homemade by maurice richard libby.blues

Maurice spent a year at the Berklee College of music in Boston studying Jazz and Composition where he met, studied with, and hung out with musicians like Jazz great Gary Burton, pianist Al Copley (cofounder of Roomful of Blues), and bassist Ron McCLure ( bassist with Charles Lloyd, Wynton Kelly, Quest, The 4th Way, Joe Henderson, Blood, Sweat & Tears, The Pointer Sisters, Sarah Vaughn, Thelonious Monk)

After playing guitar in a number of club acts in Regina, Saskatoon, and Kitchener he moved to Toronto where he started Dirty Movies, a power pop band that featured drummer Mark French, who left the band to tour with Blue Rodeo. Dirty Movies was a staple of the Toronto club and campus scene for the three years of its existence.

Finally giving up on the commercial scene, he went back to his one true musical love and formed the blues unit Automatic Slim. Automatic Slim was a popular live act playing classic venues like The El Macombo, The Silver Dollar Saloon, and the Black Swan. The band was at one time house band at four different clubs on different nights of the week, and was noted for having best grossing Wednesday night downstairs at the El Macombo. Maurice at various times shared the stage with people like Michael Picket and the Kendall-Wall Blues band.

Personnel problems shut down Automatic Slim, so Maurice embarked on a solo career, playing jazz in Toronto clubs, then returned to Saskatchewan, where he is playing both solo in various group formations.

Maurice is an explorer of the blues. He says, "I stay true to the spirit of the music, walking the tightrope between the spiritual and the profane. I play old tunes by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf-all the greats --and some unusual stuff like some Fats Waller. I do a lot of original tunes as well - twelve bar blues with lyrics that speak to contemporary experience. I'm sure not going to try to write like a sharecropper from Mississippi."

The CD began as summing up of the last few years of writing and playing. Most of the tunes were written for Automatic Slim, but never got recorded properly. "I was having trouble finding people to play with, so I ended up doing the whole CD by myself, putting in midi parts where I could play the parts myself. Despite that I tried to give the thing a real live flavor. It's a little unorthodox for a blues guy to admit to using digital instruments, but, whatever--I was never good at staying inside the lines anyway. I tried to cover as many blues genres as I could here, from Delta blues to Hiphop, but it's still all blues."

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