Do not trust the man whose pay-check depends on you taking his advice. Al Gore said similar during “An Inconvenient Truth” and the same thought occurred to me as I leafed through a discarded ‘dream’ houses and condos supplement on the 506 streetcar towards the East end. Doom and gloom sells newspapers, but here was realtor after realtor, lining up to enthuse about the property market in Toronto. I guess whether you’re a glass half-empty or glass half-full kinda person dictates who you believe – realtor, or politician?Not much of a choice between them though – a clash of the ‘liar’ titans one might even be tempted to say.
And so a similar clash of the titans between full and empty began. The cynical, jaded writer versus the self-made entrepreneur 10 years his junior. To be honest, I didn’t expect to hear such good news for house music lovers when I interviewed Lindi Delight Masunda. After all, regardless of how hedonistic you might be, are you really going to go out and party if you can’t make the mortgage payment?
However, not content with creating – to my knowledge at least – one of the first deep house-specific nights in downtown Toronto, the entrepreneur described predominantly as “positive” on Facebook hopes to be promoting Canadian DJ talent internationally, to add philanthropy to her already successful “TenaciouSoul” venture, and to launch a website that enables anyone else to do what she’s doing…all before the end of 2009.
In addition to TenaciouSoul, managing Canadian DJs to get them on the global map and out of the Great White North, and teaming up with a selection of womens’ charities, her website is planned to be a proverbial online directory of bartenders, DJs, security staff, sound and lighting technicians, plus whatever else you can think of to throw a mini-rave of your own. Oh – and she’s going to learn to DJ herself too. Well, it is only January I guess, but then this is a 27 year-old who gets fidgety if she’s not doing umpteen things at once. “I need variety,” she grins from the other side of a pint.
I suppose it’s not surprising for someone who graduated in electronics & telecommunications on the West coast, and then turned up as the brains behind TenaciouSoul – which isn’t even her day job – on the East coast some years later. “I believe in fate,” says Masunda. “My last night in Toronto before flying back to Vancouver for good, I walked into a bar and asked the manager there if I could help out. He asked me whether I had bartending experience, I said yes, and that was that. I was working in there the next evening as my empty seat on the plane headed West.”
We’re now six-and-a-half years down the road.
Perhaps that puts Masunda’s ambitions into perspective, although she hasn’t been at the single-handed event management and promotions game for all that time. “I decided in about March 2006 that I wanted to throw parties,” she explains. “I was doing it all myself, which made it hard work but also meant that there was no-one around to tell me I shouldn’t do it, or that I was doing it wrong!” And that’s how it went for a year or two. No qualifications, no training, no sponsorship, no grants, no loans, no counsel, no helpline, nothing: “I’ve learned the hard way over the last two-and-a-half years, but I’ve learned fast too. Now I feel more like I’m coming into my own as a promoter, improving my focus, and – at the same time - getting to know myself better as a woman.”
Masunda steals off to the bathroom mid-interview, giving me time to reflect. She’s confident, yes, but not arrogantly so. She’s decidedly cheerful, and the persistent “positive” description from Facebook is being slowly but surely being put into context. She’s going to be one of those people who makes you feel good after you’ve spoken to them. Maybe that’s why Joel Smye, the owner of ‘Footwork’ on Adelaide West, agreed to let her single-handedly promote a Robsoul Recordings night there. Masunda achieved this with good old-fashioned person-to-person networking, via the DJ Phil Weekes, and proceeded to complete the flyers, promotion, and even the guest list for that evening. Needless to say it was a tremendous success, so successful in fact that Robsoul Recordings retained Masunda’s services for the rest of that month, and their other planned gigs.
She’s back, and a simple question I missed occurs to me: “Why deep house in particular, and why ‘TenaciouSoul’?”
“I have to promote something I’m passionate about,” she smiles. “I live and breathe house music. It’s what I wake up to in the morning, and what I go to bed at night to.”
“I didn’t know what to do about a company name. So, I just made two columns of different words that I wanted the music to feel like. I came up with various combinations before TenaciouSoul, but couldn’t believe my luck when I Google’d it and found the company name wasn’t already registered somewhere.”
What does TenaciouSoul the brand actually mean though? For once, Masunda has trouble articulating: “It’s sexy, sensual, classily-dressed women in afros…” But, there’s more to it than that, as the emphatic feedback on Facebook demonstrates. Were TenaciouSoul the end of a battery then it’d obviously be positive. If a car, then imagine a Volkswagen Beetle with a subtle, stylish paint job, and understated but cool chrome rims. Why? Because – like the DJs and music choices that go into each of the gigs – they’re known globally, vehemently reliable, and potentially iconic. However, whilst the bug would definitely be souped-up, it would still be approachable somehow, most likely packed with 20 and 30-somethings, picking up willing hitch-hikers to take them to a festival somewhere. Most of all, there would be no tinted windows. There’s nothing aloof about Masunda or the gigs she crafts, so the only hidden aspect of this particular Volkswagen would be the punching-above-its-weight, hand-tooled power station lurking under the hood.
After all, Masunda has already managed to secure a couple of all-time DJ debuts for Toronto clubbers, most notably perhaps John “Jellybean” Benitez – a name old enough for even me to recognise from a high school disco. Jellybean has had his hands on everything from Madonna’s debut album in 1982, through the Pointer Sisters, the soundtrack to “Flashdance”, Fleetwood Mac, to Sting, and even Whitney Houston in 2000 (remember her before she met Bobby Brown?). It also took her less than two years of promotions to persuade Groove Assassins to come to town for the first time.
I bet that was a good night.
Then there’s Masunda’s ability to persuade DJs to play outside of their typical genre (imagine lifting the hood of said Volkswagen to find a Kawasaki or Sherman tank engine inside). DJ Sneak is best known for a raw, minimal, percussive-almost-dub style house, championed by the likes of Trade in London, UK. DJ Aleksandra doesn’t often stray far from techno. However, both were persuaded to play an out-of-character deep house set for the TenaciouSoul regulars, and both were enormously successful nights. This, combined with Masunda’s method of briefing DJs for their sets is what makes describing the TenaciouSoul vibe so tricky. OK, so we’ve got afros, but then imagine DJs whose only guidance is to, “…play from the heart,” as Masunda puts it. “I wouldn’t expect to have to brief a DJ anyway,” she insists. “It’s their job to figure out whether the crowd is feeling a particular tune, and change it up a bit if it’s not working.” Maybe if TenaciouSoul were a proverb, it’d be, “Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know whatcha gonna git.”
I digress.
Picking a company name was the easy part. What followed was the administrative hard graft: getting business cards organised; striking deals; balancing everything with the needs of the day job; painting more than 300 front door keys and attaching a label with the gig details instead of using paper flyers; and networking. Lots of networking. It paid off though, with Masunda running into Eddy K of YYZ Entertainment in early 2006. This gave her the necessary backing to be able to host a night of her own, but she still needed DJs.
“I spent ages familiarising myself with the local DJ talent, scouring online, collecting cards, and asking people for recommendations,” she recalls. “From these I chose DJ Dirty Dale, most of all for his sound, which I felt fitted the TenaciouSoul ideal. It didn’t go smoothly though! The first time I met him he just told me to call him back in the morning if I was still serious!” Through Masunda’s persistence, things worked out though. Jason Ulrich was later secured for the warm-up set at TenaciouSoul’s maiden musical voyage, a humble but packed-to-the-rafters loft at Queen and Spadina in May 2006.
This strikes me as one of those times when you review your resume and think, “Sheesh, did I really do all that?” But there’s still more to come. Each new gig requires another reinvention of the humble flyer and fresh DJ talent for the growing Toronto house scene. Thankfully some things stay the same though. “One thing I’ve learned is that you have to work with people you trust,” states Masunda, possibly in her most serious tone of voice all day. “I have a core list of experienced and reliable suppliers that I go back to time and time again – sound, talent, logistics, work permits, bartenders, security – everything you can think of.”
I suppose if one has trust, then one can relax. And, although Masunda admits to, “…feeling tense until the room is full,” each time she promotes a night, by that point the necessary hard work has already been done. Thus the punters can also relax, which is probably why TenaciouSoul has already become something typically Toronto – relaxed, multicultural, but with a sense of pride that demands attention over the noisy neighbour to the South. In her words, “The music is key. TenaciouSoul is all about having somewhere to go where people can experience a musical journey and forget their worries for a night.”
I guess some houses may vary in price, but well-chosen house is always priceless. Put a value on it yourself at Footwork on 7th March 2009 when TenaciouSoul will be hosting DJ Heather and Colette.
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