THE OPUS

As a student in the genetics program at Western University, Chris Oday says he wasn’t the best when it came to the hands-on work.

“I would do experiments badly,” he says. “I was like a liability in the lab.”

But at an R&B showcase at The Baby G on Dundas Street in Toronto, Oday demonstrated that his hands are quite adept when holding a guitar.

It was the 22-year-old’s second time performing at the Toronto R&B Sounds show. He didn’t dedicate his entire set to the genre, deciding instead to pay homage to John Mayer with a cover and featuring some of his own pillowy, guitar-laden originals.

He seemed comfortable on stage, cracking jokes into the small, crowded space in front of him.

The Mississauga native has only been performing live for about a year at this point and his budding career started with a drunken application to a singing competition at Western. Though his competitors were more technically skilled, he says he was shocked when he “somehow” won.

Since then, he’s been working on building his identity as an artist through live performances like the R&B showcase and by working as a guitarist for Del, an Oakville-based rapper.

His relationship with music started, however, in his youth being raised by a Nigerian father and a Nigerian-Barbadian mother. He remembers listening to Alicia Keys in his parents’ car so often he memorized the track list. Oday says his parents initially put him in piano lessons and he didn’t take to it, saying the rote memorization didn’t gel with him.

It was only about three years ago when he started playing the guitar, teaching himself to play by ear. Now, he’s working on his songwriting process.

“I’m an instrumentalist first. I’ll play guitar or piano and then … I’ll start with some melody,” he says. “It just needs to hit your soul.”

Oday says that while not all of his musical obsessions inform his sound, some of them include John Mayer, of course, but also R&B/soul artists like Anderson .Paak and Masego, pop artist Billie Eilish and rappers like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole.

Pieces is an orignial track by Chris Oday.

One of the originals he played at the show, Pieces, took one of his own romantic experiences and broadened it to tell a wider story, Oday says.

“The girl who I was with at the time, she was the template of the song,” he says. “but … I think about my mom when I sing that song or my brother. It’s any kind of love, really.

He is still early in his growth as a musician, though, and says he hasn’t found his voice yet.

“What’s my sound?” he asked himself quietly. “I don’t know.”

The Toronto Sound is a varied piece of culture.

Oday is just one of several examples of that very variety.

The seemingly infinite combinations of culture, musical influences and locations have made the sound into something much bigger than any one label or definition and has given it a wider reach than one might expect from the music emanating from a single city.

So much so that Erin Ashley thinks the city is a bit of a workhorse. Save for a few pockets in Montreal and Vancouver, she says, Toronto is the global face of black music for the country.

“We don’t have all of Canada pulling the same weight when it comes to this music,” says Ashley. But while there’s just one city “trying to do God’s work for everybody,” the sound of black music — as prolific as it may be — is still struggling for a lack of, well, everything, in her view.

“There’s definitely not enough money in there, there’s not enough opportunities, there’s not enough space, there’s not enough radio, there’s not enough television. There’s just not enough of anything to support a viable and successful infrastructure for rap and R&B in this country.”

It’s a disheartening picture in some ways. There is a distinct contrast between the level of global clout and influence black music from Toronto has managed to develop and the relative lack of space and support of black music within the city. There is a disconnect between the music’s impact and recognition that some say stems from prejudice towards black people.

While David Cox thinks that there’s a wealth of talent in the city, he still believes race plays a big role in holding back black artists.

“I’d be dumb if I didn’t say that it feels sometimes there’s a level of racism when you look at certain things in the industry” he says. “Sometimes perception can feel like the white artists are getting through quicker than the black artists.”

For Campbell, there’s no question about it. He said that the barriers black artists face in Toronto are a result of a conscious attempt by a largely white music industry to stifle black creativity by ignoring its value. “People will recognize that this is the particular genius that we bring to this side of the world,” he says, and that recognition would disprove, in part, the notion of black inferiority.

But despite the struggles, black music in Toronto has made itself the city’s sound. It may no longer be marked by moody, darkened production, but instead the eclectic mix of cultures and interests within the black population has given the music a lot to work with when it comes to things like style, genre and impact.

It’s the creative diversity of music makers like Manswell, Oday, Carimbocas and Letang, to name a small few, that encapsulate the breadth and range of the city’s sound and its expanding effort to solidify its mark on the global music scene.

It’s important to do so, Cox says, because Toronto’s black talent has a sound worth hearing that is larger than the few greats that have made it out of the city into the mainstream. But the city’s black artists need the financial and industry backing, promotion, outlets and public visibility to match their talent. With that they can succeed.

“It doesn’t help us if Drake is an anomaly,” says Cox.