art of joy and pain

The other day, a snowy, slushy morning in Toronto, I entered the Yonge/Bloor subway station. Once past the turnstile, I was greeted with the lush, melodious romantic strains of a tenor voice singing in Spanish, accompanied by sparse but efective guitar picking. I stood for a while and observed the busker, listening to his beautiful music. The tempo was fairly brisk but the melody was melancholy, the chords mostly minor. There was something deeply evocative in the song.
I dug out a toonie, put it in the guy's guitar case and listened a bit more. Outside, the weather was frightful. Inside, hundreds of people were shuffling between platforms, salt-stained boots, dripping hair, dank overcoats, barely pausing. But I stood there, almost transfixed and as I listened, I choked up. Not only because the music was so beautiful and so sad, so real! I choked up for another reason, too. I realized that - to the best of my knowledge - there is no one in this city, no one in this country who produces music that would touch me on as deep a level as this fleeting moment in the subway did.

Canadian music can be cerebral, it can be complex, it can be interesting. But I cannot think of a single Canadian artist that can touch the soul the way this Latin subway musician did. I don't know the music of Quebec and so won't speak for it. But as for the rest of Canada - where are the melancholy strains, where are the joyful rhythms, where are the sorrowful melodies, where are the true, real simple tunes that will speak to the heart and bypass the brain entirely?
I cannot think of any. Not even the work of the great tunesmiths of yesteryear, such as Gordon Lightfoot or Leonard Cohen touches me as deeply as this simple Spanish/Latin melody did.....there was pain and joy in it that I had also felt. Whereas Lightfoot and Cohen speak only of concepts that touch me in the abstract. And they are both excellent songwriters. I will not even mention the lesser lights who have gotten wide acclaim but whose music does not traverse the mind barrier and touch the heart with a hot finger.

Perhaps it has something to do with the old Einstein quote. When asked how he liked living in the U.S., he replied that he liked it fine and he was certainly glad to be out of fascist Germany but at the same time he observed that Americans had not yet learned "the art of joy and pain".
I would definitely say that the same applies to their Canadian cousins.

I sit at home and listen to the Serbian Gypsy singer Saban Bajramovic. Goose bumps all over, tears in my eyes again. I can listen to Mozart with the same result (rather crazy el. guitar rendition of his 40th Symphony here). And to McCartney's "Here, There and Everywhere", also with the same result. And to Chet Baker's "I Fall in Love Too Easily", ditto. And Mexican music. And scores of others. But no Canadian artists are on this list. No one who speaks of the art of joy and pain.