Loud Guitars's video: Paul Deslauriers-Interview

In this business, we are often guilty of looking all around us, worldwide to find interesting players to cover and expose. We often forget to look closer to home and indeed, here in Canada we have several greats to consider. We will be covering several of those in the next few months with detailed interviews starting with this very interesting player and great friend Paul Deslauriers, Montrealer via Cornwall Ontario. This past summer, Paul had the pleasure of performing two SRO shows in his hometown of Cornwall, drawing out all of his friends , teachers and family, in short, a triumphant homecoming indeed as these were Paul's first proper gigs there in over 10 years. It is also worthy of note that Paul endorses Wizard amps, manufactured right in Cornwall, they, and he sound great. Paul left home at a young age and headed west to Vancouver Canada to seek fame and fortune in what was then, a vibrant west coast blues rock scene. He toiled several years there with his hard rocking blues rock band Black Cat Bone before finally returning east in the 90's to set up shop in Montreal. Back in Quebec, Paul was in great demand to add his strong vocal and guitaring talents to the projects of many diverse artists such as The Respectables, Amanda Marshall, France D'amour, Garou and Nicola Ciccone, to name only a few. His main goal however, was always to form his own hard rocking blues outfit. Forming his current band, a hard rocking blues trio along with the powerhouse rhythm section of Sam Harrison drums and Greg Morency bass, in 1997, Paul has been giving it his all since that time with a hard rocking blues approach that simultaneously pays tribute to his biggest guitar heros, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff and Jimmy Page. Additionally, for the past several years Paul has released several records and toured the world as one half of the acclaimed duo Dawn and Paul with the incredibly soulful Dawn Tyler Watson. This duo relies heavily on Paul's vocal and acoustic guitar talent and has been a very successful collaboration indeed. These two totally different units have garnered several awards: the Lys Blues Award for Best Artistic Performance in 2011, Album of the Year in 2008 (En Duo), and Best Musical Performance in 2005, he was also a nominated at the Canadian Maple Blues Awards in 2008 for Acoustic Act of the Year along with Dawn Tyler Watson for their album "En Duo". If that wasn't enough, Paul started a collaboration with his former sitar teacher and Indo-Pakistani roots music virtuoso Anwar Khursid which culminated in the 2013 release of "Enter the Gate" a true celebration of east meets west , raga meets blues and rock glory. The duo, supported by Paul's band performed at the 20th anniversary Tremblant Blues Festival winning the "best show" of festival award, no mean feat considering the purist blues nature of the festivals crowd. The joyous interaction between the two maestros is a beauty to behold, see it if you can. If that wasn't enough Paul has in recent times thrown his hat into the production arena. In 2010 Deslauriers was musical director, producer, and performer on the "Nos Stars Chantent Le Blues à Montréal" CD for L'équipe Spectra and the Montreal International Jazz Festival. More recently, and as a byproduct of his frequent visits to France to perform, Paul was invited to produce a record for the French rock band In Volt. That record will be released in early 2013. Loudguitars were fortunate to catch Paul during a short break in the mixing process for the next Paul Deslauriers Band as yet unnamed record, due for release in early 2013 to discuss that project and all of the others. We were fortunate to sample a couple of tracks from this upcoming release and needless to say, it is going to be killer, the best PDB project yet. Sit back and enjoy our conversation with the charismatic and talented Paul Deslauriers!! http://www.pauldeslauriers.ca