"I'm the music this year," confirms Rich Terfry, a.k.a. Buck 65, of his house band role of sorts at the 2006 Juno Awards broadcast live on CTV on April 2 from the Halifax Metro Centre, in Nova Scotia, where he was born.
Buck 65 is also nominated for video of the year at the Junos for "Devil's Eyes" off his 2005 album "Secret House Against The World," which he co-directed with Micah Meisner. In 2004, he won best alternative album for his 2003 breakthrough "Talkin' Honky Blues."
The MC, musician and turntablist who creates an arty mix of hip hop, rock, folk, jazz and the kitchen sink with a deep throaty spoken-word delivery bordering on rap, hails from Mount Uniacke, NS, a tiny rural town of a few thousand residents about 45 km west of Halifax, where he later lived and cut his rap teeth.
Terfry first heard rap in the mid-'80s on Halifax's Dalhousie University station CKDU, whose then 33-watt signal he was able to receive by climbing a tree in his yard. He later hosted his own hip hop show there, initially under the name The Bassment, then The Treatment, while working on his music career. He's since become internationally recognized for his eclectic songs and clever wordsmithery, touring all over the world, and counting Radiohead and Vincent Gallo among his fans.
"(The Junos) are happening in my hometown this year which may have been something that they considered. Maybe not. I'm not sure," says Terfry of the opportunity presented to him by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) and Toronto-based Insight productions to do the incidental music.
"But also I think they wanted to do something new and maybe something that you could see as, I know if 'edgy' is the word, but there seems to be an awareness that the international perception of Canadian music is really changing and it's an exciting time right now and they want the show to reflect that. I think there's a little more of an eye to being hip and putting together a great show than maybe ever before."
Terfry will create the main music for the awards ceremony, including the opening theme and any incidental music between performers and award presentations.
"That will all be me. I still have to get to work on that. We've been toying with some ideas but we really haven't come up with that music yet," he says from his home in Paris, France. "They'll be the opening theme and that will serve as the template probably for the entire program, so you'll hear variations on that theme throughout, but they'll also be the need for some other pieces of music here and there."
He's pretty positive the opening will have vocals. "I guess it was (2002) when Barkenaked Ladies hosted and they did a musical intro kind of thing and, vaguely speaking, it could be something along those lines."
Terfry, who has been known to perform solo with his turntable and a lightbulb over his head as well as with a full band, says he is going with "a small group of us" for this opportunity. And he thinks they will be on the stage, not in some kind of pit like at a theatre production.
"I think off the top of the show, we'll be in one position and then move somewhere else after and we'll probably be somewhere there on the floor, but even a lot of those details that are still being hammered out," he says.
Once quite a tame affair that catered more to an older viewer, recent years have seen Juno Awards appeal to the very demographic the record labels gear most of their marketing campaigns all year (by having performances by acts like Feist and Billy Talent and this year Broken Social Scene and Bedouin Soundclash). Inviting Terfry to create the music for the show is quite an adventurous, cool move for CARAS, the organization which presents the Junos.
"It is hard to get people to take risks in high places, but when the Barenaked Ladies were hosting, these are guys that are very witty and there were some good laughs there. So they (CARAS) do have a bit of a sense of humour."
Terfry expects to be asked to submit his music in advance to CARAS, but would like to be able to do some improvising on the show.
"I anticipate that every step of the way there will have to be some kind of approval for things," he says. "I'm hoping that there will be some good room for some freedom there and to have some fun and so on, but when you're looking at this huge thing on national television, as you can expect -- and I've got a little bit of experience doing this kind of thing before -- everyone wants to run a very tight ship."
His little bit of experience was at the 2003 NHL Awards at Toronto's John Bassett Theatre. He opened the show with a live rap/spoken word performance set to a retrospective on the hockey season, then scratched and emceed from a balcony. "(It was) such a humorless event that anytime I tried to do anything that seemed at all like fun, it was shut down right away - 'No you can't do that,'" he says.
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