Gigs
Dig some bio-bits of righteous jive
straight from the fridge Dad.
Bob Derkach (b 2.09.49)
I have been involved in music since the age of six, when first studying accordion under the tutelage of Arnold Sevniegh and Ted Kyriachuk in hometown Edmonton AB Canada. From age thirteen I was performing solo classical accordion Sunday afternoon recitals at the Edmonton Art Gallery and made several local television appearances.
In 1964 I joined the rockabilly/pop combo D.L. and the Royales (later Lawrence and The Lancers) playing rock covers on accordion. Then I got my first organ for $20.00, a used 24-bass Magnus Chord Organ with a borrowed ham-radio microphone stuck inside reproducing more wind-fan noise than the squeezy nasal tones of the metal reeds.
Two years later I joined The Government Way Scale, playing a Fender Rhodes 73 suitcase electric piano with a silver-sparkle lid and action like cheese. The group was in the midst of enjoying local success with our alternative covers of Moby Grape and Vanilla Fudge etc. until a fateful 1967 Thanksgiving weekend gig in Jasper AB where we lost our gear when the club burnt down.
Close enough for R&R:
TGWS had a Friday night gig at a tough rock club in Edmo and I showed up late. As I was setting up, the jukebox was laying out 'The Letter' by The Box Tops on continuous play and we were asked if we knew the tune. Well, we didn’t and were then advised that we don’t start playing until we did. Deep diving into the audio output of the 45-playing machine we quietly picked out our parts and after about three spins we broke into a spot-on version much to delight of the patrons and to the great relief of the band. Hum a few bars….!
Previously studying viola with the wonderful Mr. Hank DeMarco while at McCauly JHS 1962-64, I continued my musical pursuits on trombone and euphonium with the brilliant Ms. Sharon Lang while attending Queen Elizabeth High School, playing bone in the pit for several school musical productions and with our local jazz combo The Band. Also gigged with The Zen Magus Big Band for a couple of seasons - way cool!!
A jazz tale:
Zen Magus would add a couple of high school musicians to his big band each season and with me on trombone and my bud Dave Ferbey on tenor sax - both of us from Queen E. - we did some amazing gigs including the old Yardbird Suite circa 1966. At that famous (and still running!) jazz club, the band set up on a tight 4-tiered stage with the brass on the top two tiers. We were bopping along with our rehearsed repertoire when Zen called a fresh tune from his huge book. I looked over my chart and saw a 32-bar solo for 2nd bone. Not too deep into jamming over changes I turns to the 1st slip-horn cat asking if he’d like to have a wail and in his beat drawl said 'Nah man, dig to hear you blow'.
We started playing and I recognized the melody so I knew I had a starting point. Coming up to my solo moment I stood up, as is the wont of big band soloists, and in the incredibly tight squeeze of 20 or so players on the small tiered risers, I slightly pushed my chair backwards knocking over the trumpets' music stand directly behind and about 50 loose pages came flying. The trumpet player, notorious for being a bit in his cups, swore at me as he kicked my chair almost causing me to tumble down the riser. Catching my balance, the band drops down to vamp and I start my solo debut, noodling around the melody a bit. All is groovy until we come to a bridge transition with changes I’d never seen before in my life. Totally out of my melodic comfort zone I started grabbing voice-leading where I could and as the progression advances I was getting more and more outside and climbing higher and higher in pitch until the last couple of bars where I hit the highest notes I ever declared on the trombone. The sax section on floor level all turned around while still playing and looked up with eyebrows of surprise and somewhat amazement. I sat down to gracious audience applause with the trumpet player behind me still cursing while gathering his charts.
I did go on to play the horn another day….
I then got a gig playing t-bone with The Edmonton Shumka Orchestra under the musical direction of Gene Zwozdesky who was also the vocalist in his pop cover group and was looking for a bass player. So I picked up the Fender-P and also became the arranger for The Shan-tels, an 8-piece horn band who enjoyed a lengthy house gig at The Caravan Motor Hotel Hide-A-Way Cabaret - the in spot of its time.
It wasn’t long into this tenure that, tired of writing out all of the keyboard parts, I slid behind the house A-100 and began my fab life journey on the Hammond. The band later reformed as the power quintet Yellowhead.
In 1971 I joined the Edmonton underground blues band Hot Cottage after jamming on my trusty Hohner Pianet N with the trio at the first Garneau Saskatchewan Drive street dance that Thanksgiving weekend - kinda making up for that other fateful ’67 Thanksgiving.
The band rapidly became a local institution playing regularly at The Hovel, SUB Theatre, Room At The Top and Dinwoodie Lounge on the U of A Campus, Kinsmen Field House, Jubilee Auditorium, touring Western Canada and continued to play Garneau Street Dances for the next nine years.
We recorded several ACME Sausage programs for CKUA Radio and made our 1972 album Big Walter Horton with Hot Cottage on London Records produced by Holger Petersen of Stony Plain Records. Incidentally that album session was the first time I played on an acoustic piano.
In 2014 Hot Cottage was inducted into the Edmonton Blues Hall of Fame.
Continuing in the blues and R&B I had the honour and privilege to play bass and piano on album sessions and live gigs with Johnny Shines, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, The Thunderbird Blues Band, Louisiana Red, Uncle Wiggly’s Hot Shoes Blues Band, Lionel Rault, Ronnie Rault, Aaron McNeil and the illustrious Clarence ‘Big’ Miller. I also had the very unique honour of sitting in on piano with B.B. King in concert.
Digging the Blues:
A thrilling blues highlight for me was when Hot Cottage was doing the warm-up for B.B. King at the Kinsmen Field House, Edmonton AB, November 26th,1972. Because of difficulties with connecting flights, some members of B.B.'s band never arrived and the drummer/music director asked me if I played blues piano and would I care to sit in - I had played Hammond for the Hot Cottage set. Seated behind a concert grand which had remained upstage and just out of the stage lights, I jammed with the band as they played the obligatory warm-up tunes before the star comes on. Whilst taking a solo during the third number I felt a hand on my left shoulder, looked up and there was B.B. King - ten feet tall with Lucille extending to infinity. He then said to me, "You're doing a fine job boy, stay right where you are...".
During the first number, B.B. sings a couple of verses and then breaks into one of his trademark solos: the band drops 'way down and Mr. King sounds three perfectly-placed guitar notes. As was my past custom improvising with Steve Boddington, Hot Cottage's original guitarist extraordinaire, I answered B.B. King's opening solo statement note for note on the piano, unwittingly catching him quite off-guard. B.B. drops his arms to his side and turns upstage to face me as the crowd of over 4,000 cheer their delight. Mr. King looks back to the audience and, as the ever-gracious showman that he is, does a grand arm gesture to me as the crowd continued to cheer and gives a look as if to say "...you best keep out of my space, man...". I humbly bowed in supplication and went on to play the rest of the set, the horn players beside me telling me the keys the songs were in and sometimes calling out the changes in a trickier bridge or two. At the end of the show B.B. King gave me a special introduction and an extended featured solo in the encore. Woo Hoo!
I was the in-house arranger and session keyboardist for Joe Kozak’s Project 70 Recording Studio in Edmonton working with many fine country and western artists. In addition I served as the in-house arranger and producer at Larry Wanagas’ Homestead Recorders where I also recorded many of my film score projects.
And on the cutting edge of tech, I recorded and produced numerous film and album projects at Garry McDonall’s excellent Damon Recording Studios where I learned to push the faders and twist knobs on the first Canadian fully computerized Neve 8108 console. Never looked back!!
Concurrently in the mid-1970’s behind the Hammond, I pursued a jazz direction gigging in organ trios and quartets notably with Brian Hughes, Dennis Burke and George Koller. And at that time I formed the jazz/fusion/R&B group Heaven Train for two CHFA Radio-Canada programs, playing local clubs and featured on the day-stage at the 1981 Edmonton International Jazz City Festival.
See Media/Special/Heaven Train.
The late '70s and early '80s were a very fertile period in Alberta for local filmmakers and I created music for over twenty short films, documentaries and teleplays. My debut soundtrack in 1975 was for a 15-minute modern-day rendition of 'The Cave' from Plato's Republic, composed entirely on Mini-Moog synthesizer. Continuing on the Moog I scored an ACCESS TV two-part series 'UFOs in Alberta' and thus began my on-going love of creating space music.
And a 1983 NFB documentary film project on solar energy entitled 'Under The Sun' garnered me an AMPIA Award for Outstanding Filmscore. Thank you, thank you very much!
In 1979 I became the audio producer/composer for The Queen Elizabeth Planetarium in Edmonton AB mounting five Star Shows and producing various other Municipal multi-media projects. I designed and spec’d the recording studio and the dome multi-speaker playback system for the then-proposed Edmonton Space Sciences Centre (now TELUS World of Science).
During this time, I subbed for fellow musician, composer and dear friend Jan Randall who was the Musical Director for the new satellite Second City Theatre in Edmonton. This eventually led to a full-time gig in 1981 and, while still maintaining duties at the Planetarium, I mounted four revues with the theatre company. By amazing coincidence the process and opening of each show at The Second City coincided with each Planetarium show process. I don’t think I ever got them mixed up…
In 1983 I accepted the MD chair for The Second City Toronto ON where I opened and performed 43 reviews plus one show at The Second City Santa Monica CA before leaving in March 2006: “…the longest day-job I’ve had in my life…”.
For a bit of context about the gig dig this Bobpliment from Bruce Pirrie:
“From the Fred Kaz’ days of slide whistles, butcher shop bells and three-fingered jazz to you tech-ing the pit with synths and samplers (from Kaz to Kurzweil!), you became an actual member of the cast like a fifth Beatle, Bob.
“In addition to co-writing original comic and satirical songs and creating entire mini-musicals including 'Karl!', a musical biography of Karl Marx as imagined by a collaboration between Leon Trotsky and Irving Berlin, your real-time underscoring, emotional cues and comic references fully set the mood, time period and location. Whilst following or leading the actions of the actors in both intricately prepared and rehearsed scenes to full-blown, off-the-cuff, who-knows-where-the-hell-this-is-going total improvisation, your job as a one-man-band became a one-man orchestra under your tutelage. You were the whole orchestra pit.”
Thank you Mr. Pirrie!
Apart from several wonderful Second City anniversary shows, I had the honour and privilege to MD 'A Benefit of Laughter' in 2008 which was a reunion of the SCTV cast for several charity performances to benefit SCTV alumni. We did four stellar shows at The Second City Toronto and at the The Second City Chicago’s 50th Anniversary.
Make-‘em-ups:
During my 25 years at The Second City we enjoyed many fine moments with alumni and special guests who would attend the show and then join us for the third act of total improvisation. We jammed with Robin Williams, Keanu Reeves, John Goodman, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, Michael Keaton, John Candy, Tony Rosato, Joe Flaherty, George Wendt among others. When Aerosmith was in Toronto in the early 00’s Steven Tyler and Tom Hamilton came to the show on their night off and they excitedly joined us for the improv set. It turned into a 45-minute major rock musical with me bashing on piano and everyone doing various hilarious Tyler/Jagger impersonations. Tyler killed it - way fun!
I had the great joy and honour to gig and record with the incredible Canadian singer/songwriter Daisy DeBolt. I co-composed, arranged and produced two of her wonderful CD projects: I Can (1997) and Just Mountain Songs (2000).
I have enjoyed a continuing collaboration with artist/writer/broadcaster Jon Lomberg who was the Design Director for NASA’s Voyager Golden Record and chief artist for Carl Sagan’s television series Cosmos as well as creating the opening sequence in the Warner Bros film Contact.
Jon and I have worked on several unique and award-winning projects including the aforementioned film 'Under The Sun', the scientific multi-media presentations 'The Global Atmospheric Consequences of Nuclear War' aka 'Nuclear Winter' (with Carl Sagan) and 'Weapons in Space' (for the Union of Concerned Scientists), the CBC Radio ‘Ideas’ programs 'Halley's Comet' and 'The Artist's Lab' and the CD-ROM series Exploring The Planets. And a definite milestone is Visions of Mars which is an extra-terrestrial artifact DVD-ROM time capsule currently residing on-deck NASA’s Phoenix Lander in the northern arctic region of the planet Mars. I’m still figuring out how to collect royalties…
See Media/Filmscore/ETP and Media/Special/VOM.
In 1986, whist being featured on ‘The Artist’s Lab’ as an artist using digital equipment and computer software, I acquired the fantastic Kurzweil K250 digital sampling synthesizer. This incredible axe opened a multitude of sonic doors and windows and portals and worm holes of which I could only dream since the advent of the New England Digital Synclavier II. I featured the K250 on that radio program and went on to use it in my film score, album and sound design compositions and productions. And as I was the first kid on the block with this latest technology, I worked on a multitude of very interesting projects in many of the major recording production studios and theatres in Toronto actualizing orchestral scores by other fine composers and creating unique and exciting soundscapes and SFX for major motion pictures, television, theatre and multi-media installations.
In 2000 I had the great joy and honour to play the Canadian Stage and Yale Repertory Theatre runs of 'Something Else with Zug' starring the horror clowns Mump and Smoot with the cool original score by Greg Morrison.
I was the MD for the comedy sketch theatre company Women Fully Clothed 2005-2017 mounting 3 original shows and touring North America. The company consisted of Second City Alumni with whom I created several Second City revues in Toronto and Santa Monica. In full circle Robin Duke was my first director at The Second City Edmonton.
I had a most excellent time as MD for Drew Carey’s Improv All-Stars touring the US and playing Drew’s annual Super Bowl Week house gigs at the Hollywood Theatre MGM Grand Las Vegas NV 2007-2010. This grew into the GSN’s single season of Drew Carey’s Improv-A-Ganza.
See Media/Special/Drew Carey.
And after 25 years and hundreds of North American appearances, I remain active as Music Director for the Canadian performances of the stellar improvisational group Ryan Stiles’ Whose Live Anyway?
Revisiting my blues and earlier roots, I wailed slide-guitar, harmonica and accordion on several film and television projects including my original scores for the feature film 'The Wetonkawa Flash' and the series 'Wrestling with the Past' as well as several other projects.
And in my continuing film score work I enjoy an on-going collaboration with film maker/playwright Peter Campbell of Gumboot Productions Victoria BC, having scored several of their documentaries.
See Media/Filmscore.
Surrounded by MPE keyboards, blinking switches and buttons, knobs, faders, LED screens, and a CPU or two with more plugins than synapses, I continue my sonic explorations in my home studio in south-western BC.
AI not included….. 👽❤️
CREDITS
Webmaster - Robert Postma
Bob 250 Illustration - Dana Andersen
SPECIAL THANKS
Lyn Harlton
Evelyn Neves
Carlos Neves
Rob Postma
Bruce Pirrie
Peter Campbell
Dana Andersen
Jon Lomberg
Jan Randall
- et al.