!earshot Top 200 of 2021

Every Musician Should Be So Lucky

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JD: Yes, exactly. Well, I should ask your buddy Chris a question. There's two members here from The Bills, the wonderful roots band with multiple Juno nominations and other things. Chris, how do you juggle the two projects?

CF: It's with great glee that we juggle the two projects - appiness and enjoyment. The Trio and The Bills provide us with a great thing in that different parts of our music personalities get to be expressed. Every musician should be so lucky, that they have such great projects to work with and projects that are in demand-thankfully. So juggling the two is not a burden or anything.

When we get together to do the trio stuff, we get very focused on what this music is and the trio is a nice unit because it is smaller. The Bills are five and they have very strong musical personalities and it's very exciting, but there's something about the trio that gets us away from the controlled chaos of The Bills and we get into this great mood together. Another thing about The Bills is that we sing, so there's a whole vocal and lyrical aspect to everything. With the trio, we get together making instrumental music, so I feel they both offset each other in a positive way and it's great. I feel lucky. Marc's jazz thing from the trio spills over into The Bills. I think you were talking about playing a cut from The Bills album. It's important because everybody sitting in the control booth, here - Joey was very involved in the arrangement of this version of Stardust for The Bills album, of course and he's the bass player for the trio. He and Marc worked together on the arrangement. Marc plays the mandlin. He brought this song to the band - so here's the trio and the trio had a great influence on The Bills on this cut.

JD: Now it's time to ask some silly questions, maybe a bit unfair - in that I don't think I could answer the first one, myself - but anyways guys - what is your earliest musical memory.

MA: I think I'll go first. I was kind of a lucky kid because my parents were both classical piano players.
The Marc Atkinson Trio at the Montreal Jazz Festival
(photo: Geneviève Benoit)My first musical memory is sitting on the (piano) bench and falling asleep while my Mother played Chopin preludes and nocturnes. I remember feeling kind of giggly and embarrassed whenever music was played because it made me feel so good. How about you, Joey?

JS: Well, of course listening to stuff on television and recordings. I guess one of the earliest things I remember hearing - my father really wasn't a jazz buff - but somehow he had a Bud Shank record. I really gravitated toward that and listened to that a lot. Later on in life, I guess about ten years ago I got to play a gig with him. So that was kind of neat. Anyway, things like that.

CF: Well, my father was a fiddler, old time fiddle music, so I grew up listening to his band play. The thing I sort of remember the most that he was also into rock and roll and he wanted to school me in the history of rock. I remember when I was five I got my first vinyl LP ever. It was Elvis Presley's Golden Hits and he gave me a guitar that year, my first little Gibsons, so that my early repertoire was [sings in a falsetto voice] “I'm all shook up,” in that kind of five year old voice. Anyway, that was my earliest musical memory.

JD: I think a lot of people of that age would have an Elvis memory. So, in a similar vein, what would we find in your CD, record or tape players this week?

MA: Well that's a big question because we listen to music often. Apart from circling around from Bob Dylan to song writers to Radiohead , I keep coming back to exciting folk musicians out there. Have you ever heard of Taraf de Haïdouks?

JD: Can't say that I have.

MA: They're just a brilliant Romanian gypsy band that seems to be playing untouchable acoustic music and it's really exciting to me. I also love listening to Django Reinhardt as usual, but lately - I'm going to come out and say it. I returned to this DVD of Led Zeppelin , because I wa so into it as a kid and I actually needed to know if they were so good of if it was my own imagination. Now, they are a little rough around the edges, but the drummer, John Bonham - he is the engine behind that band and boy that's exciting to hear - to be revisiting that right now. That is what I found! I love his drumming and drumming is a big thing for me, so I try to get some of the drumming out on the guitar and a lot of the compositions come out from the musical space. That's what music I'm listening to these days.

JD: Ok, anybody else, or is it we're all in the same vehicle so we listen to the same music?

MA: Deirdre has been making mixed tapes for us. Today she was playing lots of music from around the world - music from Africa and Pakistan. The other day she made a rock tape with a whole lot of the other things I mentioned.

JD: It sounds like you have fun with it. How can our listeners keep track of the Marc Atkinson Trio?

MA: Jim, if you want more information about the trio and where we are playing, we have a website. It's www.marcatkinson.com . That's marc with a “c” and that's how I was able to score that waterfront digital space. That's also where you can get all three of our CDs. They never show up in second hand stores, and they hardly ever show up in brand new ones, too. You can get the CDs from the website and if you are interested in having more of The Bills stuff, The Bills have a website, too. It's thebills.ca and we have three albums under that band's name as well. So we keep recording and we like to keep on the radar by letting you know about our website.

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