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Concert reviews Music

Basia Bulat at Massey Hall

BASIA BULAT at Massey Hall, Thursday, July 10.


Basia Bulat is a master of instruments both familiar and not, and she brought an arsenal of them to her Live At Massey Hall concert.

“You’ll never get me off the stage,” she said, genuinely and charmingly in awe of the setting.

Songs from her latest folk album, Tall Tall Shadow, sounded fuller, richer and more rock ‘n’ roll backed by her strong six-piece band, especially with the two-drum-set treatment. (Her brother, Bobby, was behind one of them.)

Bulat contributed to that high-energy- spirit, too, dancing around as best she could with a large guitar slung over her shoulder, cradling an auto-harp as carefully as one would a child or delicately tickling her tiny charango – as she did on opener, City With No Rivers and the outstanding solo, mic-less encore performance of It Can’t Be You.

Her slightly husky, sweet vibrato was made for Massey. Though it was never drowned out by her band, it sometimes had to compete. That was resolved when she performed a solo mini-set partway through – particularly emotive and poignant on Paris Or Amsterdam, a song she dedicated to the deceased friend for whom it was written.

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