\u201cThe music really touched especially Canadian souls,\u201d says Anderson, who first produced the show 14 years ago. \u201cEven though [The Band] was living in the States writing a lot of their music and they wrote about America a lot, they wrote from a Canadian perspective. I always think The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down could never have been written by an American. They wouldn\u2019t have seen that perspective \u2013 it had to be written by someone who was outside the country looking in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back on the evolution of the show, Anderson says it was never his intention to pay tribute to The Band and, at the same time, stresses that it\u2019s not your traditional tribute show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t do this full time \u2013 this is an all-star band that just gets together to play this music because we love it,\u201d he says, adding they took their first bow together at the Kitchener Blues Festival in 2010. \u201cIt was supposed to be a one-off when they asked me to put together a special concert that would involve a lot of people, and I thought of The Last Waltz because they had 13 people on stage. We did it, the audience went crazy when we did it, and we enjoyed it so much because this music isn\u2019t easy to play. All those players were quite masterful in their own ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe band members said, \u2018Why don\u2019t we do this again sometime?\u2019 14 years later, here we are and\u2026it sells better now than it did 14 years ago. We believe this is part of our shared Canadian musical heritage and to play it live and play it in that spirit \u2013 we don\u2019t promise that we\u2019re going to do it note for note because The Band never played it note for note, they never repeated themselves; we do it in that spirit, we play it in that style, we play those arrangements, but within that we just do our own thing, our favourite things that we want to play, and it keeps it really fresh.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the last 14 years, the show has played across Canada and gets a tremendous reception wherever they go, particularly in the hometowns of original members of The Band. In those venues, they get feedback not just from fans, but friends and family of the trailblazers. Along the way, they\u2019ve also amassed musicians with strong ties to \u2013 and memories of playing with \u2013 the founders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey are the cream of the crop,\u201d says Anderson. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this out of the love for the music and I think that comes across. I think people realize we\u2019re so proud of these people and what they accomplished that we want to celebrate it. That\u2019s why we call it a musical celebration of The Band. It\u2019s not a tribute show in the sense that we\u2019re impersonating them; we\u2019re just celebrating their achievements and what they were able to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Aurora Cultural Centre will present The Last Waltz: A Musical Celebration of The Band Live next Friday, January 19, at 7.30 p.m. at St. Andrew’s College. Doors open at 6.45 p.m. For more information, including tickets, visit auroraculturalcentre.ca.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Brock Weir Music history was made in San Francisco in 1976 when The Band invited iconic friends Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and more for The Last Waltz, an epic concert painstakingly documented by Martin Scorsese released on film in 1978. Nearly 50 years later, this legendary night lives on in memory and on film, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8Rl","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-10 12:06:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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