CHANDRA with PETRA GLYNT, BILE SISTER and NEW CHANCE at Jam Factory Co. (2 Matilda), Thursday (November 12), 9 pm. $10 at the door.
Chandra Oppenheim‘s 1980 album, Transportation, is a remarkable suite of songs by an imaginative 12-year-old backed with care by adult musicians who took her ideas seriously and gave them space to grow, completely in step with the Dadaist/minimalist impulses of the New York no wave scene of the day.
“As a child, Chandra wasn’t restrained so much by theory or musical indoctrination, so she was more free to be creative and write songs in a novel way,” says Toronto musician Julie Reich, of Bile Sister, noting that the songs are structured around Oppenheim’s uniquely strange vocals and lyric perspectives.
“She was obviously an influence on the Model Citizens and the Dance” – the bands from whom Transportation’s players were recruited – “as opposed to the other way around.”
Speaking from her home in Portland, Oppenheim, the daughter of conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and now in her mid-40s, admits that she was too young to understand exactly where her music fit into the pop landscape. But she was keenly aware that it was not the sort of thing getting played on the radio and MTV.
“In an interview I did back then I said something precocious like, ‘I’m ahead of people in terms of the way they think about music, and eventually it will come around and there will be people who like what I’m doing, but it’s going to take a while,'” she says, laughing.
Sure enough, Transportation was reissued in 2007 by Canadian label Cantor Records, along with a full side of unreleased material also recorded in 1980. Its reputation grew quickly among a new generation of critics and musicians, including Reich, who was taken with the inherent outsider perspective offered by the preteen’s vivid imagination.
Reich struck up a correspondence with her for an interview piece for print, which led to a full-blown collaboration at Double Double Land last year where Oppenheim joined Bile Sister onstage to perform a couple of Transportation songs.
“I haven’t played out that much in all these years,” Oppenheim reflects, “but I’ve always been a musician. That’s all I ever did, and kept doing, all along.”
In fact, she has a brand new record, A Slightly Better Idea, that she’s been busy with and will return to after the run of Transportation shows.
“There’s an opportunity for more people to know about [Transportation] and appreciate it, and that gives me renewed excitement.”
Working with Reich, Oppenheim has assembled an all-star band of Toronto musicians for the upcoming Jam Factory performance. The show is also a tour kickoff for Bile Sister, who will team up with Oppenheim at a few U.S. stops in the coming weeks.
For Oppenheim, who now has a young daughter of her own, it’s been an opportunity for reflection.
“I felt like something was supposed to happen that didn’t happen in my life,” she says, “and I think it’s wonderful the way things come back around. Things go in cycles, and I get particularly excited about people playing Transportation – for it to be part of something again.”
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