“I’ll keep playing as long as the flavour lasts.”
It’s a line that David Vest has attributed to his friend Jimmy “T99” Nelson, but it’s one that aptly describes Vest’s own approach to music and performing.
“As long as I feel that connection with the audience and my fingers are still working and my bones will carry me onto the stage,” Vest says in response to the question, “what’s the flavour?”
Of course, it’s fair to say that they don’t make them like Vest anymore and there’s no more authentic blues performer to be found.
He’s the son of an Alabama sharecropper whose personal connection to music goes back more than 50 years when he first stepped on stage with the legendary Big Joe Turner. He now makes his home in Canada and has become an icon of the blues scene in his adopted country.
His legacy is impressive, to be sure. How many people can say that they wrote the first songs ever recorded by Tammy Wynette or had their music covered by artists that range from Paul deLay to the Downchild Blues Band.
Vest has received five Muddy Awards from the Cascade Blues Association, including the Best Keyboard Player, and played piano on Bill Johnson’s JUNO-nominated album Still Blue and on David Gogo’s 2014 JUNO-nominated record Come On Down. He’s also a five-time winner of Canada’s national Maple Blues Award for Piano Player of the year.
But in the end, it’s not about awards. It’s all about the music – the flavour.
“The Blues can lift you up. That’s what it does for me. The Blues taught me that I don’t have to be anything other than myself,” Vest reflects.
“All of my songs are always recorded live in the studio, with very little overdubbing, if any. I sing at the same time as I play the piano. I could never go into a vocal booth and sing along to a pre-recorded track, even if it was prerecorded the same day. To me, that’s karaoke, not blues. I’d rather hear interesting mistakes than listen to fake perfection.”
It’s an approach that has seen Vest described as “a honky-tonk hero and a world-class entertainer” by the Victoria Jazz Society – a musician who rolls out the boogie like the players of days gone by … the guys who would tear up juke joints and turpentine camps of the early 1930s.
“I like to think that my music comes from the moment just before things separated into all these artificial categories. Duke Ellington said that his own music was beyond category. I hope that’s true of mine as well.”
And although Vest writes his songs on a computer these days, the music has lost none of its soul.
“I used to write with a pencil and a flare pen on a legal pad, but I lost so many songs that way,” Vest says.
Vest will appear throughout B.C. this summer with July performances at the Butchart Gardens on July 10, in Parksville on July 19, in Duncan on July 20, and at Hermann’s Jazz Club in Victoria on July 26 and again on Sept. 20. Find information and ticket details at davidvest.ca/shows
