Tag Archives: Classic Albums Live
February’s Range of Great Music at Meaford Hall
by Bill Monahan
There’s something for everyone’s taste this coming month at Meaford Hall, from Canada’s Queen of R & B, Jully Black, to Grey County’s famous step-dancing fiddlers, The Beckett Family.
There is still one show left in January but it’s been sold out for quite a while.
Country star Gord Bamford, promoting his new record “Neon Smoke”, is on a grueling tour that has him playing every night in a different Ontario location through the first week of February, then heading coast to coast for the rest of the month. After a show in Kelowna he’s heading straight out Australia where he’ll be spending the month of March on tour. So far in this vast itinerary, the Meaford show is the only one sold out.
The Opera House will be filled with fun on Feb. 16th when the audience gets to Sing Along With Grease, that most sing-able of musicals. Before the movie they put you through a vocal warm up, hand out props to use, and judge costumes of anyone who chooses to dress up. You end up singing through the show with the whole crowd. I got chills, they’re multiplying, and I’m losing control just thinking about it.
Classic Albums Live is bringing a note-for-note reproduction of the first Led Zeppelin album. This album was completely recorded by the band before they approached a record label with it. Jimmy Page and their manager paid for it, in order to have complete artistic control. Atlantic Records signed them for the largest advance ever paid, for the first time straying from their focus on American R&B to take on a British band. The record was on every turntable within my earshot all year in 1969 when it came out, with Robert Plant’s keening voice unlike anything we’d ever heard.
The Classic Albums Live company, created by Craig Martin, is comprised of world class musicians, many of whom augment their solo careers with these demanding reproductions. They regularly fill Meaford Hall with their note-perfect re-creation of albums, taking on the most challenging of records, from Sgt. Pepper to Rumours.
The album will take up the first half of the show and greatest hits from the Led Zeppelin catalogue will fill the second half.
All You Need is (The David) Love (Band)
by Bill Monahan
Saturday, Jan. 13, The Harbour Street Fish Bar in Collingwood welcomes back the David Love Band with what they call “Power Pop For Baby Boomers,” promising, “Absolutely no blues whatsoever. Just happy, shiny songs. “
The trio, consisting of Love, Darrell McNeill, and Kevin Mulligan serves up a long list of pop songs from the sixties and seventies. While he has played guitar with some heavy hitters (Randy Bachman calls him “my first choice for super solid guitar playing and vocal back up on any rock band I put together”), in this combo, Love takes on the bass, with McNeill on guitar and Mulligan on drums. All three of them provide vocals. They cover the British Invasion and the Summer of Love along with some classics from the likes of Tom Petty, ZZ Top, and The Byrds. This trio, along with an acoustic duo he has with Brian LeBlanc, allows Love to spend more time at home with his family after almost forty years of touring the world with a variety of bands.
In the seventies David Love began his professional career with a band called Titan and two years later moved on to Dodger, touring Ontario and Northern Quebec. After a ten-year break from the music business from 1979 to 1989, he formed a quartet called The Intenders and was back on the road. Four years later, he joined The Carpet Frogs, a gig he stuck with for eighteen years. With them and on his own, he served fourteen years as a member of The Burton Cummings Band, on guitar and harmony vocals, and when the two principal members of The Guess Who reunited for five years to form the Bachman/Cummings Band, he was on board.
He continues to perform as part of Craig Martin’s stellar group of world-class musicians create concerts with note for note reproductions of Classic Albums Live, an assembly that frequently plays Meaford Hall. Anyone who attended The Beatles No. 1 Hits this past summer at Meaford Hall saw him in that show.
He notes on his Facebook page: “I love playing that music and to be with so many other talented performers recreating it note for note is very fulfilling.”
While his power pop trio can’t hope to reproduce these classic songs note for note, they can elicit great memories and, as he says, “deliver Pop Rock with a melodic sound and high-energy beat, leading audiences to tap their toes, snap their fingers or jiggle their bones on the dance floor.”
So jiggle your Baby Boomer bones over to the Fish Bar on Saturday night. There’s a $5 cover and the music starts at nine.
The Thursday Outlook – October 26 to 31, 2017
You don’t have to run through the jungle this weekend to enjoy the music of Credence Clearwater Revival. Classic Albums Live is back this Saturday at Meaford Hall. This is the large group of professional musicians assembled by Craig Martin that has been recreating note-for-note albums since he invented the concept in 2003. They have already presented Elton John’s Greatest Hits and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and this time around it’s CCR. The difference between this show and other tributes is that the emphasis is entirely on the sound, without any effort to recreate the original band’s stage act. You can close your eyes and pretend you’re listening to vinyl.
If you can’t get tickets to Meaford Hall on Saturday, bring your own CCR vinyl to BYOV Night at The Red Door. Come in costume!
On Friday night in Owen Sound, Heartwood presents Bootleg Credence, a four piece rock band with two sets of CCR and John Fogarty covers to reproduce the excitement of the original band. This sold out show is in support of Chapman House, Grey Bruce Hospice.
On Friday evening the music of Claude Bolling will be performed at the L. E. Shore Library in Thornbury by the Chantry Island Quartet. Claude Bolling is a French jazz pianist famous for his collaborations with classical players like Jean-Pierre Rampal. They had a popular hit with their recording of Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio, which the Chantry Island Quartet will perform on Friday. This mix of Baroque elegance and modern swing spent over 500 weeks on the Billboard charts. Rampal’s part will be played by Meryl Gillmore, principal flute with the Georgian Bay Symphony Orchestra, along with Adrian Little on piano, Mike Grace on bass and Stephen Wood on drums.
Meaford Hall is Brimming With Live Music This Fall
On Friday night, the last of the Meaford Summer Concert Series ended with a big Tom Barlow concert in the parking lot outside Meaford Hall. But in the Opera House upstairs a full slate of great music is packed into the next few months.
The biggest show of the fall season, Jann Arden at Meaford Hall in October is already sold out, to no one’s surprise. Already catching on with advance sales is the next big show from Chris Scerri, this time a tribute to The Last Waltz, a favourite concert movie from the seventies in which The Band featured an array of stars and friends. For the Meaford Hall show, Chris has assembled the very best local talents to reproduce the excitement of the original, in a band comprised of Drew McIvor, Jayden Grahlman, Jon Zaslow, Beaker Granger, Jared Koop and John Hume .
While The Last Waltz uses local talent to reproduce the sixties, country music shows off our local country stars early in September at Meaford Hall in the Bruce Grey Country Jamboree Meaford Style. Produced by Bognor Jam, the show is hosted by the True Country Show Band, who hosted last year’s Grand Ol’ Opry at the Music Hall of Fame Auditorium in Hepworth. In addition to the True Heart Trio, this band of great country players will be backing up local Meaford talent. Amanda Dorey and Scott Almond will both get a chance to perform in The Opera House with a great band.
