Performers

Friendly Rich and the Lollipop People (Ontario)

Writers and reviewers, scrambling for a generic hook for Friendly Rich Marsella’s ten-piece band, the Lollipop People, often default to avant-vaudeville or something similar. This is sound, since the “voix-de-ville” from which we get “vaudeville” evokes Guelph’s neighbouring community, the menacingly swelling (if culturally unsung) city of Brampton to which Friendly Rich’s music gives voice.

In this music (and in the city), the nice and the not-nice are more than juxtaposed – they are cuddling (for now) like teenagers in a subdivision basement. Rich also maintains a vaudevillian penchant for mixing high and low culture – his ten pedigreed players are trained in variously erstwhile ‘classical’ traditions: classical jazz, classical bluegrass, classical free improvisation, classical bassoon-with-loops-somewhere-in-the-TTC, and, hell, even classical classical.

The music sounds like none of these, though, and more like a backyard party with a few too many garrulous relatives, while others look on amused if befuddled. It’s a party, of course, where the kids are welcome too; if the Lollipop People have been accused of making “children’s music gone wrong,” then it’s only by critics who heard them too late in the game. For them, the radical instrumentation, effusive energy, socially and politically charged lyrics, theatrical moxie, and sheer whimsy of Friendly Rich and the Lollipop People is ‘merely’ for grown ups.

Website:

www.friendlyrich.com