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A distinctive five-story music museum and performance venue in Calgary's East Village, opened in 2016. Its collections trace the history of music in Canada through thousands of instruments and artifacts, including a piano once owned by Elton John, alongside recording studios and live performance spaces.
Visitor guide
Studio Bell is the home of the National Music Centre (NMC) in Calgary's East Village, opened on Canada Day, 1 July 2016. Designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, it combines a museum, performance hall, recording studios and broadcast facilities. It incorporates the rebuilt King Edward Hotel, the longtime blues bar known as the King Eddy.
Wikipedia traces the collection to the Carthy Organ, installed in Jack Singer Concert Hall in 1987. In 2003 the Cantos Music Foundation was formed at the Customs House, and in February 2012 Cantos became the National Music Centre. Construction reportedly began in February 2013, the final steel beam went up in December 2014, and the building reportedly cost C$191 million. Bell Canada reportedly paid C$10 million for 12 years of naming rights in 2016.
The five-floor building covers about 160,000 square feet, clad in glazed terracotta; Wikipedia counts 226,000 custom tiles. Architects describe interlocking towers. A skybridge crosses 4th Avenue SE to the King Edward Hotel.
The King Edward Hotel was built in phases from 1905, with a five-storey section by 1907. It sat on Calgary's Whiskey Row, gained a reputation as a blues venue by the 1960s and 1980s, hosted B.B. King, Pinetop Perkins and Otis Rush, and closed in 2004 after structural concerns. Under a heritage agreement it was dismantled and rebuilt, preserving the facade, original sign and cornices, and reopened as a music venue in 2018. The claim that it was Canada's oldest blues bar is a boast repeated in sources, so treat it as such.
Wikipedia describes a 300-seat performance hall, broadcast facilities for the CKUA Radio Network, and a recording studio with three control rooms and three live rooms. The King Eddy venue reportedly runs live music seven nights a week. The interior glazed terracotta tiles were reportedly made in Germany and fired in the Netherlands.
The King Eddy's past includes Prohibition-era bootlegging reputation and a bar that reputedly became Calgary's first desegregated one under manager Homer Meeks; these are reported in local sources as reputation rather than documented fact. It closed in 2004 after 99 years.
The NMC holds more than 2,000 instruments and artifacts, including TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra), a large analog synthesizer used on 1970s albums by Stevie Wonder and the Isley Brothers; the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio; and one of Elton John's pianos. The Canadian Music Hall of Fame and Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame collections are housed here. The NMC also keeps a living collection of instruments maintained in working order for studio use, including a harpsichord reported as 400 years old. The collection also includes what sources call the world's only complete Rob Wave electromechanical organ, a claim worth checking with the NMC. Items on display change, so check what is currently exhibited.
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