Battle of the Bands: Toronto and Vancouver

Five hot bands on an even hotter evening showed off their musical gifts to an appreciative crowd at this year’s AIDSBeat fundraiser in Toronto. Lawyers-turned-musicians from law firms all over the city battled for the grand prize: the Lexpert Cup (Ontario).

AIDSBeat’s seventh annual battle of the bands in September was a huge success, with 1,400 tickets sold and a capacity crowd crammed into the Capitol Event Theatre. This year’s event raised approximately $115,000 for the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR). There was a line-up around the corner even before the doors opened. “The Capitol’s a great venue, but we have to consider that we may have outgrown our space,” says committee member Fern Glowinsky.

Winners for the last two years, The Rt. Honourable Jake and the High Court of Soul didn’t compete this time, but they opened the evening with their diverse mix of soul, retro and modern rock. They were joined onstage by the evening’s judges: Sheila Block of Torys LLP, Dale Lastman of Goodmans LLP and Osgoode Hall law professor Peter Hogg. The three, dressed as gangsta rappers, gave it their best in a rousing, albeit lip-synched, rendition of Smash Mouth’s “All Star”.

Media personality Carla Collins served as master of ceremonies, with some help from the Rt. Honourable Jake (a.k.a. Jason Bullen of Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP). Go-go dancers provided a popular distraction between sets, all the more appreciated due to the fact that the air conditioning conked out early in the evening following a thunderstorm.

This year’s four competing bands—Gorgeous Pants (Koskie Minsky), Jonas (Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP; Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP; Torys), Departure Lounge (Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP) and Tokyo Giants (Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP; Ryder Wright Blair & Doyle; Solmon Rothbart Goodman; Ontario Ministry of Labour; Federal Department of Justice; East Toronto Community Legal Services; plus two sole practitioners)—played a variety of music, from R&B and delta blues to Motown and rock.

The evening’s winners were the Tokyo Giants R&B band, who said they were honoured to accept the Lexpert Cup from Lexpert’s own Andrea MacPhail and RainMaker Group’s Adam Lepofsky. As an added perk for winning, the band will play at an upcoming Raptors game at the Air Canada Centre.

The Tokyo Giants is comprised largely of a group of friends who met at Osgoode Hall Law School 17 years ago. Guitar player and singer Brian Fukuzawa, who works as a lawyer by day at the Ontario Ministry of Labour, says he and his bandmates are happy to participate in such a good cause. “One of our classmates died from AIDS and we talked a lot about that before the gig this year. Any time you’re playing at a charitable event dealing with such a horrible and insidious disease, it’s a tough thing.”

AIDSBeat, the brainchild of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP’s Patricia Olasker, has become an established yearly event. Olasker says people come to it with a high set of expectations. Now that it’s a more mature event, “our job is to keep surprising people in some small way.” This year’s pyrotechnics display appeared to do the trick.

Olasker co-chairs the fundraiser with Carla Swansburg of Ogilvy Renault, and they’re joined by a committee consisting of Aaron Boles of NATIONAL Public Relations, Fern Glowinsky of Moneris Solutions Corporation, Audrey Shecter of Basman Smith LLP, Brian Calalang of Davies Ward, Michael Rosen of Plan-It Meeting and Special Occasion Planners and Jason Bullen of Cassels Brock.

Olasker enjoys seeing the Toronto legal community come together socially, but also “in a socially aware way to champion this underdog cause.” She describes it as the great tradition of the legal profession: “If you look back historically that has been fundamentally the quality of the legal profession, that it champions the underdog, and I think this is a manifestation of that tradition.”

Joan Bosworth, the executive director of CANFAR, sings the praises of Olasker and the local legal community. “We don’t have another example of a professional community coming together around a cause like this,” Bosworth says. The event attracts a young crowd, and “those are the people who are most at risk. AIDS is still with us, there are 50,000 people in Canada living with HIV/AIDS and approximately a third of those don’t even know they have it, so they’re walking time bombs—they’re not protecting themselves or anyone else. Heterosexual sex is the fastest-rising way of transmission right now.”

CANFAR operates with no government funding, so money is privately raised and goes directly into underwriting grants for Canadian research into a cure for HIV and AIDS. Bosworth says Canada is one of only a handful of nations with the ability and the infrastructure to contribute to this research. Since the organization gives away more than $1 million a year, AIDSBeat traditionally raises about 10 per cent of its total revenues.

Olasker received CANFAR’s executive director’s award earlier this year for her work on its behalf. The amount of money that’s been raised largely due to Olasker’s commitment, time, effort and attention to this cause “is just incredible,” says Bosworth. “We are totally blessed.”

Vancouver Joins In
The concept of bands battling to raise money appears to have taken off in the legal community. Eight bands, featuring more than 50 lawyer-musicians, squared off in Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom earlier this year to compete for the Lexpert Cup (B.C.) and to raise funds for the C.B.A. (B.C.) Benevolent Society. The Battle of the Bar Bands, with more than seven hundred in attendance, was the second-largest gathering in B.C. Bar history, making it the society’s most successful fundraiser ever. Between ticket sales and corporate sponsorship, approximately $37,000 was raised.

Society director Derek Brindle, Q.C., of Singleton Urquhart, who co-chaired the event with immigration lawyer Catherine Sas, says he got the idea for a battle of the bands fundraiser after reading Lexpert’s report on last year’s AIDSBeat. “I thought that was a wonderful concept,” he says. The reaction was “immediately favourable. It appeared to me as if everyone had the view that its time had come.”

Gudmundseth Mickelson’s band Still Living at Home was the winner. Also performing were McCarthy Tétrault LLP’s Felony; Davis & Company’s Smokeball; Lawson Lundell’s The Bluebottles; Bull, Housser & Tupper’s The Bullet Proof Bar Band; Harper Grey Easton’s The Purdy Mouth Band; Owen Bird’s Monkeys With Guns and Singleton Urquhart’s Derek & The Defenderz.

Well-known Canadian songwriter and performer Tom Northcott was joined by Supreme Court Justices Jon Sigurdson and Lynn Smith, B.C. Provincial Court Judge Bill Kitchen and lawyer Robbie Burns from Jarvis Burns McGee as the evening’s judges.

The fundraiser included draws and a silent auction of a number of autographed photos of world-famous people. “There’s quite a repository of musical talent in the firms in Vancouver,” Brindle discovered. “There were other bands we simply didn’t have room for,” although this may change next year. “There was immediately a clamour for a repeat. We’re happy to oblige.”

The Benevolent Society helps lawyers and their families who, through illness or misfortune, need short-term financial assistance. “Events like this bring the legal community together in support of our cause—to help fellow lawyers in need,” says the society’s president, Terry La Liberte, Q.C.

Ann Macaulay is a Lexpert staff writer.