Rant & Dawdle A Collection of Writing, Photography & Music

Number Three:
The Cameron Public House

The Cameron Public House, 408 Queen Street West, Toronto has, since 1981 been a community-based space for music, performance, and visual art. Launched by Paul Sannella, his sister Anne Marie Ferraro and their best friend, Herb Tookey.

Steve McCaffery; Bass Clarinet [circa 1980s]

Steve McCaffery, poet, critic, editor, performance artist, member of the Four Horsemen sound poetry ensemble and a professor of English at York University, is the author of over a dozen influential books of poetry, twenty chapbooks and four volumes of critical writing and Whispers, a recording with Bill Smith & David Lee. His works include CARNIVAL panels 1 and 2, Panopticon, The Black Debt, North of Intention and Rational Geomancy: Kids of the Book-Machine (with bpNichol). With Jed Rasula, McCaffery edited Imagining Language, an anthology for MIT Press. He lives in Buffalo.

Steve McCaffery ‘Whispers’ (Blewointment, 1980s)
http://rantanddawdle.ca/2021/08/03/steve-mccaffery-whispers-blewointment-bwp-audio-002/

The Four Horsemen ‘Nada Canadada’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry7sAl0ONDc

The back room of the Cameron Public House was for six or seven plus years a paradise for adventurous improvising musicians. Every Saturday afternoon from 1 to 4, under the direction of John Oswald, Pool , an improvisation collective which originally began at the Music Gallery on St Patrick Street [home of the CCMC] on disparate occasions and then occurred every Saturday afternoon as the first act on a double bill with the solo singer songwriter Handsome Ned. In memory the “friends” that came to play with John included myself, David Lee, Steve McCaffery, Larry Potter, David Prentice, Maury Coles, Arthur Bull, Andy Haas and occasional guests, musicians passing through Toronto; including such brilliant players as Barre Phillips and cellist Ernst Reijseger, saxophonist Lol Coxhill, guitarist Fred Frith, Laurie Anderson…

End Notes:

Comments and corrections can be sent to classicimprov@yahoo.

High quality digital copies of the photographs are available on request.

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