Steve Dawson at St. James's Hall, 3214 W. 10th Ave., Vancouver, Sunday, Mar. 30 at 8 p.m. (doors open at 7 p.m.). Tickets: $24/$20 at Highlife Records, Rufus' Guitars or roguefolk.bc.ca.
Bluesman and guitar virtuoso Steve Dawson is coming to town, on the wake of his new album, which celebrates the legacy of some of his musical heroes.
Dawson lived in West Vancouver for the first 10 years of his life before moving to Toronto with his family for four years. It was on his return to Vancouver that he fell in love with the music he still plays to this day, listening to his friend's music and connecting with the music scene in Vancouver in the '80s.
"I had kept in touch with a lot of my friends from West Vancouver and they were the ones who got really into music," says Dawson. "So when I moved back in '86 to Vancouver, I had one friend in particular, him and I had a band going really shortly after I moved back to Vancouver."
From that point forward, Dawson started to meet others playing music, jamming together and playing in bars, despite being teenagers. "I don't know if you could get away with that anymore, but that's what we did back then."
Currently, Dawson is on tour to promote his new album, Rattlesnake Cage. The album reflects Dawson's love for the simple beauty of the stripped-down, bare-bones skill of the forefathers of blues music.
To echo this tradition, Dawson is accompanied in studio by only a few of his favourite guitars, a venerable microphone found in a Detroit church and nothing else.
"I wanted to record it in a really old fashioned way where the technology I used was nothing more than what they would've had back in the '50s. So I wanted to approach (Rattlesnake Cage) like that," says Dawson.
His appreciation for the legends of old is found directly in several tracks, with tunes such as "The Medicine Show Comes to Avalon" as a tip of the hat to Mississippi John Hurt, who used to play for a medicine show that came through his hometown of Avalon.
Another is "The Altar at Center Raven," about the Reverend Gary Davis, a blind guitar player who became an ordained minister and preached at Center Raven, South Carolina, in the '30s.
"He was an amazing guitar player. He was a preacher but I know him as a guitar player. I wanted to incorporate those influences but keep it original and modern at the same time," says Dawson.
Besides playing, Dawson also enjoys producing, and has won Juno Awards for both - two for playing, and five for producing.
"I'd like to think that there is some sort of happy medium of splitting the two things up, so I don't have to abandon one."
Dawson says he still loves to play live, but that as he gets older, "the complications of being on the road tire me out more than when I was 18 or 19," he says.
"It's hard to present the kind of music that you want to, and get around easily, as everything is really expensive these days. Travel is so hard, getting your instruments on airplanes, and just things like that, that make it frustrating for being on tour."
Producing allows Dawson to make a record in the comfort of his home, which is now the storied music town of Nashville, Tenn. Having moved only months ago, the city's musical legacy is of great appeal to the veteran musician.
"I love (Nashville). It's a pretty action-packed town ... There's all kinds of music going on, a lot of recording, lot of live music ... It's kind of a melting pot right now ... with (White Stripes frontman) Jack White moving to town, that sort of changed the landscape for the whole place a little bit."
After the tour, Dawson will be working on several projects in Nashville. He plans to travel back to Canada and hopes to keep on working with Canadian artists after years in the industry. "So that's my plan, to keep that Canadian connection going strong."
