The folks at Red Bull Sound Select bring their peripatetic 3 Days concert series to Toronto starting this Thursday and, as is usually the case with the Sound Select programming, the lineup is inventive, eclectic, challenging and hardly predictable.

The 3 Days in Toronto mini-festival kicks off at the Great Hall on Oct. 19, with Drake-approved R&B duo Majid Jordan performing alongside a six-piece dance troupe choreographed by National Ballet of Canada prodigy Siphe November with support from rising stars Allie, Chris Larocca, Nino Brown and Dre Ngozi. Friday sees avant-jazz improv sensations BADBADNOTGOOD headlining Massey Hall with friends Charlotte Day Wilson and River Tiber and a few surprise guests yet to be announced. Then, on Saturday, Brampton-bred MC Tory Lanez tops a bill curated and hosted by fellow T-dot hip-hop rising star Jazz Cartier at the Phoenix that also features rappers KILLY, CMDWN and Killa Kels.

All three shows, priced at a thoroughly reasonable $20 apiece, are already sold out — which, given the involvement of the Red Bull brand, forces one to confront the fact that maybe not all corporate sponsorship is totally evil since 3 Days in Toronto is helping usher these next-gen Toronto artists to prominence. Is some of the money made by an energy drink actually being put to a noble use?

Aaron Miller, who recently left local label Arts & Crafts to focus on a management roster including River Tiber and Charlotte Day Wilson, would have to say it is. Those three artists all got a leg up in the business through either promotion through Sound Select or the Red Bull Music Academy mentorship program.

“My relationship with Red Bull has always been through their desire to invest in artists,” says Miller. “It’s come to present itself over time to me as a brand that really invests in music (and) it’s always impressed me . . .

“Ultimately, there’s been really strong investment and media support and really good opportunities presented to my artists. They’re good at keeping their brand in the conversation but, at the same time, removing it from the actual reality of the event. They put the programming first, it feels like.”

Popular music’s entanglement with corporate sponsorship is so complete at this juncture that it’s difficult to take a hardline position on the matter anymore, anyway. Yes, it seemed a bit gauche for Céline Dion to incorporate an actual Chrysler logo into the CD booklet for 2003’s One Heart while also letting her cover of “I Drove All Night” and three other songs from the album be used in promotional clips for the auto manufacturer. But the Sound Select stuff is far less intrusive.

No one yet has been asked to pen, say, a Red Bull jingle for the stage. The brand just kind of sits there in the background at shows and on a website devoted to pushing new music discovered by diligently sought-out local curators — Arts & Crafts and the Wavelength and Manifesto crews in Toronto, for instance — to a wider audience. As Miller puts it, the Sound Select team is composed of “people who get it and who, fortunately, have good budgets and want to get it right.”

Anything that can get a pack of brainy instrumentalists like BADBADNOTGOOD a headlining gig at Massey Hall can’t be that bad.

“It’s pretty legendary for us, obviously, to be able to play at Massey Hall,” affirms bassist Chester Hansen. “I’ve seen some of my favourite shows in person there or, you know, watched classic shows on DVD that happened over the past 60 years or whatever there. So, yeah, it’s gonna be really crazy to be able to be in there.”

BADBADNOTGOOD is bringing “a ton of additional instruments, as opposed to our usual quartet” to Friday’s gig, he said, including two additional keyboardists, “bobbing between grand piano and Rhodes,” a string section and horns.

“We’re pulling out all the stops,” says Hansen with a laugh. “It’s gonna be really epic, and to be able to do it in this setting is pretty sweet. And there may be one or two special guests that haven’t been announced yet that might be really crazy that I probably can’t tell you about.”

For his part, young National Ballet star-in-waiting November — who commences his first full season with the company in A Winter’s Tale next month — is delighted at the opportunity to expand the boundaries of what he usually does with dance onstage.

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“It’s obviously a different thing for me and the music is different, obviously, from what I dance to professionally in my everyday life. And I kind of appreciate that about Red Bull — they kind of wanted to mix that,” he says. “So as soon as I got the call I was down to do it because why not push the culture forward in Toronto and why not push the boundaries and mix the different arts together to make something that’s cool and enjoyable, hopefully.”

“Originally, I was gonna go really ‘ballet’ with it but you have to take in the venue, take in the style of music, take in the costumes and all these things that kind of put an R&B/hip-hop show together. So I had to think about which direction I should go choreographically. Do I go with the music or do I go with my style of dancing and kind of put that together? But at the same time, right, I’m a professional ballet dancer – I don’t want to exploit that by kind of commercializing it in a negative way, do you know what I mean? So I had some thinking to do. But overall I think it’ll be a great show and I’m excited for it.”