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Wilson Laurencin
(September 2005 Issue)
Late
Night In Canada If
you live anywhere in Canada or the northern states, you're going to
recognize Wilson Laurencin from the
television show Open Mike With Mike
Bullard. And you don't have to wait the whole show to catch a glimpse
of Wilson,
either. The camera's constantly on the house band as they
provide a foil to the host. In Canada, the Bullard show ratings
have
soared beyond Letterman, Leno, and other late-night alternatives.
"The show has its benefits," says Wilson.
"We get to play with
guest artists like Roger Hodgson of Supertramp, Victor Wooten, and
saxophonist Dave Koz. The
challenge is that we don't get a lot of
rehearsal time. Fortunately there haven't been any train wrecks. In
fact, the
less rehearsal I have, the more I concentrate."
Laurencin sat in the audience of the Letterman Show once, just
to get
a feel for the competition. His impressions? "Our show is
different as far as the music is concerned," he explains. "We
don't
play covers. Everybody in the band writes 'bumpers' [musical segments
leading to commercials]. The
interaction of the band and host is also
different. With us, it's the whole band and the host, not just the
bandleader.
Somebody emailed and asked Mike why he didn't talk to me as
much as the other guys. So for a whole evening he made
me sit with him
as co-host!"
In his down time, Wilson does sessions. Recently he recorded
Len's You
Can't Stop The Bum Rush, which is a huge hit across the
States. "It was weird recording that--me alone with a click track.
Then
they wrote the music to the drums."
Speaking about weird, take Laurencin's gig with
Canada's
street corner drummer, Graeme Kirkland. The instrumentation includes
four drumset players, two violins, bass,
dancers, and a golfer. "When
the golfer would make a shot, the music would stop, and the dancers
would freeze," laughs
Wilson. "It was out, man!"
Down a more well-trodden path, Laurencin is following up his
success in the realm of
sampling CDs, which he's produced with Bernard
Purdie and Clyde Stubblefield, and is releasing his own in response
to
the growing market for drum loops. You might also want to watch
Wilson's Web site,www.bigbeatmusic.com, for news of a solo
album.
T. Bruce Wittet
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