Menu

Daniel Lapp and Quinn Bachand: Astonishing joy

February 27, 2026 By Bowen, Music No Comments

Back in 2007 I was working one week a month in Victoria, missing my family and needing to cleanse myself of some of the really difficult work we were doing while working on big systemic Indigenous child and family services issues on Vancouver Island. My evenings were spent trying to find things to do that would bring me joy and one of those was packing my flute and whistles and trundling along to one of Victorias vibrant Irish music sessions for a night of traditional tunes.

One of those sessions was led by Daniel Lapp at the Irish Times Pub. Daniel is a most generous session host, welcoming, encouraging, curious and full of joy. I remember a few evenings and Sunday afternoons where we shared tunes and variations and talked about the difference in repertoire between the Vancouver sessions and the Victoria sessions. It’s rare to meet a musician that treats everyone, from beginner to experienced hack to absolute monster professionals with kindness, encouragement, and fun.

Although I don’t remember playing with him, one of the kids that hung out there was Lapp’s student 10 year old Quinn Bachand. Quinn started playing with Lapp and had a meteoric rise, quickly becoming known as a prodigal young Celtic guitar player, and he’s only gotten better.

It has been 19 years or so since I saw Lapp, but last night he and Quinn graced the stage at Tir Na nOg on Bowen Island, as part of Shari Ulrich’s “Trust Me” series.

It was possibly the best show I’ve seen in the ten years or so that Shari has been curating that series.

Lapp and Bachand are a magical duo and are celebrating the release of an album of music they have just recorded together of a bunch of Daniel’s original tunes. The first set of the night was tunes from the new album written for friends and family members in styles ranging from traditional jigs and reels to cajun two steps and Normandy waltzes. Both players are virtuosos but it must be said that Lapp’s compositional range is incredible and Quinn brought a dense palette of harmonic exploration. These are tunes that seem straight forward on the surface, but can at times be complex and colourful, dippingg through unexpected key changes with Quinn’s reharmonization flying around beneath. All set on top of impeccable timing and groove.

From the very first set of tunes, the audience was hooked and the energy in the room was locked on intense joy, from which is never wavered. barely minutes into the show I think everyone could tell this would be a special night.

After a break, the second set of the night was looser, more tunes called on the fly, more improvisation. Daniel got to talking more about his life going project to gather and publish his collection of the extensive BC fiddles tunes repertoire, which consists of more than 3000 tunes. He drew on much of this tradition in teh second half, which began with Quinn and him playing tunes on harmonica and which also featured a lovely new song Daniel composed, in which he accompanied himself on trumpet. A firy collection of BC tunes followed before Lapp called for an Irish set that meandered through tunes that he and Quinn played together 20 years ago. They explored these tunes together at pace, barely holding on, drifting into improvised patterns, calling up snippets of memory that put me back on that stage with their session at the Irish Times. It was like watching clouds fly past a mountain top. Hints of melody, a tunes started and then abandoned, the pair carried by spirit and flow.

The verdict at the end of the show was the loudest round of applause I’ve yet heard in that theatre which elicited an encore of gypsy jazz, showing of the Berklee-educated Quinn’s swing chops.

The room was full of Bowen Island musicians last night and we all filed out into the night infected with astonishment and joy. Nights like that make you simultaneously want to give up music altogether while inspiring you to go home, pick up your instruments and play all night long. Nights like last night remind you what music is for.

Making beauty together

February 25, 2026 By Bowen, Containers, Democracy, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Music, Practice One Comment

Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday

I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.

We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.

Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.

The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.

The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.

To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.

We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.

Bowen Island resources

February 22, 2026 By Bowen No Comments

Since the mid 1990s, a local directory has been published on our little island containing local phone numbers and featuring articles and information about island life. It became known as the Gold Pages and at first contained just phone numbers, and often just the last four digits, as everyone shared the 604 area code and the 947 exchange. The directory is mailed to every islander in May each year, and becomes a treasured companion for the year ahead.

The latest custodian of the Bowen Book is my friend Claudia Schaefer, a local artist who works in a variety of media including epoxy, paint, and photography. That’s one of her pieces above called “Ocean Waves” made from mica pigments and epoxy.

In 2021, Claudia took over the Gold Pages from Barb Wiltshire who took it over from the Chamber of Commerce, and she has faithfully produced an annual collection of phone numbers, email addresses, business pages and informative articles. The book is a local resource, deliberately not targeted at tourists. It has its own web site which is quite substantial. You can find a bunch of articles there focused on stuff that us islanders find interesting, on subjects like the best sea kayaking routes, great hikes, 99 things to do as a local, and an extensive gallery of New Yorker quality cartoons on local issues, and loving portraits of islanders and island life past and present, from our resident editorialist, Ron Woodall.

You can learn about gardening with native plants and what kind of birds frequent our forests and shorelines.

Until I stumbled across Claudia’s site today I really had no idea it was out there and how extensive it is.

Help us create and install a Squamish welcome figure on Bowen Island

February 20, 2026 By Bowen, First Nations, Uncategorized No Comments

My friend Pauline Le Bel published the first in a series of articles in our local paper on our project to install a Squamish welcome figure here on Bowen Island. This article talks about the history of the project.

And here is the back story from our ever evolving prospectus.

An Invitation to all to Co-Create a Symbol of Reconciliation and Friendship

We are at the beginning of a community project to raise funds and support for the carving and installation of a Squamish Welcome Figure on Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm. This project is a step toward deeper recognition of the Squamish People as the original stewards of this land, and an act of reconciliation and allyship that invites us all into a shared future grounded in respect and friendship.

Why a Welcome Figure?
Welcome Figures are carved by Squamish carvers to offer greeting, connection, and hospitality to all who arrive on Squamish territory. This proposed figure will:

  • Recognize Squamish ownership and stewardship of Nex?wlélex?wm.
  • Extend a visible, meaningful welcome to all who come to the island.
  • Build upon past gestures such as the installation of the “Nex?wlélex?wm” place name at the ferry landing in 2020.
  • Deepen cultural understanding and relationships between the Squamish Nation and Bowen Island residents.
  • Be created in collaboration with a Squamish carver.

This project builds on the work of reconciliation and relationship building between residents of Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm and our hosts, the S?wx?wú7mesh Úxwimixw (the Squamish Nation). Since before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, citizens on Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm have worked with the Nation on initiatives to build knowledge, awareness and collaboration. In 2017, Pauline Le Bel, with the support of the Bowen Island Public Library and the Bowen Island Arts Council, initiated a reconciliation initiative called Knowing Our Place, to learn our true history with Indigenous People. The initiative brought Squamish Nation Elders and teachers to Bowen Island, and engaged many Islanders in learning about the Indigenous history of our place. In 2020, as part of Knowing Our Place, Elders from the Squamish Ocean Going Canoe Family came in ceremony to bless the sign at the ferry dock that welcomes people to Nex?wlélex?wm. At that ceremony the idea was born to create and install a Welcome Figure on Bowen Island, as a tangible mark of the relationship between the S?wx?wú7mesh Uxwimixw and the Nex?wlélex?wm Uxwimixw (the villagers of Bowen Island).

This project also builds on several of the Calls to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Report and extends the spirit of those calls with a tangible, community-initiated project to recognize and affirm the Squamish Nation and its territory and to acknowledge our place within it.  

There are several Squamish Nation welcome figures within S?wx?wú7mesh-ulh Temíxw (Squamish territory).  You can read about some of them here:

The preferred location: the entrance to our new Community Centre

While the beach at Snug Cove was the original location — as suggested by Squamish Elder and Councillor, Alroy ‘Bucky’ Baker —  the difficulty in acquiring a suitable large cedar log has made another location more viable. A smaller log has been acquired for a welcome figure as a house post welcoming islanders and visitors to the Centre and to our community.

If you want to help you can donate at our charitable Impact page and you’ll receive a tax receipt if you are Canadian.

How to find good things

February 20, 2026 By Being, Bowen, Culture No Comments

I’m giving Current a spin. It is an RSS feed reader that is built differently. It treats RSS feeds as readable treats rather than emails to be answered and processed. It deliberately seeks to remove the stressful and addictive interfaces that drive social media and productivity software, and it offers a clean interface for the words written by my friends and those I admire and follow. This might be the best way to get into reading blogs again for those of you that don’t do it yet.

Small town libraries save the world. I live in a small town. I spend more time at the library than perhaps any other single place in this town. I use it as an office, a place to rest, a place to meet people, to learn about things, to learn how to swing dance or listen to my friends and neighbours sharing stories. So enjoy Nick Fuller Googins’ essay on small town libraries:

Another library book introduced me to Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a maverick scientist-artist who travels the world, collects mutated insects downwind of nuclear reactors, then documents the deformities by painting slides. How fascinating! How bizarre! What could be the subject of a book itself ended up as a side-plot in my novel, set in San Luis Obispo (downwind of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant), and ready to derail Josie’s ant dissertation and academic career.

Would I have stumbled across these odd tidbits online, or through AI prompts? Possibly. Doing generative research online, however, is like dipping a glass into the Pacific in hopes of finding an “interesting” cup of water. How do you know when you have one? How does Google or Grok sift and deliver results, compared with a living, breathing human at Belfast’s Public Library? They can’t.

One reason that small-town library research works so well is because of its natural parameters. Rather than an ocean of information to click through, you get a small stack of books. A small stack of books is manageable. It’s focusing. In our era of seemingly limitless data, I for one thrive on these boundaries. By constraining my initial research like this, oddly enough, I was expanding my results.

Just today I stopped into my own small town library to set up a meeting with one of the staff members and another friend, and I walked out of there with “A Psalm for The Wild Built” which my friend Marysia described as “HopePunk” (a genre I was thrilled to know existed!) and I was sold, especially after three of the staff there recommended it and Becky Chambers’ work in general. This author is new to me, but a sweet novel under 200 pages recommended by great people ticks all the boxes for me.