A year or so ago, my friend Manitoba Hal and I were chatting during the break when Hal was playing a gig in Lunenburg. I commented on a restaurant that I'd stopped in on a recent tour saying that they served breakfast all day so it was my favourite kind of place. Hal commented that it's a shame our music wasn't more compatible because we'd travel so well together. Turns out all day breakfast is one of Hal's favourite things too.
Hal went back on stage and finished his show and life moved on but the seed found a little corner of my mind in which to germinate. During a conversation with our mutual manager, Nicole Colbeck at Little Acorn Music Management, I asked her if she thought it was a silly idea because I thought it could work. Hal and I have travelled together for short periods and we do get along so maybe we could tour together. Nicole was encouraging and said we could call it The All Day Breakfast Tour so Hal and I started talking about the concept.
I can hear some of you thinking, but Bob is a mostly instrumental
finger-style guitar player and Hal is a ukelele bluesman. How would
that work? Well, when I met Hal, he was a fine finger-style guitar player in his own right and still is. He has a number of instrumental pieces that he originally wrote for guitar then transposed to ukelele and his fans have been asking for more.
Fundamentally, we are both finger-style musicians. Although we have differing styles we have worked out a format that will be appealing to both Hal's fans and mine. We tried it out at the Folk Music Ontario Conference in October. We played together at a Private Showcase and several people came up to us after and said we sounded good together. The structure of the tour show is that we each do a solo set and then have a grand finale set of duets.
The planning for the tour is now underway. Your humble correspondent is heading back into New England at the end of March and Hal is returning from a tour of Australia through Florida and we're planning to meet in Boston and play some dates together. Three weeks in April will see us in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine and we're looking to add more dates to the schedule.
There will be more to come on The All Day Breakfast Tour in later posts but for now, keep watching this space. As more details are confirmed, we'll let you know. Also visit us online at alldaybreakfasttour.com - the site is still under construction but please bookmark us.
In the meantime, best wishes for a happy and healthy 2014. It's been pretty chilly where we are so I hope it's warm where you are.
Cheers, Bob.
bobardern.ca
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