A bartender and his brass band has become a staple at Toronto street festivals
To kick off Kensington Market's first Pedestrian Sunday of the summer, the Little Rambunctious improvised brass band gathered to incite the passing crowd in some boisterous behavior.
The animated musical group is usually made up of five pieces, but on this gorgeous Sunday Kensington got a pretty special performance.
Eight musicians, led by co-founder of Pedestrian Sundays and trumpet player, Michael Louis Johnson, wasted no time stirring up excitement on the north block of Augusta street.
Johnson, who is also a longtime bartender at Communist's Daughter, cued an opening song to gain the attention of pedestrians.
Once enough onlookers had amassed, he posed a question to the crowd, "If you are not now rambunctious, are you prepared to become rambunctious?"
The band performing on Augusta Ave. near Supermarket.
"What we're going to do is this" he then commanded, "You make up a title, we make up a song. As if we're a community making music together." Then he asked the crowd to provide a song topic.
The first suggestion was fittingly, Pedestrian Sundays. "What a great idea for a song title," Johnson smiled, before turning to confer with the band. In less than twenty seconds, elaborate music had taken over the street– entirely improvised, right down to Johnson's jazzy lyrics.
Ensuing song topics included crowd suggestions like "sushi", "weirdness", "mars attack" and one improvisation from an audience member who said "I have nothing, I'm sorry," allowing the band to prove that they can truly turn any phrase into a full fledged song.
Johnson is a mainstay in the band but his bandmates rotate depending on the day's availability.
The first Pedestrian Sunday performance of 2023 featured Bad Waitress' Moon on drums, Ian Tulloch on sousaphone, Emily Farrell on trombone, Big Smoke Brass' Zach Smith on Trombone, Steve Evans on horn, and The Shuffle Demons' Richard Underhill on saxophone.
Soprano saxophonist Sean McCarthy joined at the last minute when Johnson spotted him in the crowd with his instrument and invited him over.
In between sets, Johnson explained to me that the band dates back to 2004 when he and Underhill jammed together just a few feet from where we stood on Augusta Avenue. More musicians joined and the session grew until it became a regular installment.
Johnson leading the band in a performance.
"So much of music now is so heavily weighted towards commodities; about making money. But for me, music is about community and getting people involved, making it inclusive, and making it fun for people of all ages," he says.
The latter is undoubtedly something that Little Rambunctious is good at, as demonstrated by the game of musical chairs that promptly followed.
Starting with a dozen chairs, Johnson invited willing members of the Rambunctious crowd to dance around, and take a seat when the music stopped.
With each dramatic wave of his hand, the band halted and players made a dash for an open seat. One by one, chairs were pulled away and displaced dancers rejoined the crowd.
Before long, only two were left, facing off in what Johnson called the musical chair championships.
Who was declared the winner? It was hard to say because the players found themselves sharing the final chair when the music finally stopped.
After an official examination of butt to seat ratio, Johnson shouted that Little Rambunctious had its first ever musical chair tie. The crowd whooped and hollered and the winners bowed, before the band broke back into song.
Little Rambunctious doesn't plan to produce an album, so if you want to experience their music you'll have to catch them at a subsequent Pedestrian Sunday.
"It's in the moment," says Johnson, "If you weren't there, you don't get it." Fortunately if you don't see them in the street, Little Rambunctious can also be found regularly performing at La Palette.
Emma Johnston-Wheeler
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