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Almost before he could talk in full sentences Michael Reinhart had been immersed in the music of Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Hank Snow & Chet Atkins, the needle in the groove of the fragile 78rpm discs coaxing into the air the scratch & twang, & the heartache of song.
It wasn't however until Michael was seventeen that he managed to buy his first guitar, having made do until then with a ukelele & eight years of accordion lessons. Since that purchase, it has been a consistent, if not obsessive, exploration of the wood, metal & tortoise shell of the guitar & the possibilities of ten fingers.
Michael Reinhart is a virtuosic finger-style guitarist, improviser & composer of dozens of instrumental songs, as well as several scores for contemporary dance, theatre & film. These days he works primarily as a singer-songwriter, crafting an original & unique sort of urban folk song; music that combines elements of folk, jazz, world, blues & even rap.
His guitar work is an intricate weave of complex rhythms, percussion & melody, supporting a voice that is uncompromising in its delivery of eyes-wide-open lyrics, not without humour, steeped in the realities of living, loving & working. His finger-style includes lightning fast arpeggios, yet he is equally comfortable styling slow, lyrically subtle instrumentals.
Michael Reinhart, a graduate of The Ontario College of Art, has a wide & varied experience in the worlds of both visual art & music, having exhibited his artwork in Toronto, Montreal, New York & Lyons, France. His illustrations have been published nationally & internationally. In addition, he has designed stages, lighting, music & video installations for modern dance & multi-disciplinary performance; one of the most recent being a collaboration with dance artist Lin Snelling entitled extinction, a creative examination of the abandonment of the rural way of life in western Canada & the concurrent challenges of making art in our western culture of abundance & consumerism.
Michael studied the accordion for eight years & is a self-taught finger-style guitarist. Since 1982, he has collaborated extensively with various musicians, dancers, choreographers & directors in Toronto, Montreal & New York, primarily as a composer, but also as stage & lighting designer, videographer & photographer.
Among them are John Oswald, Peter Bingham, Canadian Children’s Dance Theatre, Marc Boivin & René Highway. He has worked on scores for more than twenty choreographies by long-time collaborator Lin Snelling, their most recent projects being Loop Thing, extinction, circle, IAMMYOWNRAIN & Woman As Landscape.
In addition to having recorded a collection of acoustic solo guitar pieces in 1996 entitled Night Traffic, a soundtrack CD, Woman As Landscape, was released in 2000. Michael created music for the short film Ningiura (2000), the documentary Dear Little One (2005) & in late 2007 the award-winning (Best First Feature / Toronto International Film Festival) feature film Before Tomorrow by director Marie-Hélène Cousineau. Most recently (2006), the renowned director Zacharias Kunuk included some of Michael's music in his most recent film documentary Kiviak vs. Canada.
He completed two recordings in 2002, a yet unreleased suite of improvisations with Toronto percussionist Barry Prophet entitled White Desert Blue Shadows, & another album in collaboration with nine Inuit singers entitled Quaraaluktuq, released in May 2003, creating musical compositions based on traditional Inuit songs & his personal impressions of the Arctic after a visit there in 2000. The album integrates traditional Inuit music & throatsinging with contemporary, acoustic, multi-instrumental composition. The latter (Quaraaluktuq) was adapted into a multi-disciplinary cabaret performance, Qabaret Quaraaluktuq, which brought together dancers, actors, a chanteuse, circus artists, a videographer & an Inuit drum dancer, & was presented at O Patro Vý-- in 2003 & Théâtre La Chapelle in 2004 in Montreal.
The choreography-document extinction, a multi-disciplinary collaboration with Lin Snelling, was presented at Usine ‘C’ in 2004, wherein Michael created video, set & music score as well as a live performance. In addition to guitar work during the brief existence in 2003 of the world jazz trio RAO, which included Montreal percussionist Ganesh Anandan & multi-instrumentalist Colin Offord of Australia, Michael embarked as well on an explorative, improvised collaboration with dancers Marc Boivin, Tonja Livingstone & Lin Snelling working toward musical compositions influenced or inspired by physical movement.
He participated in improvised broadcasts on Radio Centre Ville in 2005, & has steadily been performing his songs in clubs, cafés & at spoken word events such as Words & Music at Casa del Popolo & Cirque des Mots at la Sala Rossa in Montreal. He completed a successful tour in New England of the multi-disciplinary performance CHALK, with an ensemble of dancers & musicians, which had its premiere in Montreal in early February 2007; a short west coast tour which included two dates in Vancouver & one in Nanaimo BC, & a tour in the UK where he performed in Bath, Swindon, North London & London. Michael performed in January 2008 in Vancouver's EDAM Studio Theatre, improvising two sold-out shows with dancers Peter Bingham, Rob Kitsos & Lin Snellng. Most recently he toured in Ontario, among the stops were Port Dover, Hamilton & Toronto. In the meantime, an album (or two) is in the works as Michael continues, as he has for the last several years, to write, improvise & perform original music in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver & Ontario venues as singer-songwriter & finger-style guitarist.
His music has been heard nationally on CBC programs such as Disc Drive, The Roundup, Sounds Like Canada, Roots & Wings, Pearls of Wisdom, Ideas & locally (Montreal) on All in a Weekend, Homerun & various Radio Canada shows as well as Radio Centre Ville & CKUT.
Recent performances in Montreal include the Yellow Door Coffeehouse, Centre St-Ambroise, Cagibi, Words & Music at Casa del Popolo, Cirque des Mots at la Sala Rossa, O Patro Vys, Café Esperanza, Espace Libre, Le Swimming, Usine C, Theatre la Chapelle, l'Assommoir, Auberge St-Gabriel, Espace Tangente, Sablo Kafé, Interarts & McGill University.
Toronto performances include Freetimes Café, The Art Bar (Gladstone Hotel), GATE 403, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Winchester Street Theatre, Premiere Dance Theatre, Artword Theatre, Lula Lounge, Loons, NOW Lounge, The Cobourg, The Renaissance Café, the Cameron House, & Hugh's Room for Songwriters Unite.
Ontario performances have included Ottawa at Rasputin's Folk Café, Manhattan's in Guelph, The Pheasant Plucker & Pepper Jack Café in Hamilton, Alliston Songwriters' Circle in Alliston, Hemming's Broken Plate in Port Dover, the OCFF conference in a Folquébec showcase in London, as well as Café Montmartre & RIME in Vancouver, Malaspina University in Nanaimo BC & venues in Keene, New Hampshire & Middlebury & Burlington, Vermont USA.
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