also taken the responsibility of growing the national Curbside Concerts virtual performance company in Ontario in hopes of building community and getting artists back to work.

“I would encourage young artists to find every possible avenue to make music they can, and put it out there. One never knows who will be positively impacted by what one creates. I would also say that it is wise not to depend solely on the arts for a living — the pandemic has proven the folly of that.

“Remember, though, that the creativity and non-linear thinking fostered in the arts are eminently transferable to so many other non-arts careers, and in some ways, provides one with an advantage over traditional thinkers. The fuel of the new economy is creativity — the one thing artists possess in heavy measure!”

Andrew Craig and his music can be found on his Bandcamp page and website:  dreadlockfunkybro.bandcamp.com/  wixsite.com/andrewcraig