Thought Jamie was just a church organist? Guess again. Multilingual vocalist, theatrical accompanist, singer-songwriter, recording artist, keyboardist in various bands--from Toronto to Halifax, from Orillia to Ottawa, Jamie has been on the music scene in these areas and more over the course of a career spanning nearly thirty years. He has performed at noted venues such as the Ottawa Bluesfest, the Orillia Opera House, the Château Laurier, Château Montebello and the National Arts Centre.
A native of Ottawa, Jamie comes from a family that is no stranger to the professional music scene. One of his cousins is Lise Vachon, a former member of the Montreal-based pop duo Les Alexandrins with Luc Cousineau of later "Vivre en amour" fame. They recorded several albums for Capitol and later Polydor in the late 1960s and early 1970s before splitting up, and several years later Lise recorded an album of her own for the Quebec label Le Tamanoir.
After initially taking a Yamaha music course, Jamie studied classical piano on a one-on-one basis for six years and then switched to pop and jazz in 1979. In high school he played clarinet in the concert band and piano in the stage band. The latter band competed in the national finals of the Canadian Stage Band Festival at the Constellation Hotel in Toronto in 1984, where Jamie was chosen to participate in the All-Star Stage Band as the best pianist of all those that had competed. In this band, which was led by future Calgary Winter Games music director Tommy Banks, Jamie worked with Jeff Healey and Ingrid Jensen--his only time on stage with all three. Performances of this band and all the winners of the Festival were videotaped and edited into a one-shot CTV special, "Jazz at the Constellation", which aired nationally on the CTV network in January 1985.
Inspired by Lise's achievements and encouraged by his own success at the Festival, Jamie decided to make music his profession. While studying music at Humber College in Toronto, he performed as accompanist for a variety of amateur and professional musical theatre productions of shows such as Mame, The Music Man, the David Warrack musicals Piper and We Got Love and the Kander & Ebb revue Two By Five. Since his return to Ottawa in 1989 he has worked in a number of Ottawa-area bands, including Incity Dreams, Soul Review Board, Stone Soul Picnic and Hotter than Ice. In this capacity he has helped for noted musicians such as the late Albert Collins (quite possibly Collins' last appearance in Ottawa before he died) and Rufus Wainwright.
Though Jamie has played the organ for a number of Ottawa-area church services and performed background music for a variety of events for many years (including a brief stint as a cocktail pianist at the Penguin Café in Ottawa in the summer of 1985, his primary stylistic focus in terms of cover material took another shift in 2001, when his then-girlfriend, a Connecticuter of mixed Ukrainian-German ancestry, introduced him to German pop music by artists such as Juliane Werding, Nicole, Wolfgang Petry and G.G. Anderson. Inspired by the high quality of this music, he has made it his goal to expose the North American public to it. Though his repertoire now consists of a mixture of predominantly English- and German-language material by artists such as Level 42, the Bee Gees, Herbert Grönemeyer, Regy Clasen, Anja Krabbe and the German singer-songwriter Kira, he has recently begun to branch out into material in other languages as well, including Spanish, French and even Greek. Jamie is quite probably Ottawa's only source of this type of multilingual entertainment.
