Friday night at The Opera House, Coalesce will deliver eight acts ranging from acoustic to hip hop to funk. The fundraiser is in support of Sketch, a community-based initiative that seeks to expose street-involved youth to the transformative power of the arts. Performances will include The Snooky Tynes Family Funk Band, Babalao Stereo Club, Gen Why, The Panda Chronicles, Diemons, The UofT Dance Crew, and new Toronto rapper, Juvi Da Gemini.
Since debuting just two months ago, Da Gemini has performed at Alleycatz and The Drake Hotel as well as at The Gorsebrook in Halifax.
Growing up near Bay Mills and Glendower, Da Gemini had plenty of opportunity to choose a harsher path. He watched too many kids go from playing in the park to getting into gang violence. “One minute, people were your friends, the next they were your enemy,” he says.
A lot of his childhood friends are either locked up or deceased. “I didn’t want to be part of the whole push drugs scene, always in and out of jail.” It was the kind of environment where simple survival was a struggle.
A poet since he was twelve or thirteen, rap is a perfect fit for Da Gemini. He tried his hand at drumming, but kept coming back to his words.
When he met Nic Petrini-Woolley, the producer screened him, “both as a person and as an artist.” If Petrini-Woolley was going to take him on, he wanted to know he was working with someone who was serious about his music. “We just gelled because of how we perceive music and ideas,” says Da Gemini.
Petrini-Woolley and festival co-creator Champ Apipak have a lot of ideas about how music can be used not just to reach people, but to impact lives. And those ideas will be on stage Friday night, as Coalesce turns The Opera House into a celebration of social and environmental change through the arts.
In Da Gemini’s words, “If my music can drive one soul away from violence, that makes it worth it.”
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Rob Brunet is a Toronto-based crime fiction author. Follow him on Twitter at @RRBrunet.
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