Somewhere on the sidewalks of Toronto, a musician with a Juno nomination is playing to strangers on purpose in an art form known as busking. John Goodblood walked away from the traditional path for a professional musician. Instead, he took to the streets of Toronto and Buenos Aires and just sang. It’s his music, from his heart, and 100% unfiltered. While music producers may not have noticed him, passersby have stopped him on the street, and he has received offers to collaborate from other local talent.
Kevin Zi-Xiao He takes a different road to the same corner. A Chinese-born Torontonian working toward a doctorate in composition at the University of Toronto, Kevin has had his music performed by orchestras and recognized at international competitions. None of that is why he busks. Out on the street, with traditional Chinese instruments in hand, he finds something you can’t get from a concert hall: direct contact with a live audience. He moves between classical music and anime themes, between his cultural roots and classical Asian instruments, and goes wherever the crowd takes him.
Together, they represent two very different answers to the same question the film keeps circling back to: what does an artist owe the world, and what does the world owe the artist?
“John Goodblood walked away from the traditional path for a professional musician. Instead, he took to the streets of Toronto and Buenos Aires and just sang.”
Documentarian Antonio G. Wagner grew up watching his father disappear into music while his father lived in Paris in 1990. There he’d spend his free time playing guitar in the metro, not for money but to share the feeling that music gave him with anyone who happened to walk by. That memory stuck with Wagner, and living in Toronto, where buskers are part of the city’s backdrop, as the buildings themselves. With To Busk or Not to Busk, his goal was simple: make audiences look at a street musician the same way they’d look at someone performing at Carnegie Hall.
For a critic like me who loves to talk about the work of indie filmmakers, To Busk or Not to Busk is exactly the short film that speaks to my heart. Most of us can’t get a million-dollar advance to make music, much less make a movie. But here you get to the heart of the subjects: that irresistible urge to share their art with the world. And Antonio G. Wagner does that in flying colors.
His subjects are similar in story, yet contrast in method. And when you listen to their music in the film, you’re going to want to go out and buy whatever album or downloads they have available. To Busk or Not to Busk is an intimate profile of what it means to be a true artist.
"…It's his music, from his heart, and 100% unfiltered."
