| I knew quite young that I had an ear for music. The ability to play by ear
like that is probably my strongest talent. My mother claims I started singing
before I was talking. I enrolled in piano lessons when I was seven and then took
guitar and violin for a few years. It was around 1970 and my folk guitar teacher
turned out to be a draft dodger. I remember this big poster of Woodstock on the
wall which was my first exposure to alternative culture. My father played as a
musician and performed with The Travelers throughout the fifties & sixties,
playing mostly Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, Ian & Sylvia,
etc. I was listening to all sorts of music: folk from my parents, classical from
piano lessons and pop from the radio.
Growing up in the burbs was a homogeneous existence and I listened to bits of
everything. When I first heard punk, I didn't get it. In the late '70s I was
introduced to The Clash, Sex Pistols and Devo, and it all started to make sense
to me. When I left high school and went to University, it was a whole new world.
I discovered a love for the music coming out of the UK and the States. I was at
U. of T. (University of Toronto) at the time, studying classical analysis,
composition, history and piano, and was listening to an eclectic mix of music. I
started hanging out on Queen St. in the early '80s and worked with a variety of
bands - funk-ska bands (Hopping Penguins, Rheostatics), punk band (Vital Sines),
psychedelic, reggae, children's music - and worked as the musical director for
several theatre groups. After I finished my degree I joined Whitenoise, a
funk/jazz band which introduced me to the possibilities available through
improvisation. I started playing with an avant-garde jazz band, N.O.M.A., and
soon after, I released a tape of my own work. Toward the end of the '80s I
joined Chris Bottomleys band. There was lots of room to develop improvisation
& soloing work, which I had very little experience with. I was basically a
jobbing musician, doing what I could to find work and make money.
I had played with Glenn Milchem in three bands over the years, and when I
heard that Bob Wiseman, Blue Rodeo's original keyboardist had left Blue Rodeo,
I called him. At the time, they were considering not replacing Bob, so I dropped
it. A few months later, I got a call from Glenn on a very rainy Thursday
afternoon asking for an audition. When I arrived, they were still auditioning
someone else so I had to wait. The guy who was in there sounded really good and
I wondered if I was going to be able to cut it. When I went in, they asked me
what songs of theirs I knew. I said I knew the music and Greg [Keelor] suggested
Floating - with a big solo in it. Yikes. I didn't know the song titles so I
asked them to start it and I would jump in. I don't know what happened. I got
into another space and when it came to my solo I did one that even sort of
impressed me. Glenn even complimented me, which he had never done in the
ten-plus years that I'd known him. They asked me to learn a few more tunes and
arranged a call-back for the next week. Jim Cuddy asked me to learn as many as
I could, as the push was on for the Ontario Place Forum show (July, 1993) in two
weeks, where they wanted to debut the new player. I went to my parent's house
and worked on the songs there. The day before the call-back, I got a message on
my machine from Glenn calling from the Calgary airport, saying that the next day
would be a rehearsal, not an audition. We rehearsed for the next two weeks and I
debuted in Toronto at the Forum in front of 21,000 people over three nights.
Trial by fire. - James Gray
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