Awards Season!

Awards Season: The glitz! The glamour! Shiny boots! Finger food!

Don't get too excited. It's already over, and I was too busy to write anything about it while it was happening, except for maybe a few tweets that only myself and maybe two other people might have found funny.

The Canadian Country Music Awards were held in Edmonton this year, a city with some real country music fans and real country music bars for them to get wasted in. In other words, the four days that comprise Canadian Country Music Week were a lot of fun -- there was some really great music (The Heartbroken were amazing; Deric Ruttan's band kicked some serious ass), great parties, and as always great hangs with music industry friends I cross paths with over the course of the year.



Unlike previous CCMAs, my official duties were minimal. I played a three-song set with AJ Woodworth at the Universal Music showcase at Oil City Roadhouse (it went great, AJ nailed it), and other than that I was just hanging out with AJ, Jesse, Kylee, and Melissa-Rae Barrie, trying to get into the various galas, showcases and parties without really having tickets for anything. Pretty good. I was nominated again for Bass Player Of The Year, which is actually amazing -- there are a great many talented bass players on the country scene so I felt quite honoured, again, to be recognized.



In mid-October were the British Columbia Country Music Association Awards, and the best part about that, aside from being nominated for BCCMA Bass Player Of The Year, was opening the show with my buddies in Jessie Farrell's band doing an acoustic-y, bluegrassy (bluegrassish?) version of her single "Heart Of Gold". I borrowed an upright bass from The Daver and had a lot of fun with it, not including the blister on my middle finger the size of a garbanzo bean. I had forgotten about that part of playing the upright. Electric bass players are wusses, I'll admit it. Not as wussy as oboists though. Most oboists.

Summer dates

I've updated the Gigs page with the dates that are booked for Summer 2010 so far. If everything goes according to plan, it's going to look a lot like this.

In addition to touring with Jessie Farrell, I'll be playing a few dates with The Higgins. It's been great to learn a bunch of Higgins tunes, some previous hits and a bunch from the upcoming record which drops on June 8. A great local Vancouver bass player and fellow Lakland-owner named Dennis Marcenko (Colin James, k.d. lang) laid down most of the bass on the record, so getting into his head with some of these bass parts has been a nice exercise. Some super slinky fretless work on a track called "Burn You Back" makes me regret the fact that I usually can't travel with more than one bass.

There will be more shows added, and definitely a handful of local gigs around Vancouver with some different people, so other than this site the best way to keep track is to add me as a friend on Facebook, or to follow me on Twitter.

Vancouver 2010 Olympic gigs

Last night I played a gig with a great singer named AJ Woodworth. Her, with Jesse Tucker and I backing her up, played two songs at the West Vancouver leg of the 2010 Olympic Torch Relay. It was outside, near the rec centre, it was kinda chilly and a bit wet but not necessarily rainy, and I was impressed with how many people came out to see the torch show up. Before us, there was a all-female a capella group, a marching band, a mens' choir (just to even it out) and a childrens' choir.

I showed up looking forward to the gig, but when I was standing on stage just a few feet away from the fire that had made it's way some thousands of miles (and, as I write this, continues to weave through parts of the Lower Mainland), I came to appreciate that I was in some way involved with a pretty significant event in this city's history. It's not as though the cynical smart-ass completely melted away, I mean, there was a mens' choir and a bunch of trombone players to make fun of after all, but I was glad to be a part of it, more than I thought I would.

And guess what? I'm doing it again on this Saturday night, when I perform for the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad with Jessie Farrell at the LiveCity Downtown Stage at 10pm. It's free, and it's going to get crazy. If you haven't done so already, it's worth making your way downtown just to be in the mix - just so you can say you did.

Hope to see you at the show. And here's a tip: If you want to blend in wear red and white, because everyone else will be.

In The Studio: Colin Bullock

I guess he liked what I was doing.

After a gig with him in November, and another last month, Colin Bullock asked if I could come and play bass on his new record - essentially all the tunes we'd been playing live.

I headed out to Room & Board Studios in Abbotsford, BC, which is run by Ryan McAllister. Ryan's band some years back was called Dakona, and they had some success in North America, signing to Maverick Records and presumably playing a crap-ton of shows all over the place. Turns out Ryan is a great producer, and even though he was officially just engineering and playing host, his laid-back vibe and songwriting experience helped us over a few humps with parts of songs here and there. He's having me back next month for some more recording on other stuff, so I'm looking forward to working with him again on that.

As usual for bed tracks, it was just bass and drums for those two days. Colin and his producer/roommate Francis were kind enough to have put some work into preparing good quality guitar/vocal scratch tracks. Much more helpful than playing to a click and looking at a chord chart while annoying MIDI pads drone in the background. The drummer was the same as the live shows, and also a guy I've played with in The Reckoners, another  Vancouver band. His name is Sam Heard and he's a motherfucker on the drums. For example, drop the needle on any classic Tower Of Power tune and he will not only play Dave Garibaldi's drum part verbatim but sing you the horn parts while he's doing it. Sick. The two of us are such jazz-funk-fusion dorks I'm surprised we got anything done amidst the yakkin'.

Fun Fact: this was the first record where I've played every single one of my basses at least once -- the Lakland 55-01, Ibanez acoustic bass guitar, Fury fretless Anthem bass, and the Geddy Lee Signature Series Fender Jazz. I think the album is going to sound rad.

I'll have some video up of the sessions soon, as will Colin, but I'll wait for the mixes and try to sync the video with that so you can hear everything. In the meantime, some photos from the sessions (and some more on Flickr):

Check out my Flickr page to see more photos from this and other recording sessions, as well as from live shows and tours.

Lakland Basses: A shameless plug

I've been playing a Lakland Skyline 55-01 for a couple years now. It's my only 5-string bass and it sees a lot of action for precisely that reason. Leading up to finding it, I had been on the hunt for a 35" scale 5-string with really even-sounding Bartolini or similar pickups, but that also had a  bypass switch to go from active to passive for some more tonal variations or if the 9v battery ever gave up the goat during a gig. The 55-01 was exactly that, and it sounds great, plays great, and looks great - simple as that.

So, fast forward to last month when I sacked-up and wrote an email to Dan Lakin with a brief resume outlining some of the highlights of my music career thus far. I figured that musical instrument and equipment manufacturers considering artists (not that I would ever seriously refer to myself as an "artist" in public, but whatever) for endorsement want to know that their gear is going to be seen first and foremost. Being heard is also not a bad thing. That means that if you can tell them there have been, and more importantly will be TV appearances, big concerts, and music videos where you are using their stuff, you're helping your case. So that's the kind of info I gave, and I'm pleased to say it didn't require any embellishment or exaggeration on my part. The same cannot be said for other aspects of my life, but I digress.

Obviously, if you're a hugely famous and successful musician all of the big dogs like Fender and Gibson (not necessarily the best - just sayin') will likely come to you and start giving you stuff in hopes that you'll use it in a highly visible way. The next step up from that is if you partner up with a manufacturer to help design an instrument or other piece of gear with your name on it. That privilege is usually reserved for legends, although there are exceptions.

Neither of those scenarios are applicable to me at present, but I'm certainly thrilled to now be on the list of endorsing artists for Lakland Basses. There are some really heavy dudes on that list. My thanks to Dan.