Winning their first Juno for Blues Album of the Year. Opening Victoria JazzFest. Releasing a new album. Touring all of Canada.
How do two musicians celebrate New Year's Eve after the biggest year of their careers?
"We're just going to cozy up and probably hang with our record collection and our cats," Blue Moon Marquee front woman Jasmine Colette a.k.a. Badlands Jass (vocals/bass/drums) told Victoria News.
"I'm finally home," she says, referring to the Cowichan Valley.
And then, it's back into action again. The swing blues duo play Feb. 21, 2025 in Victoria at the McPherson and a Feb. 22 show in Vancouver at the Hollywood, and will be prepping a few months in advance for those shows.
"They're going to be really unique," Colette said. "A retrospective of our band and the story of us going from a duo who used to busk on the streets acoustically to all these albums later in a full band."
Colette and band partner A.W. Cardinal have been reflecting on where they see their band going after all the success of 2024. And they have big plans.
They will release a collaboration with Northern Cree, a highly acclaimed Indigenous singing and drumming powwow group from Maskwacis, Alta. It'll be a mix of early acoustic folk blues swing style with Cree singing and powwow drumming.
"It was a truly profound experience recording with them. We were really inspired by the documentary called Rumble, the Indians Who Rock the World ... it talks about the Indigenous influence in popular music since the turn of the 20th century," Colette said. A.W. Cardinal, one-half of the Blue Moon Marquee duo, is Indigenous himself; Alberta-born and Metis/Cree.
They're also planning an official studio follow-up to Scream, Holler, Howl and to record another album of North Americana-style versions of their songs that they first recorded in a blues style.
"I feel like especially with the blues genre, people get this very skewed idea of what the blues is, depending on your age and demographic and where you're from. I find that people's idea of the blues is very guitar-driven, like dad mall-rock blues; it's unfortunate because that's very, very different than where we come from."
The concept of reworking older songs is similar to how blues and jazz standards get reiterated over the years, or how Bob Dylan creates versions of his songs that sound like totally new songs, Colette added.
Even after 12 years of collaboration, she and Cardinal remain on the same page when it comes to their band's vision.
"We really do want to explore so many different styles," Colette said.
And even with their knack for exploration and immense growth, they still balance staying true to their roots while exploring a bigger sound.
"I think you've got to go back to the old thing of like, play tiny little dives like you're on some huge stage playing for 10,000, and play a huge stage in front of 10,000 like you're playing for 50 at a little dive.
"We're going to move towards touring with a bigger band and I think that will be really interesting for the audiences, too, who have seen us."
To sum it all up: "It's been a really wild last couple of years."
