Singalong savants Choir! Choir! Choir! are saving the world one song at a time | Canada Voices

Last year in Toronto, Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman of the mass choral group Choir! Choir! Choir! led a parade down King Street West, bullhorns blasting. A crowd of some 1,200 had just been let out of the Royal Alexandra Theatre after the world premiere screening of the Tragically Hip documentary No Dress Rehearsal at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“We’re here to make you sound good,” Adilman yelled as the procession reached another crowd already amassed a couple of blocks away. Lyric sheets to Hip songs Bobcaygeon, Ahead By a Century and Grace, Too were handed out as Adilman and Goldman climbed atop an eye-catching bus to lead the people through the three Hip classics.

“Just sing,” Adilman assured the gang of amateurs, “and then we’ll work with it.”

It’s what they do, work with what they’ve got. Since 2011, the two pied pipers of pop have organized the choir’s open-participation shows, which turn audiences into performers. “No dress rehearsal, this is our life,” everybody sang a year ago.

Watch: A Tragically Hip sing-along kicks off TIFF

This fall, Adilman and Goldman won’t be performing from the top of a bus, they’ll be travelling in one. Choir! Choir! Choir! is going on tour, tour, tour.

“Our biggest yet,” Adilman says, working his way through a lunch of French fries and a grilled cheese sandwich. “I’ll be leaving two kids at home for three months,” adds Goldman, stabbing at his crouton-free Caesar salad. “It’ll be tough.”

Adilman, 53, then jokes about maybe having kids of his own. Goldman, the straight man of the duo, points out that they’ll have separate hotel rooms on the road. Sitting nearby, their Australian-born publicist laughs at the repartee. “They’re like that all the time,” Samantha Pickard says later. “It never stops.”

We’re sitting in a booth at Fran’s diner, directly across from Massey Hall in Toronto, where the 58-city North American tour ends with two concerts on Dec. 20. The shows later in the tour will be holiday themed, more family orientated. The earlier appearances will often feature Queen songs such as Crazy Little Thing Called Love and the foot-stomping We Will Rock You.

Or as they like to say, “We will Choir! you.”

Being choirmasters wasn’t originally in cards for the two, especially Goldman. The 49-year-old musician once described as a “brooding perfectionist” in a 2016 New Yorker profile of the duo had dreams of being a singer-songwriter − a solo pursuit. He’s bearded, acerbic and wears a ball cap advertising a local dive bar. His job with Choir! is to strum a guitar and prep the audience on the arrangements and harmonies they’ll all be singing.

“They could be called a band of random yahoos,” he says of his new singers every night.

“We’ve created a night of music that’s pure chaos,” Adilman says, after asking the waitress for mayonnaise for his fries. He’s a joyful, animated type, half Jewish and half Japanese − “first generation Jewanese,” as he puts it. Adilman is the choir conductor. “It’s not about perfection. It’s about seeing what people can do together, which is what my whole life has been about.”

Along with his brother, Mio Adilman, he worked in television as a writer and actor. The son of late entertainment journalist Sid Adilman, he once appeared with his sibling as a drug dealer in a Trailer Park Boys episode. He also hosted the Food Network Canada series Food Jammers.

Adilman is a people person who found scriptwriting a “paralytically lonely” endeavour. Studying theatre at Dalhousie University in his youth, he thrived in the city’s DYI arts scene. “Basically, I learned how to throw parties,” he explains. “Everything I do now, I learned in Halifax. You had to create your own opportunities.”

The interactive Choir! Choir! Choir! nights began in Toronto bars such as Clinton’s Tavern and performance spaces in Kensington Market. Weekly shows turned into bi-weekly occurrences as word-of-mouth buzz grew. The beer-joint communal singing had a more insular, intense vibe than the Choir! theatre shows these days.

“Back then, everyone would get really invested in wanting it to sound good, and it usually did,” says Renée Gomes, an administrator with Waterfront Toronto and a Choir! veteran. “It’s more than a singalong. You had to learn your part, and you still do. Nobu and Daveed are very strict about that.”

Apart from their scheduled concerts and corporate gigs, the nimble pair have organized impromptu memorial concerts over the years, after the deaths of numerous music icons.

In March, 2016, Choir! paid tribute to the late David Bowie at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where an audience of 2,800 (including Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper and members of the Pixies and the Flaming Lips) sang Bowie’s Space Oddity.

A month later, 10 days after Prince died, Goldman and Adilman booked Massey Hall and invited 1,999 people to sing a sombre, near a cappella version of When Doves Cry.

“Those shows have a different feeling in the room, because everyone is feeling a certain kind of vulnerability,” Adilman says. “People are truly upset. Their favourite musician is gone.”

On Oct. 17, 2017, the two were on tour staying in a dingy basement Airbnb rental in Chicago when they heard Hip singer Gord Downie had died. “People started calling us,” Goldman recalls. “The CBC called us. It was expected of us that we would do something.”

One week later, they hosted a public gathering in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, where Hip songs Ahead by a Century, Bobcaygeon, Courage (for Hugh MacLennan) and Poets were performed.

“Their idea is very smart,” says Tragically Hip manager Jake Gold. “You’re in a crowd of 100 or 1,000 or 2,000, and you feel comfortable singing these iconic songs. There’s a joy in that.”

During a typical Choir! concert, the audience is first shown a lyric video and is expected to sing, with no instruction. Then Goldman and Adilman arrive on stage to amp up the crowd and get them laughing before the instructions. The vocal arrangements of the material grow in complexity as the evening progresses. Gaining the audience’s trust is the key.

“Some people are there under duress,” Adilman says with a laugh. “Maybe a friend has brought them along. But that’s okay. Once you have the crowd on your side, you can do whatever you want.”

The Canadian leg of the current tour begins Sept. 21 at Montreal’s Théâtre Maisonneuve.