Global Marley concert at Redwood Theatre to celebrate what would have been 80th birthday of Bob Marley

By MATTHEW STEPHENS

On Feb. 6 of this year, legendary reggae musician Bob Marley would have turned 80 years old. In honour of his monumental legacy on the world of music, Culchahworks Art Collective will present Global Marley – a celebratory concert of Marley’s hits, performed by artists from across the globe living in Canada.

“Bob Marley is known the world over, but people don’t necessarily think about the fact that his music had reached every corner of the globe,” Culchahworks Artistic Director Andrew Craig told Beach Metro Community News. “And there’s a certain universality to it, which is remarkable given his humble beginnings and that he’s from this tiny little island in the Caribbean – and yet he still managed to touch people the world over.”

The concert, which is set to take place two days after the musician’s birthday on Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. at the Redwood Theatre (1300 Gerrard St. E.), will be a celebration of Marley’s influential and everlasting messages of peace, love, and resistance.

Tickets for the all-ages one-night event can be purchased on the Redwood Theatre and Culchahworks.

General admission tickets are $40. A discounted price of $30 will be offered for students, seniors, arts workers, and under waged workers. Upper lounge VIP senior tickets will be $60, and child admission will be $20 for ages 12 and under.

In an interesting and unique twist, Marley’s hits will be performed utilizing styles and genres other than reggae, to illustrate the significance and impact of his music across the world.

“When you pull the reggae away and you see what’s left, what you have is incredibly poetic lyrics and beautiful melodies that Bob crafted totally separate from the arrangement around the music,” said Craig.

The Culchahworks website describes the decision to blend genres as a great way for artists to demonstrate a unified love for Marley’s music in their own musical languages.

“We’ve taken the bare bones, the essence of the songs, lyrics and melody – and we’ve handed them to these artists to interpret through their own musical hands,” said Craig.

Featured artists slated for the event include the Kuné Global Orchestra, Blackburn Brothers, Cliff Cardinal, Jason Wilson, Born of One, Faith Amour, D’eve Archer, and many other artists from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Stylistic interpretations of Marley’s hits will be performed with an infusion of genres ranging from classical and jazz to R&B and funk, Indian and Indigenous – even Celtic and Chinese.

“We get to appreciate them in a whole new way,” said Craig. “So, it might be a song of which you’re tremendously familiar, but you likely will have never heard it treated in this fashion, and it allows for those artists to really shine in their own ways, coming from their own musical background.”

Drawn from the pronunciation of the word ‘culture’ in Jamaican patois, Culchahworks is a Toronto-based not-for-profit arts organization established in 2013 by Guelph-based Craig. Their goal is to celebrate stories drawn from the roots of African-Canadian, Caribbean-Canadian, and African-American culture through the arts. The organization strives to preserve and honour prominent figures and events from our heritage.

“We have a mandate to celebrate stories that come principally from the African-Canadian, Caribbean-Canadian, and African-American cultural legacies that have universal resonance, which is a fancy way of saying, we tell stories that we feel are little known, and amplify them through a variety of artistic disciplines.”

Later this year in March, Culchahworks will be hosting workshop presentations for an upcoming show titled Keeping up with the Joneses in Toronto and Halifax. The show tells the story of Walter Borden, Joan, and Rocky Jones: three prominent civil rights activists in Canada who, according to Culchahwork’s description, “Very nearly incited a revolution in Nova Scotia.”

After several workshop presentations in Halifax, Cherrybrook, and Toronto, the show has entered the next stage of development and is slated to become a full production by spring 2026.