Chris Butcher Music

Billy Bryans passed away this Monday morning after a long fight with lung cancer. You can read one of many obituaries here. I think we should honour him by listening to some of his favourite music, timba. This is a list he posted on TOSalsa about ten years ago of his favourite timba songs.
Timba is [...]

I’d like to share some of my thoughts and memories of the great Billy Bryans. Billy is in palliative care from a long battle with lung cancer so send him your good vibes.
The first time I formally met Billy was through Luis Mario Ochoa at Salsa on St. Clair 2009. After we shook hands Billy [...]

I’d like to offer my thoughts to the conversation that’s blown up on social media over the young Toronto group BADBADNOTGOOD.
The debate isn’t the only thing to explode though,
-Gilles Peterson flew them to England to play the Worldwide Awards and is busy tweeting Questlove that they should do a collaboration
-they’re playing Coachella next week
-they’ve been interviewed [...]

I’ve never really talked about The Heavyweights Brass Band here so I’m going to go ahead and do it.
Most importantly if you are in the Toronto area we are releasing our debut disc “Don’t Bring Me Down” at Harbourfont Centre on the Westjet Stage (the main one by the water) at 9-11PM TONIGHT Friday Sept [...]

I’m going to Barbados this weekend with Kollage so I thought it was a good time to learn Charlie Parker’s composition by the same name.
Is there anything better then J.J. Johnson playing a blues in F? I don’t think so. So here’s J.J’s three chorus masterpiece.Bass Clef PDF and in Treble Clef (8va) PDF
And the youtube [...]

A few weeks back I had a letter to the editor published in every hipsters favourite magazine NOW. You can check it out online here .It was edited (censored) fairly strongly though and they changed the title of it too. Since my least favourite thing in life is not having my voice heard, I’ve decided [...]

I’m a bad blogger. I always intend to keep the site updated but I have a lacklustre track record of writing here on any type of regular basis. Many things have happened and this will be a bulk blog to get a lot of them out there.
I went to Cuba in December for the Havana International [...]

This is a composition entitled “Why?” I wrote in memory of Jessica Marie Bernardin September 10, 1986 - November 17, 2005 (5 years ago yesterday). Thanks to the beautiful playing of David Virelles, Justin Gray and Joshua Park.

Jessica was an amazing human being, a sweetheart, extremely intelligent, musically gifted and driven. We went to highschool [...]

It’s been awhile since I’ve been blogging here. September was certainly the busiest month I’ve ever had in terms of number of creative exciting things going on. I’m going to talk about some of it retroactively in other blogs soon but I want to get writing more frequently and with a greater emphasis on  other [...]

There’s a lot of music shaking this September and I just wanted to make everyone here aware of it. The Heavyweights have two big gigs coming up that I’m spreading the word on
Monday September 6th @ The Rex Hotel 9:30PM
The Rex is Canada’s Premier Jazz Venue and this marks the first time we’re playing [...]