At 24 years of age, Winnipeg-based drummer Lucas Sader has established himself as a recording artist, composer, bandleader, and educator. Sader released his critically acclaimed debut album Apollo in 2012. Upon its release, Apollo was the #1 jazz album in Canada (!earshot). "Apollo reminds us of a golden age in jazz while introducing a young talent to watch" (Kerry Doole, New Canadian Music). 

The Lucas Sader Project returns to the TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival with a fresh, progressive sound. The group will feature Sader on drums, Laurent Roy on guitar, Paul Balcain on alto and tenor saxophones, Karl Kohut on bass, and vocalist Joanna Majoko. The group will perform Sader’s brand-new compositions and arrangements, along with works from Apollo.  

Sader released Apollo through Lucas Sader Music, the dynamic record label, production company, and marketing firm he founded in 2012. That same year, Apollo was awarded 4 stars by the Winnipeg Free Press (Chris Smith). The Lucas Sader Project was featured previously in the TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival in both 2012 and 2013. In 2014, The Lucas Sader Project was nominated for the Julian Award of Excellence, a national award recognizing emerging Canadian jazz artists. 

Lucas graduated with his Bachelor of Jazz Studies Degree from the University of Manitoba in 2013. As a student in the program, Lucas studied with Quincy Davis, Steve Kirby, Terreon Gully, George Colligan, Laurent Roy, and Anna-Lisa Kirby. Other teachers and mentors include David Schneider, Curtis Nowosad, and Jauvon Gilliam. Sader has collaborated with a variety of artists in his career, including world-renowned trumpeter Derrick Gardner, JUNO-nominated vocalist Erin Propp, country recording artist David James, and hip hop artist KayR.

Sader has worked extensively as a private instructor, primarily out of his own studio, and as a guest clinician in middle schools, high schools, secondary institutions, and music camps. Lucas was a keynote presenter at the 2014 Winnipeg DrumTalk Festival. His writing has been featured in dig! Magazine.

Twenty-seven years. Four bandmates. Two brothers. One album. Let It Lie, the debut release from Canadian roots-rockers the Bros. Landreth, is proof that there's strength in numbers.

Anchored by the bluesy wail of electric guitars, the swell of B3 organ, and the harmonized swoon of two voices that were born to mesh. At first listen, you might call it Americana. Dig deeper, though, and you'll hear the nuances that separate The Bros. Landreth — whose members didn't grow up in the American south, but rather the isolated prairie city of Winnipeg, Manitoba — from their folksy friends in the Lower 48. Where does the sound come from? Maybe it's in their blood. After all, long before they made music together, siblings David and Joey Landreth attended their father's bar gigs as babies. "Mom would take us in the basinet and stick us under the bar tables, and we'd fall asleep," says David. "Dad was a working musician who backed up people like Amos Garrett, but his love was always songwriting. He'd play three or four sets at those bars, so we'd be at the gigs all night." 

"We were always around music," adds Joey, the group's frontman and chief songwriter. "We had no choice! We were baptized into it." As the boys got older, they began paying attention to the records their parents would play in the small, WWII-era shack that doubled as the family's home. Bonnie Raitt, Ry Cooder and Little Feat all received plenty of airtime, with John Hiatt's Bring the Family and Lyle Lovett's Pontiac standing out as family favorites. The siblings absorbed those records, which spun tales of love, life and lust in the Bible Belt. Years later — after Joey and David had given up their gigs as sidemen to form their own group, with drummer Ryan Voth — the Bros. Landreth began drawing on that familiar sound, mixing the rootsy swirl of Americana with the bandmates' own experiences up north.

Let It Lie was recorded in a straw bale house in southern Manitoba, during one of the coldest winters in recent memory. Working with producer Murray Pulver, the Bros. Landreth found warmth in the songs that Joey and David had written at home, brewing up an earthy, earnest sound that has since drawn comparisons to the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and Jackson Browne. Eager to tip their hat to the man who gave the Landreth siblings their very first instruments, the band also recorded a version of "I am the Fool," a song originally written by the boys' father, renowned Winnipeg musician Wally Landreth. Wally even stopped by the studio to sing a verse on "Runaway Train," a scuzzy, fuzzy rock song that mixes boogie-woogie guitars with two generations of bluesy, booming Landreth vocals. "He slayed it," says Joey, who laughs at the memory of duetting with his father in the recording studio. "It was fun, for the first time in my life, to get to tell my Dad what to do."

Album highlights like "Our Love," "Firecracker" and Nothing" were all inspired by a string of rocky relationships, but Lie It Lie is more than a breakup album. Filled with mid-tempo rockers, butter-smooth ballads and cowboy lullabies, it's the sort of album that finds inspiration not only in the landscape of the human heart, but also the windswept prairies that stretch for hours on every side of Winnipeg's city limits. The music is steeped in the history and heritage of the band's hometown, and if it sounds wintry at times, that doesn't mean it's not downright lovely.

That hometown was quick to embrace the Bros. Landreth, with the Winnipeg Free Press applauding the band's "blues rock [songs] resplendent with soulful harmonies as golden and warm as the late evening sun." Meanwhile, the band began hitting the road in 2013, traveling the heartlands and highways that helped inspire their songs in the first place. They didn't limit their focus to Canada, either. During the summer of 2014, the Bros. Landreth signed a deal with Slate Creek Records, an American label whose roster includes singer/songwriter Brandy Clark and Pistol Annies member Angaleena Presley.

"I remember the moment Dave and I started singing together," Joey remembers, "and I realized how similar we sounded. It was a bit of an 'a-ha' moment for us. We were both pretty burnt out from our sideman jobs and wanted to make some music together, just for fun. The band built itself after that. I was just standing there, watching the walls go up."

"Joey taught me how to sing," David adds. "Prior to the band getting started, there were 3 or 4 years where we really didn't spend much time together, because we were touring with other groups. We'd always been really close as teenagers. With the Bros. Landreth, I feel like it's almost a divine interception. We were supposed to come back together and make this music."

For bookings: management@djcarladacosta.com

Live performing DJ - Techno, House, Techhouse, Deephouse - Producer 

Christopher Butcher is a musician firmly established as a representative of Toronto’s global music village, transcending genre and cultural predisposition, and pleasing audiences across the world. As a first rate trombone player, an up-and-coming record producer, a busy session musician, and co-leader of one of 2011’s most heavily buzzed new bands, The Heavyweights Brass Band, Christopher Butcher illustrates a promising portrait of an influential career in music.
Hailing from the heart of Canada’s vast prairies, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Christopher’s love of music was born of a musically diverse household, in which he got an early education from his father’s jazz record collection and his mother’s taste for classical radio. Moving to Toronto in his late teens to complete Humber College’s jazz studies program, Christopher hit the ground running, building a reputation as a first-call trombone player in the city’s vibrant jazz and world music scenes. Associations with acclaimed artists, which include Jane Bunnett, Hilario Duran, Archie Alleyne, and Jay Douglas, among others, sharpened Christopher’s leadership skills, preparing him for the next step in his career with the formation of The Heavyweights Brass Band.
The Heavyweights Brass Band begun sparring in 2009 when Christopher and four like-minded musicians committed to enacting an original musical vision. Engaging a repertoire which calls on both original music, as well as the social music of the day, the Heavyweights have created a musical gumbo which mixes traditional New Orleans jazz with ingredients such as brass band music, funk, world music, pop and blues. With songs from their debut album Don’t Bring Me Down included in heavy rotation on CBC and JAZZFM radio, word of the Heavyweights’ vibrancy has caught the ears of many, including one of the world’s most respected tastemakers, Gilles Peterson, whose compilation Havana Cultura: The Search Continues features the Heavyweights’ recording of Christopher’s original composition, Nueva Orleans featuring Ogguere.
“I am blown away by this thoroughly fresh piece of cultural collaboration. I have never heard anything like this before!” - Gilles Peterson
2012 will see Christopher Butcher make further strides in the trajectory of his rising star, with a performances across Canada and the world, two arrangements/ co-production of his featured on Mundo: The World of Jane Bunnett on EMI, sideman appearances on numerous records by Canada’s best, the celebration of a Juno nomination for a record on which he was a featured soloist (Aline Morales’ Flores, Tambores e Amores), production for several artists, and the debut full length record by Christopher Butcher as a solo artist.

In 2010, mere days before departing for a Canadian tour, Ricardo Lopez-Aguilar’s marriage fell apart. At the time, I was the other half of his musical outlet Oldfolks Home, and saw firsthand how this shattered his world. I was right to expect that this would spell the end of our imminent touring, but what I couldn’t know is that this event was about to trigger the start of the most insightful, self-aware, and honest divorce album I have ever come across: Black and Blue.

The album's opening lyric, “Lately I feel like I want to kill / and I’m trying so hard to say something right” gives the listener a front row seat to the post-traumatic stress Lopez-Aguilar experiences as he tries to come to terms with his current situation. While some of Black and Blue’s most telling moments come on stand-out track (and letter to ex-wife Kerri) ‘It Scares Me’, Oldfolks Home is at his best on the heartbreaking ‘Sleeper’ where the lasting effects of the dissolution become clear to him “You know there’s no going back on this / it’s permanent…”

I wondered about Lopez-Aguilar’s thoughts on Black and Blue’s potential to be summed up as just another break-up album. “I’ve been told that I may become known as the Taylor Swift of indie rock,” he joked. “But this isn’t an album about placing blame, or gaining sympathy, or saving face. This is the product of allowing myself to grow out of my darkest moments, while patiently waiting for the good to come through.”

Oldfolks Home, who is no stranger to festivals like the Halifax Pop Explosion and Pop Montreal, looks forward to revamping what already is a highly reputable live show. “There were a few shows in the aftermath of 2010 where I didn’t have the courage to say much,” says Lopez-Aguilar. “I half-joked at the time that I would have been happy to prerecord all my stage banter.” 

So will he be able to turn this negative energy into a positive? “That’s an understatement. I have never felt more free to experiment in a live setting. While I’ve always been interested in a fusion of digital and acoustic, the live show is about to get far more… three-dimensional, so to speak.”

Oldfolks Home has a bright vision for his hometown of Winnipeg. Like several of his musical peers, it was important for him to write and record Black and Blue in Winnipeg, and wanted its elements to stay local. He recruited a cast of current and former hometown players such as Keri Latimer (Nathan), Michael P Falk (Les Jupes), and Shaun Gibson (The Details) to contribute, and, what might be Black and Blue’s most shocking twist, the album’s cover art and name are taken from a piece donated by Lopez-Aguilar’s Winnipegger ex-wife, Kerri-Lynn Reeves. 

There’s no doubt that many of the beautifully crafted tracks on this LP will find perfect homes on television and film soundtracks, and I can say with great certainty that if John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity could do a present-day “top 5 divorce albums” list, Oldfolks Home’s Black and Blue would easily earn top spot.	

-Shaun Gibson, 2012.


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