Posted by It was only after I had booked my Thursday flight to Ottawa that I found out I wouldn’t have to start work until Saturday afternoon, so I was pretty excited to discover that my good friend Dave Lauzon was scheduled to play with his new band Original Soundtrack at Avant-Garde that very night. Hoping to kill birds, I sent an email out to a couple of Ottawa friends and arranged to meet them at the bar. When my plane touched down at YOW at 8:15pm on October 26th, 2023 I raced for the first cab. My hotel was less than a kilometre from Avant-Garde; I checked in, dropped my bags and strolled slow and easy through the unseasonably swarthy 20° weather.
Though Dave changes guitars and pedal configurations more often than most people change their socks, his sound remains utterly unmistakable. I was still a good eighty feet from the bar when I recognized Dave’s soloing emanating from the small venue, and I recognized it implicitly. Even though I had never heard him play with Ottawa fixture Matt Aston on drums before, even if I had never heard musical guru Chas Guay play the bass before, even if I had never before heard the song template that the band was currently improvising over, still I knew without question that that was Dave Lauzon playing guitar in there.
So when I stepped into the bar I wasn’t at all surprised to see Dave, Chas and Matt set up at the front nor was I surprised to see my friends Gord and Lynn sitting at a table behind half-full beer steins, but I was rather shocked to see that besides them there were only two other people in the place, and one of them was the owner/bartender. I ordered a beer, introduced myself to the stranger on the barstool, and joined my two friends for a couple of hours of non-stop mostly-improvised jam-jazz-groove-rock music courtesy of three of the city’s finest players.
Well, non-stop except for the lengthy setbreak, which afforded me ample time to catch up with my old young friend Dave. Heck, the setbreak stretched so long the crowd might have started to get unruly, had we not been nearly outnumbered by the band.
It’s a musician’s bane and a musical shame that it took until at least halfway through their second set before a single other person stepped through the door of the place. It was a couple, actually, and another group of four arrived just before the band finished up shortly after 11pm. And I didn’t see any of them put any money into the band’s tip jar.
But the band didn’t seem to care. As Dave busied himself wrapping cables and packing up his expensive guitar rig (a job I used to help with back when I managed his old band nero) I noted how it was a lot of work for such a small payoff. He told me quite earnestly that he was just happy for a chance to get out and play music with Matt and Chas, and I don’t blame him.
For me, I was happy that Dave was able to hang out for an hour or so after the show while Gord and I finished our last few beers, even after Lynn, Chas and Matt had left. Oh, how we laughed and drank! Good times.
(It was on the stumble back to the hotel that it occurred to me that I hadn’t taken the time to eat anything since breakfast. So I drunky-detoured to Elgin Street and discovered to my surprise that the fast food places were all locking up their doors. Suffice to say, I woke up on Friday morning very, very happy that I was off until Saturday.)
Todd Man Out 