“When six strings become a passport”
February in this city asks for strings.
Because a guitar is basically tension you can hear.
Literal tension.
Nylon sets hovering around 60 pounds across the strings.
Steel 12-strings climbing toward 250.
And somehow… that pressure turns into tenderness the second a human hand touches it.
Also, a quick historical jump-cut:
Early guitars ran on gut strings—the intestinal lining of sheep or cattle.
People called it “catgut.”
Cats stayed completely uninvolved. I know, I live with one.
Which feels poetic, honestly.
An instrument built from the most unglamorous materials… becoming the most romantic sound in the room.
And then there’s that line I always come back to:
the guitar as a small orchestra.
Every string a different colour.
A different voice.
Six voices. One body. One person steering the weather.
Jaysuits, that’s the sweet spot.
Because a theatre does something a playlist never quite touches.
It gathers people into the same air.
It slows the clock.
It turns music into a shared language instead of background noise.
On February 1, Massey Theatre holds space for an all-Canadian tour built around dazzling virtuosity, diverse musical traditions, and intimate storytelling.
Last year, I sat in that same building for BUWA; a night that reminded me how this venue holds artists who carry whole worlds inside a single voice.
The SkyTrain ride felt like part of the ritual.
The room listened with its whole body.
This time, the flex lands in a different form.
Four guitarists.
Four traditions.
One shared arc across the night.
Still deeply Canadian.
Still somehow global.
And the lineup reads like a résumé stack that makes a guitar case feel like a trophy cabinet:
A guitarist-composer with the 2014 ACUM Prize for Special Achievement in Jazz and the Landau Prize, plus stages like Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, and the Sydney Opera House.
A JUNO Award–winning jazz guitarist and vocalist with a catalog that includes a 2021 JUNO winner and a 2024 JUNO nominee—tone, phrasing, presence, the whole thing.
A harp guitar innovator whose “Comfortably Numb” cover pulled 19 million views, plus a Canadian Guitar Festival Competition (2016) win.
And a flamenco composer-guitarist whose album 8 Reflexiones made history as the first flamenco CD composed and recorded by a woman… still pushing the form forward with every new chapter.
The Massey effect
” Intimacy, even from the balcony”
A lot of concerts operate like a straight line. you show up, one artist plays their world, everyone claps, you head back into the rain.
This night runs on a different engine.
The real magic sits inside the structure. where the guitar becomes the common connector, and everything else becomes a moving conversation. Each artist steps forward with their own voice, jazz guitar and vocals, flamenco composition, harp guitar innovation, world-fusion jazz language. Then the walls between those styles start dissolving.
The way it unfolds carries that “festival-in-a-single-evening” energy. Each guitarist steps into a solo spotlight first; one voice, one style, one worldview at a time. Then the real alchemy starts to happen. The concept leans into interaction: duos, trios, quartets, the same four players reappearing in new combinations, letting the guitar act as the shared passport while everything else shifts around it.
One moment lives in jazz phrasing, another rides flamenco rhythm, another opens into that orchestral harp-guitar range, another brings in global melodic languages.
The common thread stays the same. The colours keep changing.
Massey has hosted this touring festival for nine editions, and the way they describe it says everything about why it works: a warm, friendly format that breaks down barriers.
That warmth matters, because virtuosity can sometimes feel distant. Here, the whole premise leans toward closeness. Toward hearing the details and feeling the humans behind the technique.
And that’s why this night plays like a mini-festival without the chaos. No massive site map. No sprinting between stages. Just one room, one focused listening experience, and a lineup curated to keep surprising you in the most musical way.
The Four Faces of the Six-String Multiverse
Four artists. One stage. An all-Canadian tour that still feels like it travels continents in a single evening. So let’s meet them the way we met Buwa. Through story. Through receipts. Through the specific flavour each one brings into the room.
Jamie Dupuis
This is where people sit up straighter. Shoulders shift. Eyes lock in.
He’s a Canadian guitarist, composer, and producer known for complex fingerstyle technique, energetic performance, and arrangements on both guitar and harp guitar.
One viral moment tells you how far his sound travels: his 2016 harp-guitar arrangement of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” pulled over 19 million views, launching international recognition.
The backstory is peak “built for this.” Piano at age 6 for theory and notation. Guitar at 14 and suddenly the obsession turns real. Rock foundations first—Nirvana, Metallica, Yngwie Malmsteen, Rush, Van Halen—then classical training kicks the whole thing into a different gear.
Eight-hour practice days. A mission.
Formal studies follow: Cambrian College (2008) under Philip Candelaria, then a full-ride scholarship to Musicians Institute in Hollywood (2011).
Post-grad life reads like working-musician reality at full tilt: sessions, weddings, bar gigs, festivals, composition, albums, and constant performance reps.
Now for the trophy shelf, Jaysuits, because this is where the “expectation setting” becomes extremely clear:
- 1st place, Canadian Guitar Festival Competition (2016).
- Sudbury Mayor’s Award (Emerging Artist, 2015).
- 1st place (Country category), Lee Ritenour’s Six String Theory (2012).
- Plus a trail of wins that stretches back through festivals and scholarship competitions.
Influence-wise, he pulls from artists like Chet Atkins, Tommy Emmanuel, Stevie Wonder, Django Reinhardt, and he plays across styles; classical, jazz, blues, country, rock, folk, pop.
Instrument list goes wild in the best way: harp guitar, acoustic, classical, banjo, 18-string classical guitar, electric guitar, vocals.
Then there’s the discography grind: releases spanning Inspired by a Dream (2010) all the way through multiple harp guitar arrangement projects and The Last Crossing (2021).
So for Jaysuits, expect a set that feels cinematic and athletic at the same time.
Itamar Erez
The set that arrives like a scent before it becomes a melody.
Songlines once described his playing as music that “catches fire,” and that line feels like the cleanest preview of the energy: technique that stays lyrical, then suddenly stretches out and lifts off.
His sound lives in a three-way crossroads—Middle Eastern delicateness, jazz freedom, flamenco passion—and the result is a personal language that feels both ancient and current.
Awards land here too: 2014 ACUM Prize for Special Achievement in Jazz and the 2014 Landau Prize.
The stage history reads global: collaborations alongside names like Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Tomatito, and Avishai Cohen, plus a Carnegie Hall debut in April 2018 with Tekbilek’s ensemble.
Album-wise, this is deep catalogue territory—six releases spanning Adama Ensemble work, to Mi Alegria (2019), to May Song (Oct 2022), to Migrant Voices (2024), a collaboration with Iranian-Canadian percussionist Hamin Honari that highlights the spontaneous interplay between guitar and percussion.
And here’s the Vancouver-specific heartbeat I love: he teaches at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra School of Music, carrying that world-music and jazz approach straight into the city’s musical ecosystem.
This one feels like listening to a conversation between cultures that already know each other.
Jocelyn Gould
This is where the theatre energy shifts into jazz-club intimacy, then scales right back up into festival-level confidence.
She comes with a headline receipt: 2021 JUNO Award winner, and a Benedetto endorsement that frames her as “a leader in the next generation of great mainstream jazz guitarists.”
Her sound pulls from the greats—Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Joe Pass, Kenny Burrell—then filters those influences into something bright, modern, and completely her own.
The performance history is stacked with serious company: appearances as a leader and alongside artists like Freddy Cole, Bria Skonberg, and Michael Dease. Artist bios
And the albums carry their own storyline:
Elegant Traveler took home the 2021 JUNO Award for Jazz Album of the Year: Solo. Golden Hour puts her guitar front and centre, introduces her voice, pulls international acclaim, and earns heavy rotation including Sirius XM play—then climbs to #1 on Canadian and #9 on North American college radio jazz charts.
Then she took it on the road the real way: a Golden Hour Tour (June 2022) with stops at 11 Canadian jazz festivals, a 2022 calendar that moved fast and wide, including a six-week U.S. run built around Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone.
She brings that rare combination: precision that feels effortless, joy that feels contagious, and a voice that lands like a second instrument.
Caroline Planté
Flamenco has heat, and flamenco has discipline. Her story carries both.
She began learning flamenco at age 7, guided by her father, guitarist Marcel “El Rubio” Planté—one of the genre’s pioneers in Quebec dating back to the 1960s.
Over two decades of deep immersion followed, built through performance and long training stays in Spain.
Then the pivot arrives: a shift away from strict purism, into a more personal compositional voice—shaped by her influences and the evolving artist she’s becoming.
In 2004, meeting choreographer-dancer Mariano Cruceta in Madrid changes the frame, leading to eight choreographic and musical works and a short film created together between 2004 and 2013.
The landmark moment lands in 2010: 8reflexiones, recorded in Madrid at the legendary Musigrama studio, achieves wide success and becomes the first album entirely composed and performed by a female flamenco guitarist.
A decade in Spain follows, touring across the Americas and Europe, then a return to Montréal in 2013, where the project life explodes outward—works like The train of 57 strings (Prix Accès culture RIDEAU 2017–2018) and collaborations across ensembles, flamenco companies, and interdisciplinary projects.
The newest chapter: The Roses of Lorca, created with singer Marcos Marín, inspired by Federico García Lorca.
Mark Your Calendar (And Charge Your Compass Card)
Jaysuits, this is one of those “circle it now, thank yourself later” nights.
Sunday, February 1, 2026 — 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM at Massey Theatre in New Westminster.
Address for the group chat and your maps app: 735 Eighth Avenue, New Westminster, BC V3M 2R2.
Ticket tiers land clean and simple (service charges + taxes already included):
Adult: $62 | Student/Senior: $50 | Child (12 and under): $30.
A quick pro move: tickets run through TicketsNW/Ticketpro, which the venue flags as the official seller.
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