Keys To The Streets - Video #8 ft Holy Hum - “The Rip” (Portishead Cover)

For the second year Big Smoke has teamed up with Keys To The Streets to film musicians performing intimate concerts on the public pianos located throughout the city.

While the pianos have gone away for the season, we still have some awesome videos to watch, and reminisce about warmer times.

This video features Andrew Lee of Holy Hum performing on the public piano at Strathcona Community Garden.

Here's what Adam Sharp of Big Smoke has to say about this video:

We met with Andrew Lee of Holy Hum on a warm evening in the beautiful Strathcona Community Garden on one of the final days of this years’ Keys To The Streets program. The city had recently been struck by a storm that brutally rendered a few of our pianos nearly mute including this one, which was restricted to just one octave and a few stray keys on either end. While discussing other options for the shoot with Andrew, he drove down to the garden to assess the damage for himself and an hour or so before we were to meet reported back that he would be able to make it work on the 12-or-so working keys.

On that note, it is my pleasure to introduce this sparse and beautiful version of Portishead’s “The Rip”.

Keys To The Streets - Video #4 ft Paloma Pendharkar "We Live Here"

For the second year Big Smoke has teamed up with Keys To The Streets to film musicians performing intimate concerts on the public pianos located throughout the city.

The fourth video in the series is one of the many performances on the pianos that wasn't by a professional touring musician. The Keys To The Street team stationed at the Folk Festival this year filmed as many raw talents as they could. I'll let Adam explain more about Paloma Pendharkar's piece below!

To see where all the pianos are located, click here. To see the archive of all the performances from this year and last, click here. And a reminder that you can donate to keep the program going for NEXT year as well - more info here.

Here's what Adam Sharp of Big Smoke has to say about this video:
One of our goals with this year’s video series was to disprove the inference that to be featured on it required some level of professional commitment to music. In any industry, it figures that the people you’re going to be around the most are those who are also in it with you, so we made a point of trying to record some artists who don’t frequently tour in bands or involve themselves in that music machine, and who simply just play the piano really well!

Our two-person team stationed itself at the Folk Fest piano for as long as we could stand the heat over the three days of the festival, and were fortunate enough to film a handful of performances from exactly these sorts of players.

Paloma Pendharkar approached us whilst selling 50/50 tickets as a volunteer for the festival to ask what we were doing, and ended up taking 5 minutes out of her day to play for us.

This is such a beautiful song, and as we attempt to capture some of Vancouver’s city flow in each video, could easily serve as something of a theme tune for our series.