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Dave Lang putting soul back into jazz

For Dave Lang, jazz has lost its original meaning.
Dave Lang
Dave Lang

For Dave Lang, jazz has lost its original meaning.

“People react to the word ‘jazz’ a lot – you picture people sitting quietly and being bored – but jazz originally was music people played in the bar, and people got drunk to it and they screwed to it and got stoned, and so we kind of want that aspect of jazz back, and less of the boring, family-friendly outside concert in the park, reading from music with no soul kind of jazz,” he said.

“I think you know exactly what I mean; that’s what’s wrong with it, it’s sort of neutered – in the same way that classical music gets neutered – put in this really safe box.

“We try and keep it having lots of energy and fun without turning into a ska band.”

Touring with his band The Black Squirrels, Lang plays Wild Bill’s in Banff Friday and Saturday (Dec. 23-24) and the Canmore Hotel on Dec. 29.

“Whether you call it western swing, or country with horns, with a bit of jazz and country, emotionally it comes from the world of punk rock ’n’ roll,” he said, trying to describe his music.

“It’s a mix of covers and originals, and the covers tend to range from popular stuff people know – like we do a little Johnny Cash – to Geoff Berner and Carolyn Mark and put them all through the arrangement machine, and arrange them for three horns and the lineup we’ve got.”

The band has six members, with Lang on guitar and vocals, an upright bass, a drummer and a three-piece horn section – trombone, tenor sax and trumpet.

“I write the original tunes, and do all the arrangements,” he said. “When you just have one horn, you can treat them like the lead guitar player in a band, but once we went up to three, there’s written, arranged horn parts, and that seems to have worked out pretty good. People dig it, because they don’t see that very much any more.”

The Victoria-based band passed through the region earlier this year.

“We were at Wild Bill’s in the summertime, which was the first time I’ve tried to tour with a band this big,” said Lang. “The biggest I ever did before was four, and you could tour with a van, but now we have to drag an equipment trailer along behind.

“Wild Bill’s is a great room – I like all the wood inside, the people are nice, they pay us OK,” he explained. “And the Canmore Hotel is more of an old fashioned rock ’n’ roll kind of room, but it’s always good. People have been playing the hotel for ever and ever.”

While Lang has spent much time in Victoria, he has also moved around and tried a lot of different things, for the sake of building experience and avoiding complacency.

“I came to Victoria to go to university – and it was great, I was playing in lots of bands and with lots of people – but I didn’t want to spend my whole life here because it was comfortable,” he said. “So I went up north and was playing in a Top 40 cover band in Inuvik and in Saskatchewan for a while; I did audio for film and TV in Toronto for a little while, and then I was a musician-in-residence at an old theatre in Swift Current.”

He always liked jazz, but could never really play it, he explained.

“I would get invited to play at events and they didn’t really want a sit-down-and-listen show, they wanted background music, so I ran into this band there (in Saskatchewan). They were playing classic rock and country tunes, so I said, ‘I’ll play the lead, and let’s do a little background music to play these gigs, and we can all share solos and it’ll be fun and we don’t have to do something that doesn’t really fit with what the audience wants.’

“So we did that and it went well, but we got bored with doing instrumental versions of ‘Hey Good Looking’, so we started doing more jazz stuff, which led me into this Black Squirrels thing.”

It was when he returned to Victoria that Lang put together a band with a horn section.

“There’s a lot of good players in Victoria, and I put together a four-piece with one horn and that was fun, but then some burlesque dancers wanted us to back them up,” he said. “So I thought that was a good excuse to move it up to three and I started writing songs, and then it’s been going really well since I did that.”

As a child, Lang began with the piano, but then discovered the guitar.

“I took piano, like everybody did, and it just didn’t make any sense, and then my younger brother got a guitar when I was in high school, and the guitar made perfect sense from a songwriting perspective. It’s so easy, all of a sudden you figure out how music works,” he said.

“And people liked the songs I wrote, so then I went to university, and instead of finishing my history degree, I’d go down and get all these song books out of the basement of the library and torture my roommates banging out all these 50s, 60s tunes on this crappy guitar.”

Before his current project, Lang’s work focused on solo music, of original tunes with a bit of bitter humour.

“I’m trying to bring some of that into this,” he said. “Right now, we do play lots of covers, because sometimes we need to play three or four sets and we need to be entertainment, background, dance band music. But we like to be flexible and have the music be interesting and have enough original tunes, so when it’s time to play a two-set, sit down, check us out gig, we can do that.”

To find out more about Dave Lang and the Black Squirrels, visit davelang.com


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