Four years ago, Peter Katz was still a fresh-faced, twenty-something new to the Canadian music scene when he and his band paid to play a showcase at Canadian Music Week. This year, the powers that be extended an official invitation - all MasterCards aside - to Peter Katz and the Curious to play their first official CMW showcase Friday night at the El Mocambo in Toronto. He couldn’t have been more excited to be there.
“It’s a festival but it’s also like an industry conference,” he told me during an interview in the foyer of the building just a few hours before his 11:00 p.m. set, “I like it. It’s been really good for us and I have been going to all the panels and everything, just meeting people and checking out shows. The best thing is, it’s kind of like a buffet. You just walk in and see something and that’s fun too, to discover a new band. It’s exciting. I love being in this environment.”
“Canada is really good at supporting its artists through Factor and that sort of thing, and Canada is really well-respected on the international front,” Peter says, with regards to the Canadian music industry. After having attended a handful of panels discussing the future of Canadian music in the face of the digital age, Peter has a lot to say: “I think it’s just going to grow,” he says of the industry, “There’s going to be more and more music and it’s going to be tougher for people to get noticed but at the same time maybe that will create a ‘survival of the fittest’ environment where it’s just a matter of who is willing to stick it out and who has got what it takes to make it. I think the bar is constantly being raised and any band that starts up now has the experience of all those who have come before and the canon of music out there.”
When it comes to his own art, Peter noticeably modest, “I try to always remember that this is a craft and that no matter how many MySpaces I update and web pages I go to and all that stuff, at the end of the day, I need to remember to keep practicing guitar and keep writing and singing. That’s my number one job. It’s got to be a priority. I just want to get really really really really good at what I do.”
Future plans for Peter include a cross-Canada tour, starting next week. The first two weeks will feature a full band, with the rest leaving Peter to woo the foreign crowds by himself. Though he won’t be making it out that far this time, Peter tells me how much he relished spending time on the East Coast. “I just fell in love with all these East coast bands. There’s a real community out there. Everybody lives near each other and they all come over and play in each other’s bands.”
Peter hopes for a good turnout at his showcase, which will be the last time he performs on a Toronto stage until early May. He’s trying to promote his new album, which is being re-released on Curve Records sometime in the coming months. However, he’s apprehensive about the crowd that will come from a festival of this size. “Sometimes,” he says,
“I feel like you don’t really get to do your thing in this context because the turnover is so fast and the crowd isn’t necessarily your crowd. It’s different when you’re headlining and you’re building the night and you’re sort of creating the whole atmosphere. That, for me, is an important part that I don’t get to control in this sort of showcase.”
Peter, ever the charmer, has a few tricks up his sleeve for the show that will hopefully win over the hearts of the audience members. “We’re going to promote the new album but also try some new acoustic stuff for the people who already know the older songs and have come out to the show specifically to see us. I always want to give those people something new.”
It must have worked because when I returned to the venue shortly after 11:00 p.m., the crowd was plentiful and all were dancing along to the tunes with Peter on stage, singing, playing and grinning like a kid playing with a beloved old toy. He’s just happy to be doing what he loves and it’s clear that he is getting better and better and better at it.