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SiriusXM’s Top Comic finalists battle for biggest prize to date

SiriusXM Canada, the country’s leading audio entertainment company, today announced the eight finalists who, determined by popular Canadian vote, have earned a spot to perform at SiriusXM’s Top Comic Finale. The Finale will take place at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Toronto on September 29 at 7 p.m. as part of the Just For Laughs JFL42 Comedy Festival.

From 72 contestants down to eight, the finalists will battle it out mic-to-mic, bringing their best comedic material in hopes of winning the coveted title of SiriusXM’s Top Comic and the biggest grand prize to date – $25,000. Auditions were held in Toronto andVancouver across six nights in June where judges selected 18 semi-finalists from the 72 comics chosen to audition. From there, aCanada-wide online vote was held and the eight comics with the most votes advanced to the Finale.

SiriusXM’s Top Comic 2016 finalists are:
Kevin Banner, Vancouver, BC (hometown is Sooke, BC)
Sophie Buddle, Vancouver, BC (hometown is Ottawa, ON)
Graham Clark, Vancouver, BC
Mike Delamont, Victoria, BC
Che Durena, Toronto, ON (hometown is Port Coquitlam, BC)
Mayce Galoni, Hamilton, ON
Julia Hladkowicz, Toronto, ON (hometown is Ottawa, ON)
Chris Robinson, Toronto, ON (hometown is Brampton, ON)

The Finale will feature a headlining performance by Canadian comic Tom Green and will be hosted by Ben Miner, Canadian comic and host of SiriusXM’s Canada Laughs. A panel of industry judges will select the winner of SiriusXM’s Top Comic who will receive the grand prize of $25,000. The winner will also receive guaranteed spots at three of Canada’s biggest comedy festivals in 2017: JFL42 inToronto, JFL NorthWest in Vancouver, and the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal as well as be included in a televised JFL: All Access special airing on The Comedy Network. Two runners up will receive TV spots at the 2017 Just For Laughs Festival in Montrealplus a double-threat show at JFL42 2017.

Tickets for the SiriusXM Top Comic Finale can be purchased online at: jfl42.com/act/siriusxm-top-comic. JFL42 passholders have access to the Finale by using one of their credits to reserve their seat at the show. Passes and tickets to JFL42 are on sale now at jfl42.com.

For those outside of Toronto, Canada Laughs (channel 168) will air the Finale live, starting with a pre-show at 6 p.m. ET. Satellite radio subscribers who have access to SiriusXM Streaming can listen to the Finale on Canada Laughs on the SiriusXM App and online.

Top Comic is part of SiriusXM Canada’s ongoing initiative to provide exposure to Canadian talent. Last year, Montreal’s Derek Seguintook home the title and grand prize, with Matt Billon of Vancouver and Jordan Welwood of Winnipeg placing as runners-up. Previous winners include Faisal Butt, Pete Zedlacher, Eric Andrews, Matt O’Brien and Brian Stollery.

Canada Laughs (channel 168) features uncensored Canadian comedy 24/7 including stand-up, sketch and more, putting the spotlight on the rich pool of extraordinary talent from Canada. Canada Laughs is available to all SiriusXM subscribers in Canada and across the U.S. and joins SiriusXM’s hilarious comedy lineup, including Comedy Central Radio, Raw Dog Comedy, The Foxxhole, Jeff and Larry’s Comedy Roundup, Laugh USA and more.

SOCAN Foundation Reveals the 24 Young Composers and Young Audio Visual Award Winners

From left to right : Dylann Miller, Guillaume Campion, Antoine Binette Mercier, Olivier Bibeau, Katerina Gimon, William Kraushaar, Lora Bidner, Taylor Brook, Gabriel Dufour Laperrière, Spencer Creaghan, ...

The SOCAN Foundation today announced the 24 winners of the 2016 SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers and Young Audio Visual Composers.

This year’s competition attracted 224 entries, awarding a total of $51,000 to the prize winners. The jury awarded the grand prize to Canadian, New York-based Taylor Brook for his inspiring piece “Song for Solo Cello.”

“Congratulations to all of this year’s winners for composing music that made enough of an impression on the juries to be chosen as a winner,” said Charlie Andrews, Manager of the SOCAN Foundation. “There are a tremendous amount of talented young Canadian composers and we’re thrilled to be able to help and recognize some of them, so they can continue to create the beautiful music that touches us all.”

The Annual SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers recognize Canadian composers 30 years of age and under for specific musical works in five categories of concert music. The submissions were judged anonymously by a jury of three prominent composers: Dr. Robert Lemay (Sudbury, ON), Jocelyn Morlock (Vancouver, British Columbia), and Afarin Mansouri Tehrani (Toronto, ON).

“Overall the composers demonstrated a great deal of skill, wide-ranging imagination, and that there was a remarkable (and admirable) diversity of styles and influences in their music,” said Morlock.

The Young Audio Visual competition is designed to recognize Canadian composers who are 30 years of age and under, for original musical themes or scores created exclusively for audio-visual support (TV, film, Internet, etc.). The jury for this category was comprised of industry professionals Darren Fung (Los Angeles, California), Judith Gruber-Stitzer (Montreal, QC), and Stephanie Copland (Toronto, ON).

“The level of musicianship and professionalism displayed in this year’s AV composer candidates was impressive.  It gives me great hope that that craft of screen composing is alive and well,” said Fung.

Young Composer Award Recipients:

The Sir Ernest MacMillan Awards (for compositions for no fewer than 13 performers up to full symphony orchestra, which may include vocal participation and may be scored to include electroacoustics)

1st – Hoi Chak Roydon Tse (Toronto, ON)
2nd – Matthew Ricketts (New York, USA)
3rd – Joseph Glaser (Montréal, QC)

The Serge Garant Awards (for compositions for a minimum of three performers to a maximum of 12 performers, with or without voice and/or electroacoustics).

1st – Taylor Brook (New York, USA)
2nd – David Storen (North Vancouver, BC)
3rd – Carmen Vanderveken (Nijmegen, Netherlands)

The Pierre Mercure Awards (for solo or duet compositions, with or without voices and/or electroacoustics)

1st – Taylor Brook (New York, USA)
2nd – Gabriel Dufour-Laperriere (Montréal, QC)
3rd – Hoi Chak Roydon Tse (Toronto, ON)

The Hugh Le Caine Awards (for live or recorded electroacoustics, where the intended performance is, at least in part, through loudspeakers. Works in this category may be multi-media and may include acoustic instrument(s) or voice(s), live or recorded. The principal element in the work must be electroacoustic)

1st – Guillaume Campion (Montréal, QC)
2nd – Maxime Fillion, (Montréal, QC)
3rd – Matthew Horrigan (Vancouver, BC)

The Godfrey Ridout Awards (for works of any number of voices with or without instrumentation and/or electroacoustics)

1st – Katerina Gimon (Vancouver, BC)
2nd – Matthew Horrigan (Vancouver, BC)
3rd – Dylann Miller (Aurora, ON)

The John Weinzweig Grand Prize (for best overall work submitted; applicants do not apply for this award)

Taylor Brook (New York, USA).

Young Audio Visual Composer Award Recipients:

Best Original Score – Non-Fiction

1st – Antoine Binette Mercier (Montréal, QC)
2nd – William Kraushaar (Montréal QC)
3rd – Olivier Bibeau (Quebec, QC)

Best Original Score – Fiction

1st – Arie Verheul van de Ven (Toronto, ON)
2nd – Isaias Garcia (Toronto, ON)
3rd (tie) – Vincent L. Pratte (Los Angeles, USA)
3rd (tie) – Shaun Chasin (Toronto, ON)

Best Original Theme (opening or closing)

1st – Emily Klassen (Toronto, ON)
2nd – Spencer Creaghan (London, ON)
3rd – Vincent L. Pratte (Los Angeles, USA)

Best Original Score – Animated

1st – Lora Bidner (Toronto, ON)
2nd – Benjamin Goldman (Montréal, QC)
3rd – Toby Sherriff (Los Angeles, USA)

Pink Floyd fly a pig to announce museum exhibit

When you’re Pink Floyd, how do you announce a museum exhibit dedicated to your career? You fly an inflatable pig, of course. A balloon floating over the Victoria & Albert Museum accompanied the announcement of The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, a career-spanning show that will “include 350 items of band ephemera — instruments, posters, handwritten lyrics, artwork, and more.” The exhibit will open in London next May.

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Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon On The One Music Invention That Changed Everything: The Walkman

A lot of people talk about how the business of music has changed, and that’s not super interesting, except in the sense that it reflects how people’s actual relationship to music has changed. You’ve been a significant performer for a long time. What differences do you perceive?

Simon LeBon: Nothing has happened recently that compares to the massive change that happened at the beginning of the ’80s, when the Sony Walkman was invented. That was the biggest change in music. It still is. It’s still massive. The fact that people listen to their own music, and they have their own playlists, their own set of likes. You don’t have to listen to everybody else’s choice. That, to me, still is the biggest development in the music scene in 50 years. Everything comes from that. The downloading, the internet, the relationship with music that the internet has provided wouldn’t exist if the Sony Walkman hadn’t been invented.

It’s true that it introduced the on-demand paradigm, but it didn’t do anything to change the nature of hits, or undermine the mass audience, both of which the internet has done.

No. You’re right, but also, there’s something else as well which is crucial to us right now, and that is how a live show is perceived. When we started out, live shows were considered promotional tools to help sell the record. Audiences really didn’t have to pay a lot of money to come see you play live. Now, because recorded music is pretty much free to a lot of people, they can pick and choose. You don’t have to go and spend $10 on a CD or a vinyl album to hear the one song you like because it’s an album track. Recorded music has become cheaper. The value has dropped, but the value of the ephemeral moment, of the band onstage, that thing which can’t be recorded because it’s you and how you feel, it may involve the people you go with. Maybe there’s a girl you’re falling in love with, or maybe you’ve taken drugs. A lot of this stuff is all part of the experience, particularly in festivals, as well. We’ve seen this incredible, incredible rise of the music festival, and it’s the personal experience that people are now investing so much more in compared to, say, 20 years ago. That has actually become the shared experience, as well. You share that with your friends. It’s like all sitting around with the Rolling Stones record and rolling a joint on the album cover.

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Mel Brooks Shares Fond Memories Of His Good Friend Gene Wilder

Mel Brooks chats with Jimmy about working with his good friend Gene Wilder over the years, including the origin of Young Frankenstein.

We became very good friends and I told him about Leo Bloom and the thing I was writing called ‘The Producers’. And I said, “look, I’m promising you…when we get the money, you are going to be Leo Bloom”. He said “Oh yeah, when you get the money. You’re doing a play about two Jews who are producing a flop instead of a hit, knowing they can make more money with a flop and the big number in it is ‘Springtime for Hitler‘? Yeah, you’re going to get the money. …We got the money, I went backstage …and he was taking off his makeup, he was in his dressing room. I took the script and I said “Gene, we got the money. We’re gonna make the movie. You are Leo Bloom.” and I threw it on his makeup table and he burst into tears.

First Drafts of Rock: “Free Fallin'” by Tom Petty (with Kevin Bacon)

For his new Tonight Show segment First Drafts of Rock, Jimmy Fallon is joined by Kevin Bacon to sing what were the original lyrics to Tom Petty’s 1989 hit Free Fallin’, a song about a girl who really, really, really, really, loves horses.

Twitter is paying its best users to create videos

Twitter wants the kind of video creators YouTube has — and the massive audiences that come with them.

To make this dream a reality, the company is pulling a page from YouTube’s playbook: It’s going to sell ads alongside creator videos and share that ad revenue with the people making the content. And Twitter is offering very appealing terms.

Unlike YouTube, which gives 55 percent of the money to creators and keeps 45 percent, Twitter is using the same revenue split it already offers other Amplify video partners, like the NFL: 70 percent to the content creator and 30 percent back to Twitter, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

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Seven Days, Over 45 Canadian Acts, Two New Venues – Canada’s Walk Of Fame Festival Is Bigger Than Ever

The seventh annual Canada’s Walk of Fame Festival is bigger than ever as it returns to Toronto September 20 – 29, 2016. What began as a four-day festival in 2010, has now expanded to a seven-day showcase of Canadian arts and includes the addition of two new venues this year for the Festival’s concert series: the Mod Club and the Phoenix Concert Theatre. The Festival will also include the return of the three-day Yonge-Dundas Square Free Festival and the Future Legends at the Horseshoe showcase.

“Canada’s Walk of Fame Festival provides a platform to showcase the wealth of incredible talent we have in Canada, from rising stars to award-winning artists firmly established in their careers,” said Melanie Hurley, CEO of Canada’s Walk of Fame. “Whether it’s watching a free performance by a favourite musician, discovering a new band, hearing a reading by a popular author, or enjoying a special screening of a favourite childhood cartoon, the Festival offers something for everyone.”

PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS:

For a current schedule of programming visit canadaswalkoffame.com. Additional programming will be announced in the coming weeks.

Future Legends at the Horseshoe (September 20)
Following the success of the inaugural rising star music showcase, Future Legends at the Horseshoe returns on Tuesday, September 20 and features rising stars of the Canadian music scene. Performers include JUNO Award and Polaris Music Prize nominated international sensation Cold Specks, the multi-talented genre-bending artist BAD CHILD and NEFE, Grand Prize Winner of the 2014 Canada’s Walk of Fame Emerging Artist Music Mentorship Program, supported by RBC. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. Advance tickets are on sale now and can be purchased by visiting canadaswalkoffame.com or ticketfly.com.

Mod Club (September 21)
Platinum-selling, JUNO nominated jazz singer Matt Dusk with special guest JUNO nominated, jazz/blues artist Florence K are headlining with an exclusive intimate performance for the Festival on Wednesday, September 21. The evening’s line-up also includes acclaimed folk singer Sarah MacDougall, and Ayaz Virani, the 2016 Grand Prize Winner of Canada’s Walk of Fame Emerging Artist Music Mentorship Program, supported by RBC. Tickets are $30 in advance or $35 at the door. Advance tickets are on sale now and can be purchased by visiting canadaswalkoffame.com or ticketfly.com.

The Phoenix Concert Theatre (September 22 & 29)
The Festival’s country music showcase on Thursday, September 22 includes performances by CCMA Award nominated artist Leah Daniels, Boots & Hearts 2015 Emerging Artist Grand Prize Winner James Barker Band, fourth generation musicians The Abrams Brothers and rising country stars Washboard Union who have shared the stage with some of the biggest names in country music including Zac Brown Band, Keith Urban, Reba McEntire and The Band Perry. Tickets are $15 and are on sale now at livenation.com, Ticketmaster, Soundscapes, Rotate This or by calling 1-855-985-5000.

Presented by Q107’s Psychedelic Sunday, rock icon and recipient of the 2008 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement Michel Pagliaro will return to a Toronto stage for the first time in more than 30 years on Thursday, September 29 to close out the Festival. Special guest, JUNO Award winning musician Tomi Swick will open the show. Tickets are on sale now and range in price from $10.70 – $25 (plus service charges). Tickets can be purchased at livenation.com, Ticketmaster, Soundscapes, Rotate This or by calling 1-855-985-5000.

Yonge-Dundas Square Free Festival (September 23-25)
Taking place September 23 – 25 at Yonge-Dundas Square, the jam-packed Free Festival line up has an exciting mix of programming including live music, book readings, dance performances, film and television screenings and sports activations including an autograph signing with Toronto Maple Leafs alumni. There will also be lunchtime workouts with Goodlife Fitness, food trucks and tons of giveaways.

Comedian Johnny Gardhouse will once again host the Free Festival and musical performances include JUNO Award winning hip hop artist Classified; JUNO nominated folk rockers Great Lake Swimmers; hockey player turned musician Jonathan Roy, who is mentored by 2016 Canada’s Walk of Fame Inductee Corey Hart; psychedelic rock group Black Mountain, who are on the 2016 Polaris Music Prize shortlist; rock outfit Zeus; world music group Delhi 2 Dublin, who are known for their signature fusion of many genres; and rising star Top5, who captured Drake’s attention and received a shout out on Views and also played OVO Fest. Plus the seven finalists of this year’s Emerging Artist Music Mentorship Program, supported by RBC, will take the stage.

A Saturday morning throwback on September 24 will bring some nostalgia to the Festival with screenings of popular cartoons and children’s television shows from the 1960s-1980s. Mitch Markowitz, the only surviving member of The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, will do a special introduction to the show and meet with fans.

Funding for the festival is provided in part by the Government of Canada through the Canada Arts Presentation Fund, which has the objective to give Canadians access to a variety of professional artistic experiences in their communities.

In addition, financial support is also provided by the Government of Ontario through Celebrate Ontario and the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership Corporation.

Canada’s Walk of Fame gratefully acknowledges the support of our 2016 National Sponsors: Cineplex Entertainment, NBCUniversal, Slaight Communications and Air Canada.

For information about the Festival and Canada’s Walk of Fame, visit canadaswalkoffame.com

Yangaroo Music And DMDS Increases Contemporary Christian, Worship and Gospel Music Stations For Delivery

YANGAROO Music powered by DMDS is excited to announce they have enhanced and upgraded their digital music delivery system to now include more than 70 destinations actively looking for new Contemporary Christian, Worship and Gospel music for airplay consideration across Canada.

These new destinations are now able to be reached via YANGAROO Music’s DMDS delivery platform, the same way virtually all radio in Canada receives new music from Major Labels, Independant Artists and everyone in between.

This has been achieved by compiling, updating and engaging virtually all Canadian Christian Music radio stations as well as a dedicated group of other promotional outlets in Canada to help create a simple, centralized, more efficient way for Christian Artists to get their music out to Canadian Christian Radio.

Watch Phil Collins, ‘Hamilton’ Star Leslie Odom Jr. and Phil’s Son Perform “Easy Lover” and “In The Air Tonight”

Phil Collins appeared at the opening of the US Open tennis tournament on Monday night to play a two-song set that featured a duet with Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. on “Easy Lover,” the hit that featured Philip Bailey on the original 1984 recording. Nerve damage prevents Collins from playing drums anymore, so his 15-year-old son Nicholas took the kit and, reports Rolling Stone, played “one of the most famous drum fills in rock history with ease.”

The set wrapped after just two songs, but Collins is releasing his long-awaited memoir on October 25th that he’ll support with a promotional book tour. He’s revealed no firm plans for a new album or comeback tour, but much of his old band reunited for the US Open. His drummer may still have a few years of high school left to complete, but hopefully that won’t impede any road work. “My kids were in nappies when I was last on the road,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “They love my music and I’d like to take them out so they can enjoy it.”

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That Eric Alper
6-time nominee for Publicist of the Year during Canadian Music Week, a 16-time JUNO Award winner overseeing PR campaigns, and have also been truly honoured to work with some of the biggest and most important artists of our time.

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