Throughout the late Eighties and early Nineties, she was an It Woman of Ottawa’s inventive music scene, when bands comparable to Fats Man Waving and The Black Donnellys dominated native phases and airwaves.
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For a couple of transient years, music was not an enormous a part of Rebecca Campbell’s life.
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It was the early Eighties, and he or she had moved from Ottawa to Montreal to review historical past at Concordia College.
Nonetheless, Campbell, a self-described pure singer, says, “I’d come again to Ottawa and do a six-nighter on the Rainbow.
“(However) I nonetheless thought-about music to be an idle and indulgent pursuit, and assumed that my life could be spent saving the world by different, extra lofty means.”
That may have been music’s loss. Thankfully, Campbell, moved again to Ottawa to embark on a musical profession and he or she by no means seemed again.
Throughout the late Eighties and early Nineties, she was an It Woman of Ottawa’s inventive music scene, when bands comparable to Fats Man Waving and The Black Donnellys and singer-songwriters from Lynn Miles to Melwood Cutlery to Ian Tamblyn to Terry Tufts dominated native phases and airwaves.
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Campbell sang with all of them. “I’m certainly at my happiest when I’m collaborating,” she says.
However Ottawa noticed a lot much less of Campbell after she moved to Toronto in 1996. Collaborating intently with Jane Siberry drew her there. Then she set down her personal musical roots.
However on Saturday, Campbell, now a couple of months shy of 60, will return to Ottawa for a uncommon hometown gig below her personal title. She’ll play on the First Unitarian Congregation on Cleary Avenue with guitarists Roddy Ellias and Justin Orok, plus bassist John Geggie.
“I’m wanting ahead to singing my coronary heart out,” says Campbell.
She’s been singing her coronary heart out since she was in Grade 7 and eight at Glashan Public College. She nonetheless remembers the roles she had in class musicals — Gladys in The Pajama Sport, Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, Nurse Nellie in South Pacific. “I’ve at all times thought it sort of absurd that an 11-year-old was up there singing Steam Warmth and Hernando’s Hideaway,” she says.
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“Musically, these early years had been all about enjoyable,” Campbell remembers.
However she continues: “I used to be not a type of youngsters who sat on the top of her mattress and wrote songs about her emotions. Writing has by no means been my first intuition.”
She regrets that she hasn’t composed extra music, However says there’s one thing noble about being an excellent interpreter. “I’ve at all times felt that respiratory new life right into a music which may in any other case be forgotten is an efficient deed,” Campbell says.
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When Campbell returned to Ottawa after college, she joined a music group that she says was “free-spirited, intermingling and busy.
“These days, one might afford to be poor,” Campbell says. “It appears to me that life felt a bit simpler than it does now. We labored onerous and had enjoyable, however we sort of took every day because it got here. There was a lot of interaction between musical communities, and all of us performed on every others’ information.”
These had been the times when Ottawa musicians made cassettes and competed in CHEZ-106’s ShareCHEZ expertise contest.
Quickly after it was shaped in 1987, Fats Man Waving, a collective that included Campbell plus musicians James Stephens, Peter Kiesewalter, Danny Artuso, Fred Guignon, Ross Murray, and Ian Mackie, was a ShareCHEZ finalist, rising to the highest 10 of 200 bands.
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Campbell booked and promoted gigs, pageant performances, and excursions throughout Canada and the U.S. She remembers making use of for grants, creating posters and even mailing out postcards about upcoming exhibits. Fats Man Waving made three information and was the backing band for a lot of native singer-songwriters. However after 9 years, the group disbanded amicably, and Campbell left city quickly after.
Virtually a decade earlier than, Campbell had labored as a back-up vocalist in Jane Siberry’s band when it toured the U.S. for a couple of months in 1988.
Within the late Nineties, Campbell labored as Siberry’s private assistant, subletting her boss’s dwelling in Toronto whereas Siberry lived in New York Metropolis. She additionally labored for Siberry’s report firm, Sheeba Data, and sang on excursions with Siberry that featured simply the 2 girls and a piano participant.
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“It was a outstanding gig for a back-up singer. I used to be afforded an excessive amount of inventive freedom and musical and lyrical house in that setting,” she says.
In Toronto, Campbell additionally labored intently with one other Ottawa expat, guitarist and composer Justin Haynes, a musician whose brief, good life included hardships and struggles with psychological sickness. Haynes died in Toronto in March 2019, on the age of simply 46. However 20 years earlier, he and Campbell had been housemates and musical companions and so they made two information.
“I used to be writing tunes and we had been collaborating so intently. It was magical.”
Since then, Campbell has labored in Toronto in a wealth of musical conditions. She sang with Parachute Membership and was a member of the band Porkbelly Futures. She has toured each December with Sultans of String.
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In recent times, Campbell started returning extra continuously to Ottawa to take care of her dad and mom. “My time spent there on the parental entrance afforded me an opportunity to maintain a variety of musical connections alive,” she says.
Most just lately, final January, she took half in Rob Frayne’s Ottawa Suite opus on the Nice Canadian Theatre Firm, the place a long time earlier than she had been on the board, and an actor, and a janitor.
On the Unitarian church, Campbell’s live performance will forged again to previous and enduring musical relationships. She is going to sing a few of her personal songs, music she wrote with Haynes, a Fats Man Waving music “simply to finish the circle,” and songs by Miles, Cutlery, Tamblyn, Siberry and others.
“I hope that it’s a balm, and that it provides the gathering some hope and respite on a phenomenal spring night time in a loopy unforgiving world,” Campbell says.
Rebecca Campbell
When: Saturday, Could 6, 7 p.m. (doorways 6:30 p.m.)
The place: First Unitarian Congregation, 30 Cleary Ave.
Tickets: $30 ($25 for seniors, $20 for teens, kids free) at harmonyconcerts.ca
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