Guitarist Craig Dunsmuir has been a fixture of the Toronto music scene for more than twenty-five years, in various incarnations as Kanada 70, Guitarkestra, and Glissandro 70, the latter with longtime collaborator Sandro Perri, and as a DJ and contributor to many other local bands. He formed Dun-Dun Band in 2016, but Pita Parka, Pt. 1: Xam Egdub is the group’s first full-length vinyl recording, following a cassette released last year. And it was definitely worth the wait. Dunsmuir gathered together an impressively long list of talented and adventurous Toronto musicians—among them Brodie West, Karen Ng, Colin Fisher, Jay Anderson, Josh Cole, Mike Smith, Ted Crosby, and Blake Howard—and let them play off each other’s considerable strengths, employing various keyboards, saxophones, percussion instruments, clarinets, guitars, bass, and a Roland Handsonic percussion pad. The album consists of three instrumental tracks, named as mysteriously as the album title: “No. 1,” “No. 20 (Once Raw: The Aging G),” and “No. 7 (Nilan).” Maybe it’s because the musicians have performed with each other on many stages before, but their playing styles merge beautifully under the direction of Dunsmuir and his co-producers, Cole and Perri. The saxes and clarinets swirl and cascade and soar entrancingly over the guitars, keys, and percussion in a gently swaying, smoothly shifting, often mesmerizing mixture of avant jazz and African musical influences, coming together in brief coordinated melodic passages before breaking apart to improvise again, separately and yet perfectly balanced.
Mary Dickie is a Toronto music and arts journalist whose work has been published in a variety of different publications over the past couple of decades, including Impact, Eye Weekly, Maclean’s, ELLE Canada, The Toronto Sun, FASHION magazine and IN Toronto. She is also a member of the Polaris Music Prize jury.