For the second year Big Smoke has teamed up with Keys To The Streets to film musicians performing intimate concerts on the public pianos located throughout the city.

The sixth video in the series features a piano at Lot 19 on the streets of downtown with a gorgeous view down Hornby St. Michaelis Nave performs his piece "December & The Orchards".

To see where all the pianos were located (some are away for the winter now), click here. To see the archive of all the performances from this year and last, click here. And a reminder that you can donate to keep the program going for NEXT year as well - more info here.

Here's what Adam Sharp of Big Smoke has to say about this video:

[September 14th was] the final day of the fourth annual Keys To The Streets program and all but two or three of the pianos have now been moved into their winter homes. We unfortunately lost a couple to the storm the other week and our apologies go to those who showed up to play only to find an untickleable set of ivories. As they say, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, and hopefully we’ll be better equipped to deal with that should it happen again in the future. In true Vancouver fashion, however, those pianos will not be trashed but repurposed, and we’re currently taking suggestions as to what that might look like. Please contact Keys To The Streets if you’d like a free piano to use as your next plant pot/coffee table/bird bath!

Keys To The Streets as a program has grown in size every year and work has already begun in finding ways to carry that forward, but we cannot make that happen without some funding. A lot of incredible people and companies donated their time to this project and it truly operates on the lowest possible budget, but there are some unavoidable expenses and any donations towards that would be gratefully accepted. Please click HERE if you’d like to donate to next years program.

On the topic of growth, Big Smoke was able to film a total of 18 videos this year – double what we produced in 2014. We also expanded our team and rented some additional equipment that helped us to capture higher quality audio than previously, and I’m excited to be involved with this again next summer and to find new ways to improve on a concept who’s charm lies in it’s simplicity. A huge thank you to all the people who helped to make these videos, and to all the artists who performed so well despite an often-unpredictable set of circumstances. Keep checking back on the Keys To The Streets and Big Smoke Facebook pages to catch the remaining videos as they release throughout the fall.

It is now my pleasure to introduce Michaelis Nave (Jeff Cancade) and his two-song medley of original, instrumental piano music. Jeff reached out to us at the beginning of this piano season and expressed an interest in performing one of these videos, and I would encourage any willing participants to do the same for next year since I’ve near enough exhausted my list of piano-playing friends in this city! Jeff has spent a lot of his spare time this summer going around town and playing on all of the different pianos, which is something we’ve noticed people have been doing a lot this year. Perhaps we could introduce a stamp card for 2016 – play them all and you get a reward or something…

This is one of my favourite pianos to film, mostly for the view up Hornby St., and a huge thank you goes out to the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, who made an incredibly generous donation when this project was seeking funding two and a half months ago. We honestly couldn’t have had even close to as many pianos around town as we did without their support.

Finally, when I say “we”, I really mean Aaron Tilston-Redican and Becky Till, who managed this whole Keys To The Streets program this year and I’m delighted to say will be doing so again next summer. A personal thank you to them for bringing me along for the ride!