Inside the Longboat Hall on Dovercourt, attendees of the third anniversary showcase of Listening Room, Davie Studios’ live jam series, expanded throughout the venue awaiting the drop beat to set the show into motion. Some staked their claim in front of the 360 degree stage, others spotted friends with hugs following closely behind, but most were on the balcony level waiting to dispel their outer layers at the coatcheck to make dancing a little less sweaty.
On the floor, local musicians waited along the platform’s edges, ready to perform when the moment arose. Among them was tenor saxophonist Jakob Leeson, who has been attending Listening Room shows since they were held at Laylow Brewery on College Street, a 40-person venue.
“It’s like a cutting floor for a style of music where there hasn’t really been a cutting floor,” Leeson said.
“It’s a community. It’s an ecosystem.”
Founded in 2022 by Shadia Ahmed, Davie Studios is an underground live music organization that runs jam sessions and showcase series designed to centre Black musicians and improve the economics of gigging in Toronto’s jazz scene. What began as a short-term research project has since grown into a platform that regularly sells out shows and has helped launch the careers of emerging local artists.
Once roughly 400 ticket-holders settled in, Ahmed introduced the night’s house band, which included percussionist Roshane Wright and drummer Larnell Lewis. Listening Room shows are typically programmed around the catalogue of a single artist — past nights have drawn from the music of Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Sade — but the anniversary showcase featured a look back at songs from across the series.
Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour jam session, the house band builds songs improvisationally, following melodic instincts and responding to one another in real time. No two Listening Room shows are ever the same.
What’s more, the musicians regularly swap out, making space for attendees with their own talents to take the stage. During the anniversary showcase, tap dancer Victoria Miller stepped into the circle, syncing her feet to the beat of Larnell Lewis’s drum kit. Still, the core house band remains intact — a full Black ensemble, something Ahmed says is by design.
Before founding Davie Studios, Ahmed recalls noticing that the musicians, staff and audiences in Toronto jazz clubs were overwhelmingly white, despite the city’s diversity.
“When I would bring it up to my peers in the jazz community, like, ‘Hey, why is the scene so white?’ I was getting told that there aren’t a lot of Black musicians in Toronto playing jazz,” she said. “Which is kind of ironic, because jazz is Black American music.”
In the summer of 2022, Ahmed began pursuing her bachelor’s degree at George Brown Polytechnic, but feelings of burnout eventually led her to take time off from school. She stepped away from working in jazz clubs, though her longtime love affair with the genre never waned.
She spent much of that summer reflecting on what she wanted — not just for herself, but for Toronto’s jazz scene. She thought back to a gap year she had spent immersed in Philadelphia’s local music community in her 20s, admiring how artists created spaces to uplift one another and learn collectively.
With school still on the brain, Ahmed began wondering how hard it would be to build a Philly-like jazz scene in Toronto.
“I was really curious if it was possible to very intentionally diversify and very intentionally improve the economics of what it’s like to be a local musician,” Ahmed said.
And thus, Davie Studios was born.
The organization’s first event took place in September 2022: a Marmalade jam session — the charity-driven arm of the organization, pun intended, Ahmed said.
“It was really important for me to have the very first jam be for the sake of charity,” she said. “My background is Muslim, and there’s this philosophy that the best kind of charity is collective charity.”
The show was met with an outpouring of support. Although Davie Studios was initially intended to be a short-lived research experiment in community creation, Ahmed decided to keep going.
One musician who has felt the impact of that decision is trumpeter Christian Antonacci, who has been working in Toronto’s music scene since before graduating from the Etobicoke School of the Arts. While he loves the work, he’s no stranger to the financial precarity that comes with gigging.
“I’m tired of eating pickles every night,” he said.
Antonacci explained that it’s common for companies to take months to pay, often failing to compensate musicians for the hours spent on set-up and sound checks. But at Davie Studios, he said, Ahmed has “really figured out” how to take care of musicians, prioritizing clear communication and fair pay.
“It all reflects,” Antonacci said. “We all want to make sure the music’s good, so we show up early — and she takes care of us on the back end.”
That backend support has turned Davie Studios into a pivotal classroom for emerging talent like percussionist Roshane Wright. Having been warned about Canuck weather, Wright arrived from Jamaica in 2019 wearing three coats — in August. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready for the cold,’” he said. “As soon as I got out, I had to take everything off, the whole nine yards.”
Uncertain about his Canadian future, Wright focused on networking while at Humber College, waiting for the right opportunity. That chance came during a Listening Room show centered on D’Angelo’s discography. Though he was originally scheduled for one song, Wright ended up staying for the entire night. “I was very happy I was playing, but in the back of my mind I was like, ‘I hope this is going well,’ because I kind of bulldozed this,” he said.
He wasn’t supposed to be paid for the original guest role, but Ahmed made sure he was compensated. “She did right by me,” Wright said. Ahmed continued to hire him, and last spring, Wright was named the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Breakthrough Jazz Artist of the Year. “I am growing as a musician and as a musical director because of the choice she made to take a leap on me,” he said.
Wright is part of what Ahmed calls a “pipeline of aspiration.”
“I really wanted, similar to Philly, to have a pipeline of aspiration — like a young kid could look at TJ [Williams] and think, ‘I want to be like TJ when I grow up,’” she said. Williams recently wrapped a 64-show world tour with Jessie Reyez. That pipeline is already paying off: 19-year-old drummer Jonathan Scott had his first show last October, and a clip of his drum solo racked up over 4.2 million views.
For Ahmed, seeing the successes of the musicians who have come through her 2022 research idea has been nothing short of a dream.
“But there’s also so much left in this dream too,” she said.
