One of the things I love about accordion music is that it can go so many places in a single song. Musicians seem to travel with the notes, and where they start is not always where they wind up. It's not all neat and tidy, modern accordionists seem to want to take it everywhere it can possibly go. This conversation with Accordion Noir co-hosts Bruce and Rowan, started in the dark studio of Co-op Radio in the downtown Eastside, and then went a whole bunch of places, over to Strathcona, across the waters to James Bay in Victoria, Oak Bay Secondary (where I graduated high school), Kamloops, where the Candidos finally settled and where my Dad was raised... It was one of those talks that brings a lot of points on your life map together, I really enjoyed meeting the voices of Accordion Noir, and having the luxury of an hour's reflection. There's a special treat for those who listen right through to the end -- Rowan's hilarious takeoff of a Nine Inch Nails tune.
“You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,” Virgil said to me after one practice. “It’s like watching you walk into a secret place that no one else knows how to get to.” Hockey is the saving grace of young Saul Indian Horse’s life. Lost to his family and orphaned in his grandmother’s arms, eight-year-old Saul is discovered at an icy railroad stop in northern Ontario and stolen away to spend the next six years at St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. “St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world,” Saul remembers. He saw children die of abuse or suicide, with whatever they had to take themselves away from hell on earth: a pitchfork; rocks to weigh down a dress in water; rope to swing from the rafters of a barn. Anything, even death, was better than the despair of suffering the school’s daily humiliations. It is a hockey ice rink, built at St. Jerome’s during Saul’s second winter, that saves him. In the years that follow, the crack of light opened by hocke
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