Jim Burke’s voice is a gin-soaked, stumble-home story from your Uncle Roy...a pale-faced Louis Armstrong... and a story of the battle for life and dreams.  
Burke has always written and played music.  He recalls his youth jamming in parks in Montreal, balancing a 24 pack of beer, with bags of chips and a guitar on the front handle bars of a 10 speed.  “The French girls would come and listen, and we would be there all day and late into the night.   “That’s where I learned to really play the guitar.”
However, it wasn’t until later in life that he would put his foot forward as an artist.  Most people remember when being told they had a life-threatening illness.  For Burke, diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) that quickly turned acute, and recognized that he had never recorded his songs, and that it would be his one regret if his cancer progressed.
“I thought to myself: ‘You can’t die yet. You don’t have the luxury.’ I knew I couldn’t forgive myself if I never put these songs, my passion, down in a way that would last beyond just me,” Burke reflects. “I had to finish it.”
Fortunately, Burke has recovered and is now using his music to help others with a cancer diagnosis. He has been working with the Alberta Cancer Foundation to raise funds and send a message of hope to other patients.
Burke’s influences include Neil Young, the Mavericks, Texas Tornados and Johnny Winter among his many influences, but cites travel as his true muse. “My music tends to take on the colors of my surroundings. When I am in the Dominican, I will bring my guitar and jam with the locals, and end up writing a merengue. In Cuba, I’ll write a rumba. New Orleans will be Dixieland Jazz.  It doesn’t matter what language you speak – everyone understands music.  It may be the only universal language.”
 “Diamonds” is a newly released CD of Jim Burke’s original music.  


"You might think leading a quiet country life in rural Alberta for the better part of a decade would have mellowed Art Bergmann a little bit, but quite the opposite has happened.
Being idle on a farm in Airdrie with nothing much to do but read voraciously, watch cable news and wander the fields pondering where the world went wrong has only left the famously irascible CanCon-underground icon more outraged and defiant than ever on his vicious new EP, Songs for the Underclass. 
Released in early September on sturdy Toronto indie label Weewerk, it’s the 61-year-old Bergmann’s first new recording since the late 1990s. A combination of disgust with his ongoing treatment at the hands of a music industry that’s never really had a clue what to do with him, and debilitating arthritis in his spine and hands compelled him to chuck it all at the time, but he’s been gigging on and off for the past year or so and is now threatening a full-length album at some point in the near future — not to mention some potential reissues of early punk material dating back to his days with Vancouver’s Young Canadians. Yes, please." 

- Ben Rayner, Toronto Star (October 22, 2014)

Art Bergmann is recording a new album, The Apostate, due out in early 2016. Hold on to your fucking hats!

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