Canadian Blues
One late evening back in the summer of 1985, I was walking down Queen Street in Toronto. It was getting time to wrap up the evening, but there was still one last detail: 
LAST CALL
I would walk a little further down and see what was happening at The Pine Tree Tavern. As I approached the bar I could hear the sounds of wailing guitar riffs. I hadn’t been at The Pine Tree very often, but never had I heard anything like that in the evening breeze. As I entered the place, I noticed it was packed with people glued to the performers on stage. Most of the people there, including me, heard The Jeff Healey Band for the first time. We all stood there in astonishment and realized we were witnessing a promising star first hand. It was one of those rare special moments. I always considered myself very fortunate that I was at that place at that moment in time.
Healey was born in Toronto’s west end. He was most noted as being the blind performer who uniquely played his guitar flat on his lap. He lost his vision at the age of one due to cancer. Regardless of his infliction, he started to played guitar the age of three; continuing to hone his unique style of playing.
In my early to mid teens I was working in a record boutique. With my odd fascination with blues and jazz for my age, I was given the task of keeping all the albums in the bins stocked properly. I had a lot of knowledge of the genres, but my age would quite often be challenging. I knew I had a huge learning curve if I was going to get any kind of respect. I would have to do a lot of listening and reading to obtain this. To be honest what attracted me to Joe Zawinul was the album covers of Weather Report; fascinating covers to this day. Because I had to keep track with what was sold, I remember having to order a lot of Weather Report albums especially the album Heavy Weather. After going back and listening to some of their previous releases I was hooked.
I don’t think there’s been a single song that has made me tap my foot or snap my fingers more to its groove than Joe Zawinul’s Birdland. It was very sad to hear on Sept 11th 2007 of his passing at the age of 75. He suffered from a rare form of skin cancer.
I was asked recently who I thought had the best guitar sound. I immediately thought of players like Jeff Beck and Brian May. There was no doubt that they have a unique characteristic that instantly identifies them. Keeping things in the blues and jazz genre, there was one other name that immediately comes to mind, Gary Moore. 
