Juno award-winning jazz musicians Don Thompson and Phil Dwyer are looking, in a Chet Bakeresque way, for the silver lining of life these days. They have released a new album and are playing tour dates around coastal BC this month as a tribute to friends they’ve recently lost.
The album, called Look for the Silver Lining, features 10 beautifully rendered jazz standards and is dedicated to the memory of saxophone player Ross Taggart and artist Ted Godwin.
Multi-instrumentalists, Thompson and Dwyer had been talking about recording together for years but their distance apart seemed to get in the way. Thompson, who grew up in Powell River, has lived in Toronto since the 1960s. Dwyer moved from Toronto to Vancouver Island in 2004.
“It’s not like you can say, why don’t you come over and we can arrange some tunes to play,” said Thompson.
Thompson explained that there weren’t many studios on Vancouver Island that had a piano that he liked, but there was one in Toronto and it also had a great recording engineer. The two looked at their schedules for September 2012 and found time between their busy lives to play together.
They went into the studio without a plan of exactly what they wanted to record, but this is a constant dynamic of their musical friendship. “We never have to talk about the songs we’re going to play,” said Thompson.
Thompson finds playing with guitarist Reg Schwager and Dwyer easy because they know his playing so well and he knows them.
“I play one chord at the beginning of the song and they know the key, the speed and the notes for the next eight bars just from the way I play the very first note,” he said.
Thompson recalls he and Dwyer playing a whole concert of Frank Sinatra tunes after listening to a Sinatra CD in the car on the way back to Dwyer’s Vancouver Island home.
“We wrote down all the tunes on the record that we’d been listening to, all the titles, and at the gig that night we put the paper on the piano and started at the top and went to the bottom,” he said. “We didn’t discuss keys or anything.”
Playing with musicians that don’t have that ability is not as much fun, he said, because it’s like having a conversation that is already written out and the participants are just reading questions and answers to each other. “Music that is rehearsed sounds good, but it’s not nearly as fun to play.”
January was a tumultuous month for Dwyer and Thompson. They received news that their friend Taggart, saxophonist for Hugh Fraser Quintet, died from kidney cancer. Only a few days later Dwyer was told that his friend and mentor Godwin had died. Godwin was the last of the Regina Five, a group of Prairie artists who had reinvented Canadian art in the 1960s.
“Phil was ruined,” said Thompson.
They listened to their recording sessions and chose tracks for the album. As a fitting tribute, they chose one of Godwin’s paintings as a front cover.
At 7:30 pm on Monday, April 15, the duo will play Max Cameron Theatre. Tickets to the show can be purchased at Brooks Secondary School, River City Coffee or The Knack. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for students.
