Posted by Just over the hill from our little town of Harbour Grace is a much bigger little town called Carbonear. Oh, they have everything in Carbonear; a mall, grocery stores, fast food, and the only Starbucks in the province outside of St. John’s. Heck, they even have traffic lights in Carbonear. Imagine!
Something else Carbo has (m’lady and I call it ”Carbo”; nobody else does) is a strip of bar/restaurants – albeit a small one – along Water Street. The centrepiece is undeniably the Stone Jug, except that it is the first bar/restaurant you come to so it’s actually the endpiece, but the majestic three-storey Georgian-style stone building is certainly the most prominent. On the other end is a kitschy ’50’s themed bar/restaurant called Route 66. I’ve seen people playing music in both of these places but it has always strictly been acoustic players playing pub covers, so I don’t really think of these places as live music spots.
In between the Stone Jug and Route 66 is the third and final bar/restaurant along Carbo’s bar/restaurant strip (I told you it was a small strip). Coldwater is a small-ish two-roomed bar/restaurant that I had never seen live music in, not even acoustic pub covers, so I didn’t think of it as a live music spot either, but on July 13th, 2023 that changed with a ninety-minute show featuring Duane Andrews and the Hot Club of Conception Bay.
If you’ve already figured out that it was a swing-jazz show then kudos to you and your collection of Django Reinhardt Quintet of the Hot Club of France featuring Stephane Grappelli records.
I had been hearing of Duane Andrews ever since I moved to the area, and no wonder. The guy is an extremely well-schooled Gypsy jazz player who has performed all over the world and he lives just down d’road in Carbo! I finally got to see him play the previous summer at the NL Folk Festival, when he performed as one-quarter of a hotshot guitar-slinger quartet called Fretboard Journey, and though he only had a few fleeting opportunities to showcase his talents in that short set it was enough to prove to me that he was the real deal.
So I was pretty happy to learn that he was playing his very own show just over the hill in Carbo.
I believe his Hot Club of Conception Bay includes a rotating cast of musicians, but in this case it was Duane’s wife (I believe) and his (their?) son Isaac set up on either side of him against the back wall of Coldwater’s second room. I was flying solo – m’lady was out of town working – but Newfoundland being Newfoundland, when I sat at what proved to be the front table it didn’t take long before several friendly faces joined me. The room quickly packed up and the music started right on time, as it always seems to do in Newfoundland.
And I tell you again, Duane is the real deal. He is a fine, extremely smooth player with a metronomic rhythm that always sounds fluid and natural. And his side-family proved to be the perfect blend for his oom-chah oom-chah chord inversions and a comfortable bed upon which to lay his softly aggressive Django-esque solos. Duane’s son Isaac bounced between bass and fiddle and maybe another instrument or two, and I remember him singing lead on a song as well.
Through Duane’s between-song banter I deduced that pretty much everyone in the small but packed room was either a relative or a longtime family friend, a deduction that was confirmed when I introduced myself after the show and he reacted with genuine amazement that someone he didn’t know had come to see him.
But man oh man, I’ll go see him again, that’s for sure. And I’ll definitely go see people play at Coldwater again. Imagine, a live music spot right there in the middle of Carbo’s bar-restaurant strip!
Todd Man Out 