Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Kristen Au @ Aspetta Caffe

Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket is becom­ing a more inter­est­ing place for me these days. It used to be just a grungy, dirty area of town next to Chi­na­town that offered noth­ing for me but fruit stands and small stalls offer­ing cheap cloth­ing I would never buy in a mil­lion years.

It still is grungy and a lit­tle dirty — com­plete with a park that I hear is def­i­nitely sketchy — but the cool thing is that there are a num­ber of tapas joints and cafes now that make the place worth vis­it­ing once in a while.

Aspetta Caffe is an Ital­ian joint at 207 Augusta, just on the other side of the street from the previously-mentioned sketchy park. I was there last night with my friend to see his friend, Kris­ten Au, per­form with her 3 bands. Yep, she has 3 dif­fer­ent bands!

Aspetta is a cozy lit­tle place. You could never describe it as pala­tial, but it is a friendly,little joint — just the way a cafe ought to be!

This first video shows what the place is like, while Kris­ten and her first band play a nice lit­tle Ella Fitzger­ald piece. The video does not really show how busy and tight it felt there because, unfor­tu­nately, most of the peo­ple are just out of frame, below what the video cap­tured. Hey, I was film­ing this 360 with my cell­phone and doing it blind!

The music was absolutely organic. By that, I mean it was nat­ural and grew from the skill and heart that the musi­cians brought to the place. Things were made up on the spot, and yet it all sounded great! In the first video above, for instance, the guy on the key­board is actu­ally a per­cus­sion­ist. In this fol­low­ing video, the per­cus­sion­ists in the lower left — who were the guys the guys on key­board and bass in the first band — were thrown into the mix for fun. Later on (after my phone bat­tery died on me), a trom­bone player joined in who was a guest to the event — he just hap­pened to have his instru­ment in the trunk of his car!

When I vis­ited Lijiang in China last year, one of the things I loved most about the expe­ri­ence was the music. Whether in lit­tle cafes, in out-of-the-way bars and lounges, or just in the pub­lic squares, musi­cians played music with heart & soul late into the night. Those are some of my fond­est mem­o­ries, and I am happy that I can find a lit­tle bit of that atmos­phere and heart right here in Toronto.