Ethel Bruneau : Miss Swing Interview conducted with Ethel Bruneau, April 15, 2021 by telephone during a confinement period of the pandemic. Ethel Bruneau was a Canadian dance legend who performed and taught in Montreal from 1953 to 2019. Born in 1936 in New York City to a Barbadian father and Jamaican mother, Bruneau sadly passed away in July of 2023 at age 87. From 1953 to the 1980s, Bruneau

The New Penelope Café and its era! Call for memories! Open for just a few years in the late 1960s, the New Penelope Café is legendary in the history of Montreal music and nightlife. It was the first independent concert venue in Montreal to feature important names in 1960s rock, blues, folk and jazz, from Muddy Waters and Frank Zappa to Joni Mitchell and Jesse Winchester. It was also a

LOGOS and Montreal counter-culture When one considers the earliest days of Montreal’s counter-culture and underground arts and activist scenes, it’s hard to exaggerate the importance and influence of LOGOS magazine. It was our city’s own contribution to the independent press that was emerging across North America, such as the Village Voice and the Georgia Straight. This entirely new publishing milieu gave a voice to the mid 1960s generation of youth

This is a transcript of a conversation with John Heward and Louis Rastelli in the summer of 2016 at Café Résonance on Park Avenue in Montreal. RIP John Heward, 1934-2018, Montreal. JH: I’m from here, from the so-called Golden Mile, Redpath Street. They were row houses built in the 1920’s, and when we were there in the beginning, there were still a lot of large houses, just around Sherbrooke. It

Juan Rodriguez is Montreal’s most esteemed, even legendary, rock journalist. He began writing about the music he loves in the early 1960s while in high school, publishing one of the first local music fanzines, Pop-See-Cul, from 1966 to 1970. He has written countless articles about music ever since, for the Montreal Star, Montreal Gazette and many others. It was an honour to have him spend an afternoon at the ARCMTL

Allan Youster has been a mainstay in the audience at local concerts for decades in Montreal. He spent part of the late 1960s working the door at legendary local concert venue The New Penelope Café, witnessing performances by such figures as Muddy Waters, The Fugs, Jesse Winchester and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Louis Rastelli spoke to him for this project at one of his favourite local haunts,

Erik Slutsky is a longtime Mile End native and veteran visual artist, who we met through his hosting of the New Penelope Facebook group – a group that since 2013 has become a lively place for nostalgia about the 1960s music scene, centered around the legendary venue. He kept his copies of old New Penelope Café newsletters, concert posters and many clippings about the wider music scene of the time,