The bop-py, jazzy sounds of Juno Award-winning musician Amos Garrett will be heard next week in downtown Red Deer.
The Hub on Ross will host the Amos Garrett Jazz Trio at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 11.
Detroit-born Garrett most recently put out an acclaimed CD called Get Way Back, A Tribute to Percy Mayfield.
The musician, who was raised in Toronto and Montreal, studied piano and trombone as a child, and picked up the guitar as a teenager by watching performers such as Ben E. King, T-Bone Walker, Fats Domino and B.B. King play at Montreal’s Esquire Club.
After embarking on a career in music in the early 1960s, Garrett played with the Toronto-based jug band The Dirty Shames and moved on to a two-year stint playing and recording with the Ian and Sylvia duo, becoming a founding member of Great Speckled Bird.
Garrett developed his own technique of bending more than one guitar string at a time, which allowed him to sound like a pedal-steel guitarist at times, while remaining rooted in the jazz style.
Upon moving to New York State in 1970, Garrett played with musicians such as Todd Rundgren, Hungry Chuck, Jesse Winchester, and Maria and Geoff Muldaur’s band. He perhaps remains best known for his guitar solo on Maria Muldaur’s 1974 hit Midnight at the Oasis — although Garrett has recorded with more than 150 artists, including Stevie Wonder, Pearls Before Swine, Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Riatt, and can also be heard on Anne Murray’s chart-topping hit Snowbird.
Garrett became tired of being a “hired gun” for various bands, because he wanted to do his own singing. He moved to Alberta in 1989 after he began releasing material though Edmonton’s Stony Plain Records.
Garrett, who won a Juno Award for the collaborative 1989 album The Return of the Formerly Brothers, keeps busy with three different bands, his acoustic act, a blues band and his ever-popular jazz trio.
Tickets are $20 a person or $40 for families from The Hub, 4936 Ross St. 403-340-4869.