The music at Highlands Music Festival is carefully scheduled at three stages littered across Camp Walden. There is the Main Stage, which, inviting audiences to jump around and dance right at its foot, hosts headlining acts and rollicking bands with a larger membership. The stage at Jam Lands is cut into a towering huddle of red pines, their bare trunks filtering sunlight and offering a cool, smoky shade to acts loud and soft alike. Picnic tables hem the edges of the pit, leaving any act caught at Jam Lands feeling like a delicious secret that will be well kept by the surrounding forest.
And then there's the Amphitheatre, my favourite stage, which lies atop a hill sleepily yawning up from Red Pine Lake, whose jewel-blue you can glimpse through the trees. I recommend arriving at acts here a bit after they've started — having the music guide you through the trees feels a bit surreal, like being lured by a beguiling siren's call. A low but spacious gazebo rests like a recluse within the small clearing; I imagine kids put on plays here when Camp Walden hosts children for its summer programs, which have run on the land since the '70s. The pit is grassy, perfect for sitting or lying down as you watch dreamy acts.
Jonah Yano and his band played at the Amphitheatre, and never was there a more perfect match made between venue and musician. He stood on stage in billowing tailored trousers and a blue, oversized hoodie as his band sent up a tubular, atmospheric sound like a descent from space. Flanked by Christopher Edmondson on saxophone, Chris Ross on bass, Raiden Louie on drums, and Benja on guitar, Yano delicately tucked his hair behind his ear and slipped into his set, braiding tracks from all three of his albums: 2020's souvenir, 2023's portrait of a dog, and the upcoming Jonah Yano & the Heavy Loop.
The Montreal-based musician — known for infusing classical jazz elements with an experimental verve to create something achingly resonant — offered to festival goers a sort of salutary respite, creating with his sound a space at once kind and enlivening so that the sun-baked audience, many with their hair still wet from the lake, could shore up the energy needed for the rest of the evening.
I can best describe Yano's voice as a confiding whisper, so close you can pluck the consonants out of his words. Listening to him deliver memories of moments monumental and mundane felt like a glittering privilege. Early on in the set, he offered us "delicate," off his debut album, limning and thereby celebrating the act, a kind of fanciful labour, of thinking about another. "It is so delicate the way you take up my mind," he sang to his audience in a voice equally as delicate as the vignettes he flickered through. Many had laid down on their backs, eyes closed in sleepy contemplation, some keeping Yano's time by rhythmically tapping their fingers on their ribcage.
"I haven't sat and watched the sun set in a while," he said at one point, between tracks, apropos of the waning light. "I just wanted to empty that [thought] out of my head." For Yano, thoughts and memories aren't something ephemeral or without form; rather, they are corporeal, taking up space and worthy of being gifted to others. His voice, equally as embodied, seemed to suffuse the air and settle on your skin like dew, traveling to the water and causing its surface to tremble in awe.
Edmondson's sax, too, felt at times velvety as a curtain being raised to reveal Yano's psychic landscape, and at others as though it was being filtered through scuzzy static on a TV telegraphing Yano's memories. Yano's warm voice and smooth set — a performance so pitch-perfect he often turned around to his band with wonder and admiration — served as a balm, carefully wrapping us in a feeling of safety (because isn't the past and its smoothed-over beauty so safe?) and teaching through example how to forge unforgettable memories for ourselves.