Blast From The Past

A homecoming concert in the church hall on the waterfront, where I recorded my first album seventeen years earlier. The piano has finally been tuned. Doreen Fraser came out of retirement for the bass, and the chowder supper in the basement was as good as I remembered.

Three months in Salvador and Recife in 2010 turned into Postcards from Brazil. In February 2011 we went back with the finished songs and played them on a street stage in Olinda during carnival, between two frevo bands and a man selling coconuts from a wheelbarrow.

The band started as a summer job: Thursday nights on the terrace of the Hotel Mar Alto in Cascais, June to September 2008. The next spring we recorded Salt Air in the hotel's ballroom in one weekend. It came out in May 2009, and that summer the hotel put our name on the board by the door.

I came to Lisbon for one winter in 2007 to write, and stayed. The first gigs were in a cafe near the Sao Bento market, on a piano with a sticky E flat, for whoever was still awake. By spring there was a regular table of strangers who became friends, and one of them owned a bar in Alfama.

The Parfumerie played for six weeks at a small theatre in Montreal in the winter of 2006, and I played the piano at every performance from a little balcony above the stage. The cast still sends me a postcard every year on the anniversary of the opening night.