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,

The Peoples’ Yellow Pages, an unabashed guide to Montreal for those interested in alternative and underground lifestyles was published annually from the early to mid 1970s in Montreal. Louis Rastelli interviewed its editor, Garth Gilker, at his Café Santropol in October 2015. This Plateau Mont-Royal institution, begun shortly after Gilker ceased publishing the Peoples’ Yellow Pages, celebrated its 40th anniversary in the summer of 2016. Gilker, also known for his

Freda Guttman is a veteran artist and activist, still screenprinting and self-publishing, still a regular at fairs such as Expozine or the Anarchist Book Fair. We spoke about her time growing up in a Montreal that had changed drastically by the time she joined the nascent artist-run centre movement in the late 1960s. We didn’t speak much about her first claim to fame as an artist: her illustrations for fellow

On the occasion of the theatrical run of a new NFB documentary film, Ninth Floor , Archive Montreal digitized a number of student newspapers and images from its archives published during the infamous Computer Riots (otherwise widely known in its era as the Sir George Williams Affair), which played out in January and February 1969 at what is now the Hall Building of Concordia University in downtown Montreal. The film

Ken Norris was one of the “Véhicule Poets”, an informal bunch of poets who hosted and participated in readings at the Véhicule Art gallery and performance space on Ste. Catherine St. in the early to mid 1970s. He has more than two dozen publications of poetry to his credit and has had work appear in countless anthologies. Born in New York, he now teaches creative writing and Canlit at the

Endre Farkas came to Montreal as a child after he and his parents (Holocaust survivors) escaped during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He is a well-known and highly regarded figure in Montreal’s literary scene, coming to the city’s attention as one of the Véhicule poets—the group of poets who held regular poetry readings at the Véhicule Art artist-run gallery in the mid 1970s. He also taught literature at John Abbott College

Allan Bealy grew up and studied art in Montreal. In 1975, he moved to New York. While in Montreal, he published Davinci, and later in New York City, Benzene, both of which were ‘downtown’ art and literary magazines. Davinci was published out of the Véhicule Art artist-run gallery and performance space in Montreal between 1972-1974. Davinci was also, briefly, an imprint for some artists’ publications. It ultimately served to create