Davie Studios presents: Acid Jazz Vol.11 at The Combine

If Acid Jazz night had been your first visit to The Combine, you'd probably think we host live bands here all the time.

The thick sound of the house band that pulsed from the back corner of the room resonated through our huge space with the clarity, confidence, and swagger of owning the damn place. For about 3 hours of a Wednesday night, the band absolutely did.

The crowd that spread across both levels of Luigi's Bar and encircled the 6-piece ensemble seemed to consist largely of loyal patrons of Davie Studios: a travelling Toronto Jazz and Soul collective whose motto is "Changing Who's in the Room."

The people assembled in front of the house band are young, diverse, and– most important– as eager to bounce energy back as they are to feed off what's coming from the stage.

"Stage" here is a figure of speech. Like the music itself, our bandstand (an office floor by day) is a product of improvisation and passion for a fusion of worlds.

IT SURE DOESN'T FEEL LIKE A WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN HERE.

— Shadia, Founder & Creative Director at Davie Studios

At The Combine, our curators specialize in working with creatives, artists, craftspeople of every stripe to reinvent our simple, flexible environment to fit their needs, whatever that may look like:

Like, "Oh, you need room for a full drum-kit, saxophone, bass and electric guitars, stage piano, mics, amps, monitors, laptops, mixing board, and elbow room for an MC who freestyles with his whole body? Gotchu. We'll get moving these sofas."

The rest falls into place, with startling elegance. This jam night might be a first for many visiting The Combine, but the performers on deck are anything but new to this. They are Zander Miller (alto sax), Steve Henry (keys), Kemy Siala (bass), Salvatore Paradise (guitar), John Kabongo (rap vocals) & Adrian Edwards (drums and band leader).

Spanning generations, pigmentations, and musical pedigrees, the bandmates seem to gel like one family— both pre-show, as they shot hoops in The Yard before sound check, and over and over again, each time in the set a meaningful smile sparked between one musician and another, together navigating the twisting sonic landscape in a locked-in unit.

Looking around the audience, above the panorama of swaying limbs and hips, you saw more smiles, just as wide. And not only smiles— slow head shakes of disbelief, too. Dropped jaws, and— of course, the iconic "stank face": a kind of funky inversion of a grin that mingles both your satisfaction at a particularly sick groove with an unnameable emotion akin to visceral disgust at the palm-sweating musical virtuosity it took to play it.

Half an hour into the night, the event team improvised too, by opening up more office space to accommodate audience members to a view of the band.

Besides their incredible talent and hard work, if there is some natural law to which the band owes its intoxicating chemistry, it's partly jazz's place in an inherently experimental and participatory tradition— and it's something that transcends any one genre or instrument.

There is no single star of the band— yet they all are. There is a band leader— yet the resulting music depends on collaboration between artists and audience. The performances reinterpret classic records, and yet they also defy the logic of recorded music as a mode of mass production. Every note played in the set existed for a single moment in a spontaneous gush of mutual creativity, flowed through our ears— and was gone. Until the next show.

Before she first welcomed the House Band onstage, Shadia Ahmed, the founder of this travelling music company, took the mic to explain to anyone who's new here how this all works, and why Davie Studios began. Back in 2022, Shadia had envisioned an artistic platform for her favourite genre more representative of the art form's deep roots and our city's deep diversity. Ever since, a variety of curated musical showcases fill their recurring program, including charitable concerts and artist-tribute jams— all spotlighting local talent.

This is the 11th Acid Jazz night in a series dedicated to the cross-section of jazz & rap— elevating the genre of parties, protest, and street storytelling to a lusher, more cerebral sonic space.

At the bar, between sets, I overheard one audience member note how strange it was, that, while jazz and hip-hop both originate in Southern Afro-American music culture, you rarely ever find them associated. He clearly misspoke, though. Fans of The Roots, Robert Glasper, J Dilla, A Tribe Called Quest, Pharcyde, D'Angelo, Nas, Erykah Badu (the list goes On & On) can attest: jazz music has always been integral to the flourishing of some of underground hip-hop's most important voices.

And increasingly, the reverse is also true: Hip-hop's stripped back, low-end-driven jams have played a massive role in shaping the sound of everything from today's Top-40 party pop to the wildly experimental stuff we've been hearing on stations like Jazz FM for over a decade— think Snarky Puppy, Lettuce, Bad Bad Not Good. So yeah, jazz and hip-Hop have been intertwined from the root.

Yet, as Shadia pointed out, it's true that Toronto's jazz scene has largely remained dominated by audiences skewing "older, sleepier, and– frankly– whiter" than you might expect from Toronto's rich cultural mosaic. And, whether it's influencing radio trends or live music scenes, these things don't happen in a vacuum.

If you want a local jazz scene that’s every bit as colourful and vibrant as the city itself, you need curious, passionate, and dedicated cultivators helping to lead the music where it wants to go. Luckily, Davie Studios has continued doing that for 3 years. From small beginnings, they've since hosted dozens of packed shows: out at Bevy East, Long Boat Hall in the West End, Apartment 200, and many more, including here.

At The Combine, we like to create a welcoming home for experiences you can't usually find elsewhere. This was one of those special nights where you wonder what took it so long to happen. And yet, like a wonky Dilla kick drum that lags behind the beat, the timing was actually perfect.

One of the biggest musical highpoints– a soulful rendition of Happy Birthday in honour of band-leader Adrian Edwards.

Improvised music is one of the oldest art traditions that exists, continually being redefined and evolved anew by the influx of new talent, and the audiences that show up to groove with them. At Acid Jazz, Volume 11, free sprawling jazz covers of hip-hop and r&b favourites– from Madvillain to Janet Jackson– reminded us that the Toronto jazz scene doesn't need to be stuffy, homogenized or institutional. With the right audience, "playing the standards" can take on a totally new meaning. If we have anything to say about it, this grassroots outfit is well on its way to becoming a local institution on its own terms.

Maybe Davie Studios’ motto about "Changing Who's in the Room" isn't just about diversifying demographics. This month, the band’s captivating energy and creativity changed the room itself— from an unusually-hip office space, to an extraordinarily-hip jam space, and created a portal for new fans to discover the art form. It left an unforgettable impression on at least one audience member about how, and where, live jazz can come to life.