Olympics and Arts Funding
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
Well I have been enjoying the Olympics as much as the next guy or girl, but the real topic of this post is the fact that Tunnel Six, a Canadian-American collaborative group that was founded at the Banff workshop last spring, has recently received a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for our upcoming tour in April and May of next year, so Canada has provided lots of great things in my life of late! This is the same tour for which I recently received a grant from Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council for our concert in Portland and the recording and production of an album at the end of the tour.
I thought I would write a bit of a post introducing the band with some of the recordings we made up at Banff for you to enjoy between now and then. The band came about like this. We were in the first of three weeks of the fantastic workshop at the Banff Centre. Chad McCullough, Tyson Stubelek, Brian Seligman, Ben Dietschi and myself were sitting in the pub drinking overpriced Canadian beer, and decided to have a session the next day. We looked behind us for a bass player and there was Ron Hynes. How convienient, we thought!
The next day, Tyson and Chad and I summited Sulphur Mountain:
Afterward, we realized that scheduling a jam session right after doing that was probably unwise. However, the powerful mountain air prevailed and re-energized us. We arrived in one of the rehearsal rooms and sight read Brian’s tune “Not Yet.” Here’s us playing it a bit later in the Banff Studio (click to listen):
Suddenly, we all realized that something really exciting was going on – the group vibe was unbelievable! (Actually I remember Ben saying something somewhat flustered like “woah, what a vibe!!”). It was a bizarre and awesome experience that I’ve rarely had to play with a group of people who had never played together before and to feel as though we had been doing it for years after the very first tune!
Anyhow, we were lucky to be selected for some studio time at the fine TELUS studio at the Centre, the fruits of which you can hear here, and we resolved to play together again in some capacity after the workshop. After returning home, we started to book this tour, which will take place from May 17 to June 6 of this year. After hundreds of hours writing emails, grants, and calling venues, we are about 80% ready to go, but the news of both RACC and Canada Council support is really an unbelievable asset to our project, and is truly a big milestone in all of our careers as it will enable this tour to proceed as planned. We’ll be hitting many major Canadian cities (Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria) as well as performing in Seattle and Portland.
Next month we’ll roll out a new website and all the tour dates, etc. but for now, I hope you enjoy those recordings from Banff and stay tuned for more info, and thanks to Canada for providing both the Olympics and a fantastic arts funding program. Huzzah for northerly neighbors!
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