Great Tour!
Posted on | June 15, 2010 | No Comments
Well, it’s finally come and gone! A year ago, we decided at the conclusion of the Banff Workshop that the group at that time known as the EPIC Sextet, and now Tunnel Six, should not cease to exist at the end of the workshop, and set out to book an ambitious cross-Canada tour. Now, a year later, we’ve done it, with great success!
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the generous sponsorship of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, and Swiss Alpine Landscaping in Winnipeg, and of course I’m more than happy to acknowledge their support of what was a pretty far-fetched idea when we first proposed it last year.
There were many high points and not many low points of the tour. The low points consisted mostly of driving for 14 to 16 hours at a time. Those drives were especially rough when we had a gig the same night, or the one grueling time when we packed up after our gig in Edmonton, rolled out and drove overnight through the Rockies, through an enormous blizzard, avoided colliding with an elk, and locked our keys in the van at a Starbucks in Kamloops, to arrive in Vancouver just in time to take the Sunshine Coast ferry to Sechelt and play a great gig kicking off the Gibsons Landing Jazz Festival.
However, that particularly epic journey (and our general fatigue level) notwithstanding, we had a really great time on the road. We brought our unique music to a wide variety of audiences across Canada and the Pacific Northwest, something none of us had done before on nearly as large of a scale. I was consistently impressed with the musical chemistry of the band, which was indeed immediately evident from the first time we played together at Banff, but I was unsure what to expect a year later. In fact, the band sound was even more cohesive and “on the same page” than I even anticipated at the beginning of the tour, and needless to say by the end we had taken huge steps forward in developing a distinctive way of playing together. As Brian Seligman, the guitarist, and myself were discussing near the end of the tour, we are all very lucky that our individual musical visions intersect in a melody-driven style which is not only rewarding from our perspective but seems (at least from our experience on this tour) to really draw in our audiences in a way that is sometimes difficult with jazz.
Now I’m back in Portland, where (like the rest of the continent last month, as we unfortunately discovered on tour), it is still raining. The forecasters say it will pass soon, and we’ll have some real summer weather, but they keep pushing back the day when that will happen. Now it’s supposed to be Friday. Well, we’ll see about that. Meanwhile I’m getting all my projects (not to mention office) back in order. There’s lots of stuff coming up in the summer and the fall, including a new Kora Band record and tour, some big shows with the Bridgetown Sextet, and the Dec. or Jan. release of the Tunnel Six album that we recorded at the end of the tour. Of course I’ll keep updating this blog with (I hope) more regularity and fun stuff as the summer continues.
Meanwhile there’s plenty of photos over at the Tunnel Six site and we’ll be posting some select tour recordings there soon, which I will also link to here. Cheers!
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