Toronto based singer songwriter Peter Katz was embraced with open arms by an enthusiastic, yet, attentive crowd, Nov. 9.
This show actually started early, so I missed half of it. But I arrived in time to hear a couple of exceptional new songs.
As well, a beaming Katz came into the middle of the audience, acoustic guitar in hand to play “Oliver’s Song,” a song dedicated to violin virtuoso Oliver Schroer, who passed away from leukaemia a few years ago.
Katz confessed he had a scare with leukaemia as well, but it fortunately was a misdiagnoses. But he spoke fondly of his old friend Schroer, noting he Schroer billed his last concert as “his last concert on this planet,” and noted he learned a lot from Schroer, like having a sense of humour about life and living life on his terms.
Katz told a lot of stories and noted this show was different than his last show at the Slice.
“There’s nobody playing pool like last time,” he recalled, laughing “I had to pay them $20 each to stop playing, but luckily they paid it back to me after the show.”
Everybody was hanging off his every word this time as he talked about recording his new live CD/ DVD which was recorded during the CD release show in Toronto for his last CD “First of the Last To Know.”
He ended his show by playing the title track of that CD to rousing cheers, using a sampler to record the chorus and main chord progression and singing over it. He ended to ear-splitting whistles and went back into the middle of the crowd to play a touching request of crowd favourite “The Fence.”
He prefaced the performance by saying he didn’t want to depress the audience then told the story about Matthew Shepard, the young, homosexual university student from Laramie, Wyoming who was lured out to the woods, beaten and left for dead, tied to a fence, where he later died.
He ended his encore on an upbeat, uplifting note by playing a rousing cover of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
