David Blake - The First Tangent Café Era

On the Rhythm Changes Podcast, David Blake pays tribute with me to the first 7-year run of jazz at the Tangent Café in Vancouver, where he was the main booking agent.

We talked about:

• The first time David and I performed together
• David reveals how musical his family is
• Folk music dances we’ve been part of (for me, North Shore Celtic Ensemble with Kirin Lamb)
• Andrew Millar getting David into the Tangent booking
• Whether or not we think our city has too few music venues
• The first gig David booked at the Tangent: Ihor Kukurudza on guitar, Eli Davidovici on bass, Mili Hong on drums
• Other highlights from the early days: Meghan Gilhespy, Bill Coon & Oliver Gannon, Thad Bailey-Mai, and more
• Interprovincial performers like Allison Au, Simon Millerd, Mike Bjella, Kai Basanta, and Ted Crosby coming to BC and playing at the Tangent
• The best things about the venue for our generation and how it got going
• The establishment joins in: Steve Kaldestad, Cory Weeds, Jodi Proznick, John Gross, Brad Turner, and more
• Ted Crosby’s band that David loves: Braveheart (featuring James Meger and Omar Amlani)
• My reductionist view about Cory, Cole Schmidt, and David’s influence on the scene
• Our formative visits to the Cellar jazz club in Kitsilano, which closed the year that the Tangent took off as a jazz venue (2014); mine involved Chris Davis on trumpet, when Bob Rebagliati took the Douglas College Summer Jazz Intensive there; David’s was with Sandro Dominelli playing drums
• David’s mother took piano lessons with the late Bob Murphy (also a big influence on Jenny Xu)
• David studied with woodwinds player Mariusz Kwiatkowski and learned Charlie Parker solos without knowing their significance
• How David got from there to Capilano University
• Another jazz guitar David he admires (David Occhipinti)

Even more topics

• I talk about my introduction to Cap, right back to when Ihor and Jared Burrows auditioned me in 2012
• The biggest challenges we’ve had navigating music school
• A solution practiced by younger musicians like Ilhan Saferali, who go out and collaborate across high schools as teenagers to get more comfortable socially
• Struggling with asking for help when you need it
• What André Lachance told me about music reeling you back in
• A quick Jonny Tobin love-fest
• David’s sabbatical from the jazz life to make stop-motion animation
• How instruments motivate us, as explained by Jasper Sloan Yip on Justice McLellan’s podcast, The JPod
• The dark side of friends’ advice to never quit music
• Our bare-bones instrument purchase histories, with an assist from Madeleine Elkins and family regarding my double bass
• My peers whose gear wisdom I trust most often: Chad Galpin & Brad Pearson
• The danger of depression getting intertwined with your identity
• Avoiding the urge to over-practice your non-music hobbies that can come from a music career
• A fast telling of my Bill Frisell / Aim to Stay / Europe / Gabriel Dubreuil story (roughly 2015-16)
• David’s own playing at the Tangent and the bassists (Eli, Conrad Good) and drummers (Mili, Joe Poole, Miles Wong, Bernie Arai) he played with
• My classmates who came down often and also played: Ben Frost, Parker Woods, the late Natasha D’Agostino, Chris Fraser
• Even more guitarists playing: Tony Wilson, Alvaro Rojas, Tom Wherrett, David Sikula
• Even bluegrass, from the Lonesome Town Painters
• The Tangent staff’s key role in making it a great venue