The title of her debut CD – Kid Dream – and the dream-like ambience of the artwork says it all.
Jessica Stuart has always held on to her childhood dream of pursuing music – and since she moved to Toronto from B.C. in 2007 it has become her full-time occupation and obsession, rewarded by growing national recognition for her music, rooted in the improvisational feel of jazz and progressive folk.
But while she embraces being part of Toronto’s vibrant music, arts and culture scene – and says she looks to promote it by becoming involved in more and more collaborative projects – she still thinks fondly of B.C.’s more laid back ethos.
So fondly, in fact, that she makes frequent returns here with her group, The Jessica Stuart Few – including this month’s B.C. leg of her current Canadian concert tour, which starts Thursday, Feb. 17 at Crescent Beach’s Beecher Street Cafe (7-10:30 p.m.) and continues Friday, Feb. 18 at Langley’s Jazzy Jones Roadhouse (7:30-10:30 p.m.).
Talking on the phone from her home in Toronto, the singer-songwriter and guitarist said she looks forward to the two local gigs as a continuation of the positive experience she had playing Beecher Street Cafe last year.
And there’s a sense of uninhibited possibility about her music, reinforced by the video for Kid Dream, created by Stuart and Toronto animator-director Evan deRushie, which used a live-action video as the basis for a ‘rotoscoped’ animation in which more than 2,700 video stills were carbon traced as the basis for individual drawings – frames of the video – done by many volunteer animators.
“We’d shot the entire video, edited it and put it together, and they created the drawings for it,” she said.
“There were about 80 people involved, all told, and they included kids as young as seven years old and people 70 years old, all from different creative backgrounds and at different skill levels.”
The highly energetic result can be taken as a measure of how liberated she feels as an artist – a feeling reinforced by a “very great validation” she received in December, when she was one of 50 musicians who received a grant for composition from the Toronto Arts Council.
“Composition is such a fun thing for me,” she said, adding that her performing and touring schedule has added an impetus for challenging herself by creating new material that she didn’t have when she was a part-time musician on the West Coast doing one gig per month.
“The beautiful thing about it is that it’s so unlaboured – I have about a million ideas.
“I’m not creating pop music or trying to top the charts. This is my art project – I’m not limited by what shelf at HMV I imagine my CD sitting in.”
Artistic creativity is the upside for a business that calls for a lot of marketing skills – and putting up with the inconsistencies of the venue and touring scene in Canada, Stuart said.
“It’s so all over the map,” she said. “Conditions range from slavery to being treated like near royalty.”
Born in Vancouver and educated at the University of Victoria, Stuart doers have the benefit of a business background. Her principal occupation for some years was working on building the Victoria-based vintage clothing retailer The Patch.
“I ended up doing a lot of business trips to Toronto as a buyer, which exposed me to the music and arts scene here,” she said.
While she never won a degree in music, she has a strong theoretical background – courtesy of her mother, Wendy Bross Stuart, an ethnomusicologist, music director and keyboardist, and father Ron, also a musician, anthropologist and producer, who live in Vancouver.
That legacy also includes the Japanese stringed instrument, the koto, which Stuart plays on the title tune from Kid Dream.
“I’ve been playing koto since I was quite a young child, when we were living in Japan,” she said. “My mother is a skilled player of the koto and the shamisen – a banjo-like three-stringed instrument – and there were always two of each instrument around when I was growing up. I expressed an interest in learning to play koto and I had a year of formal tuition from her instructor, which included a lot of solo stuff and group work.”
Although her parents – like many musicians with offspring – tried to dissuade her from a musical career, she acknowledges they have ultimately been supportive.
When she first moved out of the family home, she tried to persuade her mother to part with one of the family kotos, to no avail.
When she ultimately moved to Toronto and found a store that imported Japanese instruments, she called her mother and asked for advice on buying one.
“I was on the bus going to the store and my parents called me back to tell me they had decided to let me have one of the kotos on extended loan, and that they would be Fed-Ex-ing it to me. “The next day, there it was on my doorstep, bubble-wrapped.”
