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Pop-rock band Wide Mouth Mason (WMM) will hit the stage tonight for the first show by a Canadian rock band in China.
It will be held at the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing and then the group will start a tour of Shijiazhuang and Baoding in Hebei Province, Taiyuan in Shanxi and Wuhan in Hubei.
As one of Canada's more interesting musical exports, WMM, a trio comprised of Shaun Verreault (vocals, guitar), Safwan Javed (percussion, vocals) and Earl Pereira (bass, vocals), manages to breathe new life into the blues-rock concept.
All members, in their 20s, come from Saskatchewan, a Canadian prairie province known for agriculture.
Picture a scene in Saskatchewan of two young boys (Verreault and Javed) banging on the pots and pans of a mother's kitchen, beating out rhythms that would eventually morph into chart-topping hits.
It is from this quaint rural kitchen scene that the band found its name, deriving WMM from the canning jar of the same moniker.
They later met Pereira in high school and began playing together in 1993. Two years later their first performance as a group came in rural Alberta.
In 1996, the band impressed the pop circle of Canada with their initial independent release "The Nazarene."
Later that year, they signed with Warner Music Canada and their debut album on the label released in March of 1997 was a remake of their independent release with two new tracks added.
During the past 10 years, the band has seen its fan base grow in Canada and extend to other areas of the world, such as the United States and Europe.
They have played at many different music festivals, including the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1997.
Each time the band has demonstrated their innate ability to tailor their performance to the size of the audience and the environment.
WMM has the rare ability to not just sense the music the audience is hoping to hear, but to surprise even the most jaded listener with their versatility and range.
The trio excels at performing live and whether adding funk to what would normally be a blues standard or pulling the rawness of guitar and hard rhythms to introduce and invigorate the band's sound, every show is different.
"It is the opportunity of hearing the guys perform live that is something not easily described or captured, only experienced," said Linda Fu with Warner Music China.
The band says they can never be adequately identified by music industry labels.
"It's weird because people have labeled us everything from acid jazz to classic rock to blues rock," Javed said.
"Actually, I'm happy we are so hard to describe because we have broad tastes and so does the world."
"We're multicultural. We just like music, we explore everything we can in the world of music," Verreault said.
(China Daily November 28, 2002)
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