Legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon was last in Toronto barely a year ago, for three intimate evenings of smaller-scale musicmaking at Massey Hall in May 2025. Before that, it had been seven long years since Simon’s sold out blockbuster show at the then-Air Canada Centre.
This week’s A Quiet Celebration concert at the Ontario Place amphitheatre split the difference between those two experiences, with its trifurcated structure – two main acts and a predictably lengthy and Simon & Garfunkel-heavy encore – and mix of the quieter entries off his recent acoustic album Seven Psalms (which opens the show) with more familiar classics in the back end.
Simon, now eighty-four years old(!), no longer sings like he used to, but then that’s never been his strong suit. Back in the early days, it was Simon’s writing for the angelic-sounding Art Garfunkel which made Simon and Garfunkel such a phenomenal success. Later, branching out on his own, Simon would continue to lean into collaboration, whether with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on 1986 album Graceland or the various Brazilian musicians featured on 1990’s Rhythm of the Saints. Simon’s gift has always been that of the songwriter, which, to be fair, is fine when he’s one of the, say, top ten songwriters who ever lived.
I, like so many others, prepared for this concert by both familiarizing and refamiliarizing myself with Simon’s extensive output. In the former category, my homework has involved listening to Simon’s 2023 Seven Psalms, a relatively quiet, even meditative, acoustic album with a decidedly religious bent. These seven songs, performed in their entirety, made up the first third of Thursday’s show, with X the clear standout.
Breaking for Act 2, Simon returned to a roar of applause for a second set of hits, mega-hits, and relative obscurities.
“Graceland”, the title track of that legendary album, opened the second set to rapturous applause, which was also dotted with such solo career highlights as “Slip Slidin’ Away”, “Under African Skies” – rather delightfully performed here with Simon’s wife, Edie Brickell – and, closing out the set, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”. Of the lesser-known songs, I was most impressed by “The Late Great Johnny Ace”, an ode to three “Johnnys” taken before their time – JFK, John Lennon, and the largely-forgotten R&B singer Johnny Ace, who in 1954 at twenty-five-years-old accidentally shot himself while playing with a loaded gun. It’s a horrible story, one which I was only vaguely familiar with, and which had me racing to track down Ace’s music, including his 1952 hit single “My Song”.
Fooling nobody, Simon ended the second act only to quickly return for a greatest hits encore which brought down the house. Yes, Simon has performed these songs literally thousands of times, but it’s hard not to get emotional encountering them once more, in the hands and the voice of the man who wrote them.
Of the five songs which made up the encore, we were most moved by his renditions of “The Boxer” and, finally, after the rest of the band had left the stage – and this time an actual fake-out which had me convinced the show was over – a solo acoustic rendition of “The Sound of Silence”. Just the way Simon likes it.
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For more musical trips down memory lane, check out our recentish reviews of last year’s Judy Collins (86) concert at Hugh’s Room, or The Who (Pete Townshend – 81, Roger Daltrey – 82)’s sold-out, weirdly AI-infected spectacle) at the Amphitheatre.
