THE SOUND

We Find Love is a weighty piece of work.

Not just because of the lyrical content, though the singer, Daniel Caesar of Oshawa, Ont., does croon about the fallout of a relationship that never should have happened, but also because of the instrumentation.

The first sound you hear is a piano, deftly moving through four different chords, but it’s no time at all before the keys are cut through by the sounds of a humming chorus that goes on to ground the rest of the song.

It might not register on the first listen, but there’s also a small voice that harmonizes with Caesar and the chorus.

Farther along, you get the percussion, heavy and striking, accompanied by some deep bass riffs. It’s a layered moment that builds until you reach the next verse and the music is suddenly stripped back to its foundational piano, the chorus and Caesar’s voice.

But just as quickly, you’re pulled back into the layered form of the song, this time with a tambourine as an addition.

It builds to a sort of swaying melody while the voices of Caesar and the chorus criss-cross against one another. Then it ends. The theatrical elements recede and you’re left again with just the piano and Caesar’s voice before it transitions into the next track on the album.

It’s a weighty piece of work. While it and the rest of the album it’s featured on, Freudian, is categorized as R&B/Soul, the song itself is steeped in gospel sensibilities.

And for all its substance, it was originally conceived in a moment of quiet.

“For that specific one, that came from when I was in a mood and I was just kind of bored. I didn’t feel like doing anything and then I just hopped on the keys and [We Find Love] was born,” says Jordon Manswell.

Manswell, 24, has been producing music for more than 14 years. He was born into a Trinidadian family in Scarborough and lived in Toronto until he was 10 before moving to Whitby, Ont. where he still lives.

While he now resides outside of the downtown core, he still considers himself a Toronto-based producer, having collaborated with several artists in the city.

Singer-songwriters are the face of any one song, but the producer drives the music. Manswell’s view is that “a record is never really finished.” Producing music is an effort in maintaining balance, he says.

“There’s so many ways to ruin a song. You have to take into account what’s important, what stays. Music production is more about sitting down and thinking ‘OK, what can we keep and what do we not need?’”

In We Find Love, Manswell attempted to construct that balance between soul and gospel.

The gospel elements in the song, such as the full chorus and piano, were drawn from Manswell’s upbringing in the church. He was excited to see gospel folded into the mainstream through Caesar’s work. Manswell’s musical inspirations, however, go beyond religious music. In fact, being raised in a home filled with everything from Luther Vandross to Beyoncé has also guided his tastes.

“The hip hop influence is obvious. The R&B influence is obvious, just the best form of whatever music I’m making,” he says. “I might do Afrobeats, do dancehall. I might do EDM (electronic dance music). I might do whatever it is, but in any single genre I just want to bring some type of feeling into it.”

Before the End of the Night is an instrumental album produced by Jordon Manswell and contains samples from the 2004 soca/calypso hit Tempted to Touch by Barbadian artist Rupee, as well as R&B singer Omarion’s Show Me released in 2014.

The breadth and size of Manswell’s musical frame of reference isn’t uncommon for musicians in Toronto. His is an example of a set of circumstances that is fairly typical when it comes to black people in Canada and especially black people in music. Manswell was born to immigrant parents who were brought up on one type of music — in this case, Trinidad’s most popular genres like soca and calypso — and raised on other forms of black music, like R&B and hip hop. But he also draws inspiration from black music worlds away, like genres that have come out of countries in Africa (the internet’s influence can’t be understated). All of this is the experience of a large portion of today’s black music makers in Toronto. All of these influences have led to the question, do they combine into a distinct “Toronto Sound”?

Globally, Toronto’s sound has been characterized in darker terms — words like ‘moody’, ‘atmospheric’ and ‘sultry’ come to mind. But those in music like Manswell who draw from a variety of different experiences have created a space in which the “Toronto Sound” defies definition, and in fact something distinctive may not exist at all.

The name Tre Mission has stuck with the Toronto-based grime rapper since he was about 12 years-old and was on the receiving end of some friendly teasing.

“We used to use the word ‘mission’ for a lot of different things. We used to use it for somewhere that was far or just a general journey … or if we were going to go steal from 7-Eleven or rob someone for Halloween candy or something. We would say ‘We’re going on a mission’. As we got older, it started to be more serious things and I used to chill with a lot of people that were older than me because I was tall,” he says. “I would always be like ‘Whatever mans are trying to do, I’m down to go do’.”

His older friends often hesitated to have him on these ‘missions’, saying that his young age disqualified him from tagging along. But not before, however, getting in some jabs about his eager use of the word. “And then a man called me that one day, just ‘Mission’,” he says.

He was already thinking of a new rap name, having decided the one he was using wasn’t to his liking. After having ‘Mission’ co-signed by a friend of his, the name became his rap persona and has been since.

Tre Mission’s real name is Trés-Von Carimbocas. His parents are from Trinidad and Jamaica and he was born in North York General Hospital.

He comes from a musical family. His uncle was a beat maker and Carimbocas himself has been producing music since he was 11 years old. By the time he started high school, he was in and out of recording studios.

As a Canadian grime rapper, Carimbocas, 28, is a bit of a pioneer. Grime is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in London, England in the early 2000s. Drawing influences from other genres like hip hop and dancehall, grime is most often characterized by its 140 BPM rate and its rapid, aggressive beats. The instrumentation is often paired with rapped verses. The genre was developed by  artists like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Lethal Bizzle. Some other popular names in grime include Stormzy, Skepta and Ghetts.

Many grime artists come out of the large black population in the U.K. — several artists have Caribbean and/or African backgrounds. According to a report by Ticketmaster released in 2017, grime “has taken a hold of the UK, and is reaching an increasingly wide and more diverse audience that transcends cultural boundaries.” Three out of four people in the U.K. now know about grime in some way, whether they know the genre intimately or have just heard a few key artists or songs. One in five consider themselves a grime fan and just over one in ten have attended at least one grime event in recent years, with the numbers only growing.”

Grime’s growth in Canada hasn’t been as quick. It’s yet to meet the mainstream but despite the fairly small following it has here, Carimbocas was still able to get a taste for the music when he was younger when a friend played him a grime track. It piqued his interest enough to being researching the genre when he was about 16 years old.

Meanwhile, he was a part of a music umbrella in his neighborhood where older musicians oversaw the musical output of the younger members. Carimbocas didn’t appreciate being under someone’s thumb. He’d been experimenting with making his own grime beats and decided to release one of his creations on his own. After posting it to a grime forum online, he’d found that blogs had picked up the song. He’s been a part of the scene since.

Carimbocas now travels between Toronto and London, collaborating with grime rappers overseas. While he’s built his name for himself with the grime sound, Carimbocas has a varied discography. “There’s a lot of people that, if they listen to my albums and if they’re hardcore grime fans, they will say these are not grime albums. But most of the people that know about me, know me with the connotation of being a grime artist. The reason for that is rooted in the origin and how I got into it as well,” says Carimbocas.

One of his newer singles, You Can Have, is a good example of his range. The song sounds dark and murky during the into until the percussion and Carimbocas’ autotuned voice comes in over the beat.

“When I make those songs, my friends in London that I make music with, they call it ‘G-Cry’, because they say it’s emotional sounding and maybe emotional topically, but G’ed up at the same time,” he says. “Even that song, the beat has things that I’ve taken from U.K. garage and just brought over to that tempo. If you sped it up, it could be a grime song, probably.”

Right now, he’s been into dancehall and U.K. drill, a sub-genre of drill music. Drill music is a style of trap music that originated in Chicago in the 2010s and was popularized by American artists like Young Chop and Chief Keef. He says that dancehall has also been an influence for him in his music.

His view on the sound of the city today is that people have it wrong.

“When I see lists of stuff, even the lists that I’m on, especially the lists that I’m on … I literally never agree with it,” says Carimbocas.

He mentioned rappers Houdini and LocoCity as examples of the real trajectory in Toronto’s sound.

“If I go to a school in the middle of the city and ask kids who’s popping in Toronto right now, those are the only names I think I should see on a list that says top in Toronto to look out for and most of the time these lists don’t really reflect that,” he says.

In a small, sound-proofed room on the Ryerson University campus in downtown Toronto, Paula Letang sits in front of a multi-buttoned sound board. She sports a large pair of ill-working headphones over ears and glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. She’s DJing her weekly Friday show on CJRU 1280 AM called All About the Funk.

On air, she goes by Lady Funkalicious.

“It all comes back down to the feel good,” Letang says. Funk for her is about the groove, and not so much about deep introspection. “The lyrics are usually kind of fluffy. They’re never really about to hurt anybody. A lot of the time it’s about getting on the dance floor. It’s about just letting yourself be free and letting the music take you somewhere.”

There isn’t much in the way of Canadian funk, but Letang works to get in at least three or four songs from Canadian acts when she’s on air every week.

When she’s not playing the best from The Commodores to Kool & The Gang, she works as a receptionist at Ryerson University’s School of Media.

Letang is from the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean country where genres like Cadence-lypso, Zouk and Kompa were created or built upon by Dominican artists.

For 15 years, Letang drew from her roots and made Zouk and Kompa music in Canada. One song, Message une bouteille, saw success, wining urban music awards. Some of her other music appeared on a compilation album in France called World of Zouk. It was only about five years ago, however, when she made the turn towards creating her own funk music.

Letang grew up on the genre and found herself drawn to it after her time creating French-Caribbean music. Her first foray into the funk world was a song called Sunshine, a short but sparkling track that combined elements of funk with neo-soul, complete with cymbals and twinkling keys. The song’s release was well received.

“The response to it was insane,” she says, “particularly over in London, England and in the U.K. It just went crazy for weeks, almost two months.”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t even want to put it out,” she adds.

“I didn’t really know what to do with it. And it was just in the charts. It just kept rising and it kept going and it got to number 11 on the U.K. soul charts. It just kept on going and I was like ‘What’s going on here?’”

Letang calls herself an “anomaly” in music — she doesn’t widely promote her work or go on tour. But as a part of Toronto’s black music scene, she has taken note where Toronto’s sound is heading.

“I think we’ve got a mix of everything which I think can be part of the confusion for people,” she says.

She mentioned Drake and The Weeknd as the big voices when it comes to Toronto and as contenders for defining the city’s sound. But outside of their work, she believes Toronto still remains unclear. “We don’t really have a sound. We’ve got a lot of sounds. And I think that’s ok, too.”

“I stay out of conversations about Toronto sounds because I think it’s about a desire to have a sound that is an actual sound,” says Mark Campbell. “We want to have an identity. We want to be known globally. We want to be on the world stage as a particular entity so we can say ‘That’s Toronto’ but Toronto’s never invented a [genre].”

Campbell, 41, sits at a table in a gently lit cafe some blocks away from downtown Toronto proper. The music in the cafe is light, but unassuming and Campbell is seated with his side to the windows at the entrance.

The shifting nature of Canada’s black music scene has been at Campbell’s fingertips for some time. As an undergrad in the late 90s, he worked as a DJ for the Bigger Than Hip Hop radio show, where hours were dedicated to showcasing Canada’s underground hip hop scene, music that may have gone unnoticed otherwise.

His passion for the music drove the rest of his academic career. He started as a researcher at Ryerson University in 2016 and become a professor at the school in 2018. His research focuses on Canadian hip hop and DJ cultures and Afro-diasporic theory.

In his estimation, there is no one sound that defines Toronto in any real terms.

“The Toronto Sound would be a pop sound because it’s only the songs on the radio that sound similar … but when you start comparing someone that’s on the commercial radio versus someone’s that’s on college radio, they don’t sound the same because college radio’s not playing pop songs,” he says. “That’s what makes me suspicious about these kinds of things where we say ‘Oh yeah, this is us now’.”

Campbell says that while people often like to talk about a sound the city of Toronto can claim, he’s not hung up on the label.

“If I was 25 and I wanted to feel a certain way about Toronto and my city then I’d probably listen hard to find the connections,” he says.

“I don’t have a desire for there to be one.”

Manswell shares Campbell’s perspective — the black music in Toronto is too large, much too varied and too widely influenced to be distilled down to a single set of characteristics. But for him, that diversity has played to Toronto’s advantage when it comes to black music. He says that Drake’s 2016 album, Views, is a small example of a larger movement in the city.

“[The album] starts off very mellow then it picks up into a hip hop vibe, then you get the whole afrobeats song, then you get dancehall. Then you get the slow R&B, the one he got really famous off of. There’s little pieces of country in there and there’s little pieces of pop music and it’s all of that,” says Manswell. “So if you listen to Views that’s literally what Toronto is.”