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Volume 10, Issue 24, Week of June 17, 2013
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Colin James
Colin James, a winner of six Juno Awards, will perform June 21 at the SaskTel Saskatchewan Jazz Festival (Photo Supplied)
Award-winning musician celebrates 25 years in the industry
C
olin James is celebrating his 25th another Juno as male vocalist of the year. year in the Canadian music industry. That’s the way his career has catapulted — He can’t think of a better place from guitar hero to pop vocalist to leading to enjoy a special party than at the SaskTel a revival of swing music, with four albums Saskatchewan Jazz Festival, recorded with the Little Big where he will be performing on Band. He has been constantly in the TD Mainstage, behind the search for something new and Delta Bessborough Hotel, on different. June 21 at 7 p.m. And it seems like just “I’ve been there no less than yesterday when James, a boy four times, all of which bring from Regina, was discovering fond memories,” James said. what he might become. “The last time, the weather “My parents were folk music was so beautiful for an outdoor fans and I’d go to concerts with concert; the atmosphere was them and even played a little terrific; Trombone Shorty was on mandolin,” he said. He knew the stage just before me.” he was in love with the guitar People James was a 1989 Junowhich he was playing by age 10. Award winner as a guitar He left school and home at 16, specialist for his self-titled debut album. On trying the music scene in Winnipeg and then the second, Sudden Stop in 1991, he won Montreal before discovering Vancouver as
NED POWERS
the right destination for him. Saskatchewan was never far out of sight. “I came back to Saskatoon to play the guitar man in the 25th Street Theatre production of Laughing Jack Rivers. We performed at the Holiday Inn. It was the first time I had ever earned a weekly wage. Andy Tahn ran the company, Janet Wright was the director, Michael Taylor of Humphrey and The Dumptrucks was there. Janet was the quintessential director.” Years later, James was invited to appear in an episode of CTV’s Corner Gas. Wright was in the cast, but he didn’t do a scene with her. In front of the cameras, he was attending an audition for a band in Saskatchewan’s fictional Dog River. He wowed two members of the audition team, but Brent Butt, the other member, dismissed him, telling him they already had a guitar player. In his early band days, he was part of
a group, Hoodoo Men, which worked the Winnipeg-Regina-Saskatoon triangle on a regular basis. The band got gigs with George Thorogood and John Lee Hooker, and then came the big break with Stevie Ray Vaughan. “My surname is Munn and it was Stevie Ray who said I should drop my last name and just go with Colin James. He was afraid some public-address announcer would get it wrong and I’d be called Mud. In the shows I did with him, Stevie Ray invited me back for encores. He said, ‘I’m opening the doors for you. Walk through them.’ For what he did for me, Stevie Ray was the best ever.” As a rising artist with Virgin America Records, James got to share the opening slot when Keith Richards was touring through the United States. (Continued on page 4)