DAWN DESMARAIS
By Lindsay Wilson
She’s done it again: Dawn Desmarais, frontwoman of Dawn ‘n Blueclover, electrifying vocalist, minx of the mandolin, doll of the dulcimer, is releasing her second CD.
While her 2008 release, Dawn ‘n Blueclover: The Celtic Blues Project, is still smoldering, this 15 year vocal vet, whose range spans into blues, roots, folk, Celtic, bluegrass and country, has taken a different approach to her newest recording, UpRooted, which will be officially released this month.
“(UpRooted) is based off of focusing on songwriting and using songwriting to promote my Métis-Aboriginal heritage through music. I want to bring blues back into Métis music,” explains Desmarais, who describes her upcoming release as “acoustic roots and blues.”
She continues, “I’m finding different ways to merge traditional music genres together, and to use this as another way to do storytelling.”
While the members of the performing Dawn ‘n Blueclover sometimes trade spots, the band members Desmarais rallied into the studio include Chris Penner (guitar), Spider Bishop (bass), Ben Plotnick (fiddle), Jed Tomlinson (drums) and a number of other guest appearances. Desmarais is the main vocalist, incorporating her sinful sounds of the mandolin and dulcimer onto her tracks.
“Buffy Sainte-Marie is a huge influence of mine,” says Desmarais, who was upset to miss the long-standing Aboriginal artist’s last Edmonton concert.
Desmarais is inspired to write and perform from her own surroundings; she finds motivation from her fellow Calgary and Métis musicians, a past student who has come a long way, or local independent artists who she has shared the stage with or supported by going to one of their shows.
Desmarais can be seen serving up a slice of jammin’ as co-host of Pussy Willow Wednesday’s open mic, along with Heather Blush and Trina Nestibo at Mikey’s Juke Joint.
For the busy month of March, aside from giving vocal instruction and grinding away in the studio, Desmarais was also one of the head coordinators of The Vagina Monologues at the Leacock Theatre at Mount Royal College.
A busy girl with a lust for life and a love for the arts on every level (she’s also an accomplished dancer), Desmarais is pumped for UpRooted to hit the masses.
For more information, visit www.dawndesmarais.com.
Posted by Lindsay Wilson on Apr 02, 2010
SAM LAY
dare to double shuffle
By Lindsay Wilson
Drummers: they roll, they ride and they create the bottom end, filling up the music with nuances and variations that serve to tell the audience the style and genre of music at hand.
“The kick drum and bass guitar work together to build the platform for the rest of the band to stand on. Without that, the band can’t get in the pocket,” explains Mississippi Mike, a long-standing guitar player, harp player and vocalist in the Calgary music community, who understands the importance of having a solid drummer in any band.
There are countless techniques drummers learn, morph and integrate in their individual styles to hold up the sound they create, largely dependent on the genre that’s being presented.
But some drum techniques are so foundational that they transcend genres. Two such techniques are the shuffle and its variant, the double shuffle. One man in particular must be credited with the invention of the double shuffle: the indelible Chicago blues drummer Sam Lay.
If it wasn’t for Lay, the unmistakable rock-meets-blues sound (known as electrified Chicago Blues) that exploded out of the Chess Records era of the 1950s and 1960s under such goliath players as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry and Etta James, to name a few, simply wouldn’t be what it is today.
Lay can be heard on more than 40 original Chess recordings, and was also the drummer on the famed Bob Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited and member of the Original Thunderbirds and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
He has toured extensively since his humble Southern beginnings in 1954, backed up the best of the best, come out with recordings with his own band on Appaloosa Records and Evidence Records, and has recorded on Alligator Records with the Siegel-Schwall Band.
Inducted into the Memphis Blues Hall of Fame in the late 1980s, the list of accomplishments is virtually without end for this now 75-year-old Grammy nominee, who graced Calgary with his knowledge and skill this past February in conjunct with Gary Martin and the Heavenly Blues Band’s celebration and education for Black History Month.
Coming to Calgary for Lay is like home away from home. Lay has spent a lot of time here over the years, and was the originator of “Jam with Sam” in the mid-eighties, where musicians would come down to the famed King Eddy Hotel to jam with Lay while he was in town playing blues for the week. These gatherings paved the way for the legendary Saturday afternoon jams.
“I’m the original ‘Jam with Sam,’ so don’t let nobody tell you different,” asserts the bluesman.
It’s an understatement to say Lay was the highlight at the Cantos Music Foundation’s all-ages blues jam, hosted on the last Monday of each month at Cantos. And everyone there wanted to know one thing in particular: how did Lay invent that signature double-shuffle sound that can be likened to the sound of a locomotive going down the railroad tracks?
For Lay, it’s more of a feeling than anything, stemming from time spent in the Sanctified Church in his birthplace, Birmingham, Alabama. The invention of the double shuffle was a combination of the sound of the saints on the tambourines playing in the Sanctified Church and the locomotive train.
“That sound of the locomotive stuck in my mind and for some reason, that’s just how I played it. I just called it the Sam Lay Double Shuffle,” explains Lay. He has spent decades witnessing other drummers try to emulate his signature beat, which is based on such subtleties that it takes a seasoned and earnest drummer to come within miles of where Lay can get to within seconds of sitting down behind a drum kit.
Lay, who has built himself as a blues drummer but who has an affinity for country and bluegrass, compares the work of Johnny Cash’s original drummer to his own.
“(‘Folsom Prison Blues’) sounded like me but I never met Johnny Cash. He’s doing the double shuffle and don’t even know it,” laughs Lay in that warm, inviting Southern-rooted way of his.
Upon meeting Lay, Calgary blues drummers were all but tearing their hair out at the work they now had cut out for them, including Calgary R&B drummer Mike Woodford.
“Sam takes the shuffle to a different level – moving it around, making it sound like a freight train or a flat tire. As far as the basis for the Chicago-style shuffle, you have to basically point the finger at Sam Lay,” says Woodford, who has been drumming for more than 30 years but has completely reinvented his own shuffle in the weeks since Lay’s departure from Calgary.
Woodford is looking forward to the highlight of his year: an upcoming trip to play with some blues boys in Chicago and reconnect with his friend, Sam Lay.
The thing that the legends such as Lay want newer generations of musicians to understand is the importance in holding up the integrity of the music: teaching others to play the blues with respect for the origins and the inventors of the genre.
Much of the over-produced music called “blues” today is actually so far removed from its African-American roots, dating back into the days of plantations, that true bluesmen such as Lay can only shake their heads.
“That kind of blues didn’t come from the cotton fields and off the railroad tracks. They can call it blues if they want.”
At 75, with some recent health complications, Lay hasn’t been hitting the skins as much over the last couple of years, but he feels he’s now ready to get behind the kit and let everybody know he’s not going away anytime soon.
“I’m gonna show everybody who the boss of drums is when I get back at it,” laughs Lay in that unpretentious, honest and spirited way that is really what the blues is all about.
Posted by Lindsay Wilson on Apr 02, 2010
PETE FISCHER
BeatRoute’s A player of the month
By Lindsay Wilson
Stealing the stage with his “saxtastic stylings,” Pete Fischer has built himself a reputation as one of the best saxophonists in the Calgary area since his arrival to our prairie city in 2004.
“Calgary is a hidden gem in Canada. It’s a diamond in the rough,” says Fischer.
The recipient of CBMA’s Sax Player of the Year Award in 2009, a full-time member of the hardworking Al Barrett Band (one of the top Calgary casino and bar bands), a hired gun for other artists (both on stage and in the studio) and a theatre actor, Fischer, a classically trained musician originally from Guelph, Ontario, also finds the time to cut an album or two on the side.
For Fischer, 2010 is the year his latest CD, Hurricane Blues, will be unleashed. This CD, unlike his two preceding albums – Nothing Nice (1996) and I-90 Boogie (2000) – is original music, and is heavily focused on the sax, as Fischer replaces spots where a guitar solo would normally fit with a sax solo in his tracks. The vocals on this upcoming release belong to Fischer as well, who has a richly textured blues voice, matching his Chicago blues influences.
Not only is Fischer influenced by the Chicago blues sound, he lived down there for two years as a working sax player in the Eddie Burks and Delta Blue band.
“Chicago is one of, if not the greatest cities I’ve ever been to as a musician… I moved to Chicago with my toothbrush and my saxophone and had full time work in 17 days,” reflects Fischer.
Eddie Burks, a blues harmonica player and vocalist, had heard that Fischer was in town, and had recently lost the sax player in Delta Blue due to the rage of an angry girlfriend who had thrown the man’s saxophone out of a high-rise apartment window. This unfortunate circumstance, matched with a little luck and obvious talent, landed Fischer a job in the band.
Playing sax with Eddie Burks, who he describes as “a true bluesman,” was an honest lesson in blues for Fischer. Burks was originally from Mississippi, a poor sharecropper’s son who migrated north to Chicago with many other African Americans upon the invention of the combine. Playing with the greatest in Chicago blues, Burks became, and remains to be, a highly respected bluesman.
“I owe Eddie for teaching me how to use my education in the Chicago and Mississippi blues styles, because he gave me a chance and a life-long ability to play music,” says Fischer, who spent a couple of years touring extensively across North America with the band.
While on tour in Memphis, playing at B.B King’s Blues Club, Fischer was invited across the street to get up on stage with the Memphis master, Herman Green. Impressed by the young Fischer’s abilities, Green offered Fischer an open invitation to come back to Memphis, should he choose to leave Chicago.
Fischer did make the decision to depart from Chicago, packing up his horns and headed down to Memphis.
What he didn’t understand until arriving there was that Memphis, a cut-throat city for musicians, was the kind of place where new players, regardless of their talent, had to work their way up the street, beginning at the very bottom of Beale Street and, providing their talent and hard work shone through, eventually end up on stage with legends such as Herman Green on the other end.
“Herman Green sent me to the bottom of the street. I was so upset, I left Memphis. I now know Herman Green was right as a blues boss: if you’re good enough, you’ll work your way up the street. He’s a great player and if I wanted to play with him, I had to work my way through his trenches,” shares Fischer.
Then came the turning point in his musical career: the return to Canada.
Heading back to Guelph, the saxman put together the Pete Fischer Band, and worked for six years throughout every small town bar and Ribfest in southern Ontario. When anti-smoking laws and the crackdown on drunk driving resulted in emptying the honky tonks, Fischer had to make the choice to give another part of Canada a try or to return to Chicago.
After researching Calgary and discovering it had more live music venues per capita than any other place in Canada, Fischer remembered his days with Eddie Burke and six-night gigs at the King Eddy while the band did their Canadian tours. It was then and there that he decided to move to make Alberta his new home.
“Mike Clark introduced me to the scene in Calgary and gave me a job in his band, the Mike Clark Big Band, and that’s what opened up the doors for me,” says a grateful Fischer.
“Pete plays like his soul is on fire,” says contemporary saxman Mike Clark, who is also the owner of Mikey’s Juke Joint. “He listens very well, so when we play together, we feed off of each other and when we do a tenor battle, the audiences go nuts.”
Fischer’s “saxsations” have not gone unnoticed by his fellow musicians in the Calgary blues and rock communities. Al Barrett, from the highly popular Al Barrett Band, recognized Fischer’s talent three years ago and jumped on the opportunity to bring him into his band.
“I gave up some of my best guitar solos so Pete can shine,” says Barrett, who loves the edge that Fischer adds to his six-piece band. “I’m trying to get Pete to sing a lot more and we’re getting him to play piano more, as well.”
Last year, the band gigged 51 weekends. With full-time work, being pulled into the studio to lay down sax tracks for other musicians and his CD release of Hurricane Blues on the horizon, it seems Fischer made the right move when he picked Calgary.
“I’m very, very thankful for where I am. I’m so proud of Canada and of Calgary,” says Fischer, who remains hopeful that the casino circuit, dedicated rooms such as Mikey’s Juke Joint and groups like the Cantos Music Foundation will continue to support bands and perhaps re-open the opportunity for six-night gigs to come back into play.
Pete Fischer is performing all throughout Alberta with the Al Barrett Band, including performances at the Vintage Chophouse (Calgary) April 16 and 17. For more information and dates, contact Pete at petefischer77@hotmail.com.
Posted by Lindsay Wilson on Apr 02, 2010