Vancouver native Clara Shandler and the cello have been inseparable since she first put bow to string at the age of 3. But it wasn’t until she was a fourth-year music major and attended a concert by American folk singer Jason Webley that Shandler really grasped the power that performance could possess. 

“I was going into the final year of my bachelor program, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to pursue a career as a performer,” Shandler says. Then she saw Webley give “every single ounce of his soul” to his audience, and she walked away from the show feeling inspired and empowered. “I thought if I could do anything remotely close to that for other people, my life mission would be complete.”

Inspiring and empowering her audience is exactly what she’s been doing for the past 20 years. Under the moniker of Sidewalk Cellist, Shandler has busked all across BC, performing original and cover music. Although she now mostly plays at venues and festivals, she credits her growth as an artist to her time performing in parks and subways, where she experimented with genres ranging from classical to folk, jazz, and rock. 

“It got me experimenting with a lot of different genres of music,” she says. “Because, of course, people would come up and say, ‘Can you play this?’ ‘Oh, can you play the theme song from Star Trek?’ So it helped me just widen my musical horizon.”

As part of her desire to use music to inspire, Shandler has committed to combining her love for performing with activism. She has donated portions of her earnings to campaigns such as a bursary fund to supplement the cost of music lessons for low-income students in East Vancouver, as well as fundraising for music schools in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Nepal.

I would love to use my platform to advocate for human-rights issues, the end of wars and the end of genocide.

Her latest effort in this realm comes in the form of the Cross Canada Orca Tour, organized in partnership with Georgia Strait Alliance (GSA), a group that advocates for environmental justice and the protection of the Salish Sea and its creatures. Starting in March and continuing into September, Shandler has been playing venues in the Gulf Islands, the Lower Mainland, and on Vancouver Island, donating a significant percentage of the proceeds to GSA. The coming week will see her perform in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto. Shows originally planned in Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg have been postponed.

For Shandler, the Orca Tour serves as something of a gateway into deeper conversations. “I would love to use my platform to advocate for human-rights issues, the end of wars and the end of genocide and all the really dark and disturbing stuff,” she says. “But I figured it would be a nicer invitation to sort of lure people in with ‘Hey, we can all agree that orcas are great, and we should look after them?’ And then once people are there at the shows, I can bring up those heavier issues to discuss in person.” 

Coinciding with the tour is Shandler’s newest album, Pacific Rain, a 12-track effort released in September 2024 on streaming platforms. Tracks such as “Don’t Cut Me Down” and the title track—during which Shandler encourages audience members to make ocean sounds when she performs it—have a strong environmental focus. It’s an important theme to Shandler, and one that naturally interweaves with her conscious goals for the tour.

Eager to put Pacific Rain to good use, Shandler reached out to a number of nonprofit and charitable organizations last year to see if they wanted to use the songs or collaborate with her. Most of them thanked her politely and left it at that, she says, “but the Georgia Strait Alliance replied, ‘This is amazing,’ and [said] how they’d love to work on a concert or fundraiser.”

For Shandler, it made sense to start a tour around the region that is defined by the Salish Sea to spread the word about GSA, “this wonderful, small organization that’s doing really lovely things.” She says that as a Vancouver-based person, she loves the ocean and would be “really sad if anything catastrophic happened to our beautiful waters.” 

When Shandler reflects on what she hopes audiences get  from this tour, it’s simple.

“The one main takeaway I would want my audience to have is that we take care of our planet by taking care of ourselves,” she says. “And a lot of what I sing about is sort of going against the grain of capitalism and consumerism and just figuring out all the things that you don’t need to buy so that you can actually just spend time lying down on the grass looking up at the sky.”

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