Kat Dyson now lives in Los Angeles (Photo courtesy Kat Dyson)
When I explained to Cyndi Lauper some years ago that my friend, Montreal nightlife icon Plastik Patrik, and his band of glam/punk rockers and drag queens, ONE 976, did the most ferocious cover of Lauper’s Top 5 hit She Bop that I’d ever heard, Lauper bubbled with excitement.
“Plastik Patrik?” Cyndi asked. “What a fabulous name! It’d be great to have them come out and do an encore with me!”
So I tracked down Patrik in Vegas and told him to get a demo over to Cyndi’s management in NYC pronto. The rest, as they say, is local history: The night of Cyndi’s sold-out March 4, 2004, concert at Métropolis, the audience went absolutely nuts when Patrik and Cyndi sang La Vie en rose together.
Then Martha Wainwright joined them for Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Cyndi’s longtime guitarist and friend, Montreal’s very own Kat Dyson, was so blown away she said on stage, “Wow, this won’t happen tomorrow night in Toronto!”
“That’s right! I remember that night,” Kat Dyson told me this week. “I said that because I wanted [Cyndi] to know where she was!”
In other words, that Montreal isn’t like any other city.
And Dyson knows. Though she was born and raised in Virginia, she moved to Montreal in the “early 1980s” to join a new band, Tchukon, being put together by Slim Williams, a North Carolina native she’d first met at university years earlier.
“I got a call from Slim who was talking with Harold [Fisher] about putting together a band and they found an investor in Montreal,” Dyson recalls. “I came up to Montreal, things progressed, members came in, members left, we worked our way in the local scene, did a long stint at L’Air du Temps. We met folks like Nanette Workman, Walter Rossi, Pagliaro. Night Magic was still open, everybody was jamming with everybody, all different kinds of music were merging. It was a love fest. If you were good at your craft, that’s all that people cared about.”
And this weekend, 23 years after they broke up, Montreal’s legendary funk/jazz quintet Tchukon – with Dyson, Williams, Fisher, Eric Roberts and Ingrid Stitt – are reuniting for a one-night-only concert at Montreal’s PHI Centre.
It’s a big deal because back in the mid-1980s Tchukon made headlines coast-to-coast when they won Rock Wars for best musical group in Canada and then Star Search (the American Idol of its day) for best musical group in North America.
Kat Dyson was a member of Prince’s band The New Power Generation (Photo courtesy Kat Dyson)
“Star Search wasn’t a big learning curve for us because we started here [in Canada] on CBC’s Rock Wars,” Dyson says. “Tellingly, the night we won Star Search, we were in the Hyatt Hotel on Sunset [Boulevard in Los Angeles] and Little Richard was staying in the penthouse. Someone announced that we had won and people were cheering and he raised his glass and someone at the rear of the room said, ‘Here’s to the money!’ They weren’t really cheering us – they were cheering the money! And Little Richard raised his glass again and I said to myself, ‘OK, this is where we are.’ That was pretty telling.”
After Tchukon disbanded in 1990, Dyson played in bands for everybody from Donny and Marie (“They were a barrel of laughs!”) to Cyndi Lauper, with whom she continues to work. “I love Cyndi, there’s never a dull moment, she is authentically herself. She’s had to fight to be herself.”
Dyson used to back up blues icon Big Mama Thornton in Montreal and was even befriended by the legendary Odetta. “I met her through a Jubilation [Gospel Choir] concert at a gospel festival and we were sound-checking and I looked up and she was standing above me with her arms open wide and we just became best friends.”
Along the way Dyson was also hired to be a member of Prince’s band, The New Power Generation, recording three albums with him (Emancipation, The Truth and Newpowersoul).
I ask Kat how she fell in with Prince and she replies, “There is no falling in with Prince! You get called, you audition. That’s pretty much it. There’s no falling in! Sheila E. saw myself and Rhonda [Smith] at a trade show in Europe and we started working with her, doing some writing. Then when Prince was looking for new band members, she said, ‘I sent him your stuff.’ She did that. We had no idea. Then he called, we auditioned and that’s how it goes.”
Prince heard in Dyson what one of her mentors – Dr. Trevor Payne of the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir – heard years earlier. “When I [first] arrived here I heard about the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir – I married a Canadian who was a part of it – and the choir was part of Union United [Church back then]. They were part of the [black] community, so it was part of [my] natural progression.”
Kat Dyson (Photo by Steve Parke, courtesy Kat Dyson)
I can still hear Dyson playing guitar and singing O Mary Don’t You Weep. In fact, Payne himself once told me, “Many [other choir members] have gone on to perform on Broadway [and such], but Kat is the most accomplished and most humble that came through the choir.”
Dyson has kept in touch with Payne (“I was part of the choir’s 30th anniversary concert in Montreal this past December”) and this week during rehearsals for the Tchukon reunion concert, Kat says, “This reunion is fun, we’re all friends. We never lost contact over the years. We just pick up where we left off and play.”
Dyson says she is also “trying to pay it forward” by working with new and emerging artists in Los Angeles, and continues to work with the Black Rock Coalition all-female orchestra. “We’re headed to Europe this summer,” she says.
So I mention to Dyson that many black musicians have left Montreal because the city’s R’n’B scene has been displaced by the white indie-rock scene.
But Dyson fine-tunes my assessment, telling me, “Montreal has been and will always be an open and creative gate for all kinds of music. I worked with all kinds of people in Montreal, making all kinds of music. The indie-rock scene has always co-existed with the R’n’B scene – it’s the attitude and the perception of the people who run the establishments. They’re looking to make a quick buck and if they think kids out there want more rock, then they shut the R’n’B places down.
“It’s not that [black] musicians have left because of the rock scene, but because there aren’t any venues that will have them. It’s like playing roulette and the Number 12 wins, then everybody puts their money on 12. But historically in Montreal rock and soul and blues and jazz have co-existed as neighbours for decades. People still want variety and if they [the clubs] open up their minds, the people who love that music will come.”
Tchukon headlines the PHI Centre (407 Rue St-Pierre) in Old Montreal, Feb. 9 at 8 p.m. Click here for tickets and more info.
Click here for Kat Dyson’s official website, and click here for Bill Brownstein’s Gazette interview with Slim Williams.
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