Khari Wendell McClelland is an American musician and music historian living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a member of the gospel trio Sojourners. He is known for his multimedia show, Freedom Singer, which depicts his research into the music of slaves who travelled on the underground railway to Canada.
McClelland was born and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. [1] He moved to Canada in about 2006.
McClelland joined the gospel trio Sojourners in 2011, replacing founding member Ron Small. [2]
In 2015 McClelland travelled around Canada with CBC's Jodie Martinson, collecting and studying traditional songs and gospel music brought to Canada by fugitive slaves. [3] The trip was the subject of a one-hour documentary for the CBC Television show Absolutely Canadian.
McClelland released his debut solo album, Fleeting is the Time, in 2016. [4]
In 2017, with Martinson and director Andrew Kushnir, he developed a multimedia show, Freedom Singer, showing the results of his research and performing his own versions of songs that he had discovered. [5] [3] The show was performed across Canada in 2017 and 2018. [6] [7]
In 2018 McClelland took over as MC of the Eastside Heart of the City Festival in Vancouver. [8] Also that year he performed as part of the Mad Dogs and Vancouverites concert in Vancouver, [9] and continued to perform with the Sojourners, including a concert with blues musician Jim Byrnes. [10]
Spirituals is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs," work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres emerged from the spirituals songcraft.
Spirit of the West were a Canadian folk rock band from North Vancouver, active from 1983 to 2016. They were popular on the Canadian folk music scene in the 1980s before evolving a blend of hard rock, Britpop, and Celtic folk influences which made them one of Canada's most successful alternative rock acts in the 1990s.
Thomas Lazare Wilson is a Canadian rock musician from Hamilton, Ontario. A veteran of the Canadian music scene, Wilson has been a writer and performer for many years. Wilson's eclectic musical style has ranged from the psychobilly / R&B sounds of the Florida Razors, to the western/roots style of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings and the funk/blues-inspired rock of Junkhouse.
John Fraser Mann was a Canadian rock musician, songwriter and actor. He was best known as the frontman of the folk rock band Spirit of the West.
Benjamin Mink is a Canadian songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer best known as a longtime collaborator of Canadian singer k.d. lang. He plays several string instruments, notably the guitar, violin, and the mandolin, and is a music producer. He lives in Vancouver.
Thomas James Hunter, CM, O.Ont is a Canadian country music performer, known as "Canada's Country Gentleman".
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Luke Doucet is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has written and performed as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock band Veal and the folk rock band Whitehorse.
James Thomas Kevin Byrnes OBC is an American actor and blues musician.
Chad Allan, is a Canadian musician who was the founding member and original lead singer of the Guess Who.
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Eric Yick Keung San, better known by his stage name Kid Koala, is a Canadian scratch DJ, music producer, theatre producer, film composer, multimedia-performer and visual artist. His career began as a scratch DJ in 1994. Kid Koala works with genres as eclectic as hip hop, ambient, alternative, contemporary classical, blues, classic rock and traditional jazz. He has released 5 solo albums on Ninja Tune, and 3 albums on Arts & Crafts Records, the most recent being Music To Draw To: IO featuring Trixie Whitley. He has also released two award-winning graphic novels: Nufonia Must Fall and Space Cadet. He has collaborated with artists such as Gorillaz, The Slew, Lovage, The Afiara String Quartet, and Deltron 3030.
Phil Dwyer is a Canadian jazz saxophonist, pianist, composer, producer and educator. In 2017 he graduated from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) Faculty of Law in Fredericton, New Brunswick and was called to the bar of British Columbia in 2018. Dwyer is Member of the Order of Canada, having been invested in 2013 "For his contributions to jazz as a performer, composer and producer, and for increasing access to music education in his community." Dwyer has been nominated for Juno Awards six times and won Best Mainstream Jazz Album in 1994 with Dave Young for Fables and Dreams and Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year in 2012 for the recording Changing Seasons. Dwyer has also appeared on Juno Award winning recordings with Hugh Fraser (1988), Joe Sealy (1997), Natalie MacMaster (2000), Guido Basso (2004), Don Thompson (2006), Molly Johnson (2009), Terry Clarke (2010), and Diana Panton (2015). He is an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of The Royal Conservatory of Music.
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