Free Times

A venerable live music venue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that keeps on is the Free Times Café on College Street.

How good it felt

to be in this space.

And to be a protagonist in not only “Dad attends son's sound-check” but also “Dad catches entire fucking gig.”

(Covid, its catastrophic friends, and tragic human complacency have been thwarters of live music, and collective action and culture. They've spurred Amazon deliveries but taken the boots to the radical measures our planet requires. To ease in international travel. To spontaneous visits. To so many things the assumptive-somnolent likes of me took for granted…)

Alex Terry played the Free Times this eve. A rivetting song-writer, a folk-rocker . . .

. . . with Cockburnesque poetics and guitarwork. Listen in. His new record, Rare Bird (2022), has just dropped.

Felix Mills on percussion.

And masterly, delicious-subtle, in performance.

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*Photographs by Kenneth Mills, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 22 June 2022.

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