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Solo Piano Double with Treasa Levasseur & Jesse Whiteley
August 13 @ 8:30 pm - 11:00 pm
$20 – $25Event Navigation
Our “Solo Piano Double” series is an intriguing concept in that each artist will give a 45 minute set – they will not likely be sharing the piano stool and dueting, although that is possible but not requested! We are offering a wonderful incentive to pick four concerts and pay for just three. It all comes down to great playing, open minds and the spirit of discovery.
Monday, August 13 will feature two of the most creative songwriters from the songwriter-blues world – Winnipeg-born North Bay raised, Treasa Levasseur, who has a wonderful way of instilling the love for music to very young souls and is known and loved as a pianist/songwriter in the blues, country and folk worlds, and Jesse Whiteley who comes from one of this country’s most successful musical families and is known and admired as a pianist, composer and singer in blues/jazz/swing and beyond…
Everything about Treasa Levasseur, and the songs she writes, is as true as a carpenter’s rule. There are plenty of singers who plumb the depths of personal experience, but few have Levasseur’s sense of humour, or her sharp eye for detail. Treasa plays almost any style imaginable from folk, blues and country to sunshine pop, heavy metal and hip-hop, and she is a multi-instrumentalist as well, playing piano, accordion, guitar and mandolin.
An in-demand musician and versatile session vocalist, Treasa has worked with such varied acts as the Robber Who Robbed the Town, Rhymestone, Pan Con Queso, House of Velvet, and Lab Cap and the Monkey Mob, among others. Under the alias Slim, she released an EP, Me and the Boys, in 2002. She went with her own name for the self-released Not a Straight Line.
The passion and fire of her first album, Not a Straight Line, has been applied to even better songs on her second and latest recording, Low Fidelity. The sophomore album is a collection of personal songs and stories, but it’s never mawkish or sentimental.
Levasseur plays piano, accordion, guitar and mandolin. In May 2008, she won CBC Radio’s “Ultimate Sideman Showdown” with her trusty accordion and charming stage presence. Heavily influenced by such soulful artists as Mavis Staples, Carole King and Annie Lennox, she remains musically versatile and has played everything from heavy metal to hip-hop, country, sugary pop, and thoughtful folk music. Since first visiting the South in 2006, she’s begun to draw more of her inspiration from classic old-school soul.
Above all, Levasseur has a passion for making music. She simply wants to play — and, in addition to her own career, she makes the time to play with at least three other bands regularly in her longtime hometown of Toronto. In the summer of 2008, she played festivals across the country almost every single weekend as a member of Claire Jenkins’ band. You
can find her most Thursdays playing with singer songwriter Corin Raymond at the Cameron House. And she’ll pop up at tiny bars in the city’s Parkdale neighbourhood, singing backup or squeezing the accordion for whoever’s onstage.
She’s also been a welcome player at recording sessions for more than a dozen other distinctive musicians, including Raymond, The Undesirables, Evalyn Parry, Justin Rutledge, Madison Violet, David Baxter and many others.
