The Henrys remain a well-kept secret Band bigger outside its native Canada. CHRIS PROBERT Special to The Globe and Mail Friday, May 28, 1999 Toronto -- In a world where really good undiscovered acts stay undiscovered for, oh, maybe two days, the Henrys have pulled off that feat for a good 10 years now -- even though they've released three CDs, developed a strong cult following here and elsewhere, and become the subject of a bootleg recording of a date they did at New York's famous Bottom Line club. The band -- a quartet led by guitarist Don Rooke -- slunk into Rock-It on Toronto's Church Street Wednesday evening for a rare, virtually unadvertised hometown gig before 80 enthusiastic fans. On record at least, the Henrys are noted for their subtle blend of jazz, rock, blues and country motifs that are squeezed into eccentric song structures with such titles as Why, Arizona; Travels with My Ant;and Hey, Pal, I Wear the Dress in this Family. All these conceits were on display Wednesday, but the arrival of Gary Breit on organ, alongside bassist Paul Pasmore and drummer Mike Billard, has resulted in a more aggressive delivery. The tunes were taken mostly from the band's second and third CDs, interspersed with a few new numbers. The group worked its way into a hypnotic groove, and seemed particularly inspired in the interplay among the members during the lengthy second set, a highlight of which was an infectious 20-minute medley. While the Henrys are almost exclusively an instrumental group, they've been joined on each of their CDs by Canada's legendarily elusive chanteuse, Mary Margaret O'Hara. (She did not, however, appear Wednesday.) Rooke played with O'Hara for five years and appeared on her only recording to date, the famous Miss America from 1988. O'Hara's contributions to the Henrys' oeuvre have divided into proper songs and exercises in jazz vocal, the effect of which can be disconcerting -- like coming upon a person in the street carrying on an animated conversation with herself. She remains a cult favourite, and her association with the Henrys -- given the fact that she hasn't recorded in her own right for a decade -- has no doubt helped the group's appeal, especially in Europe. In fact, in an interview before the Rock-It gig, Rooke confirmed that Canada ranks third behind Europe and the United States in terms of Henrys sales. It's all relative, of course. The band has collected a sheaf of admiring reviews in British and continental European music publications, as well as in such U.S. magazines as Guitar Player. While Canadian dates are decidedly infrequent and its recordings are hard to find here, the group has played at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex., and a pop festival in New Zealand. This July, it's appearing at one of Europe's largest jazz festivals, the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, the Dutch capital. For all their self-effacing charm and low profile, the Henrys remain a going concern. Rooke spends a fair amount of time on administrative matters connected with the band. "It takes up more time than it should, considering how rarely we play," he said. The Henrys' march to world domination is slow, but there is a tenacity which (like so many things about the group) is not immediately apparent. Of course, true-blue fans don't want the Henrys to get too famous. Like all aficionados of things rare, true and interesting, they want the band to stick around, and that means bringing new recruits into the fold. At the same time, they'd prefer it if the Henrys stayed a well-known secret and not break the bonds of intimacy that have been established between performer and audience in the course of a decade. The Henrys appear in Toronto as part of the North by Northwest Festival, at the Rex Hotel, on June 10. ------------------------- The elusive Henrys make a Joyous appearance By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN Friday, December 6, 2002 ñ Page R9 The Henrys Hugh's Room in Toronto on Wednesday If there's one thing the Henrys have learned about show business, it's that you should always leave 'em wanting more. The elusive Toronto band accomplishes this in the easiest possible way, by hardly ever playing in public. A new album is almost the only thing guaranteed to get them on stage. Even then, the Henrys do not rush to meet their public: Wednesday's CD-release show took place four months after Joyous Porous, the band's fourth album, came into the world. Pent-up demand filled the tiered and tabled space of Hugh's Room. By the end of the set, you could almost hear the thought in most minds: "Why don't you guys do this more often?" The Henrys' distinctive sound is rooted in leader Don Rooke's kona guitar, from which he can nurse everything from a voice-like slide tone to something as dry and articulate as a kalimba. He's a speculative kind of musician, fond of abstract ways of looking at small riffs or old-sounding tunes. His partners share his thoughtful, follow-your-nose approach, though in all other ways they're as independent as cats. Jorn Andersen's drumming, like all good percussion, supplied a grid for everyone to work with, but also shot out a stream of witty annotations, buffing the beat smooth or nailing it with a sharp whack. Like a classical actor, Andersen prefers clear diction to noise and commotion, which meant a miserly hand with the cymbals and a mostly bone-dry tip to his stick. Rob Gusevs's organ padded around on soft paws all night, curling through the music so subtly that you almost didn't notice how neatly it balanced things out. John Dymond's bass came to the fore in a fine solo late in the set, elsewhere partnering Rooke's melodic excursions without missing a step. Michael White lobbed his contributions in from a more distant neighbourhood, coaxing a soulful moan from a conch shell, blowing small fantasias on trumpet, or fooling obscurely with a pile of spaghetti-cabled electronics. The weird stuff that eked from his rig during Thought You'd Never Ask put a special dreamland gloss on this sepia-toned melody. The Henrys' material wandered all over the lot, skirting the blues in one number, flirting with tango in another. Some tunes were a bit too tightly chained to a single riff, though this mattered less when the band let go into jams such as Rash, in which a resonator gizmo gave Rooke's kona yet another tone of voice. Such subtle variations would have been lost in most Toronto clubs, but the attentive crowd and superb acoustics at Hugh's Room let them be heard with perfect clarity. This has to be the best small room for music in the city. The show's only disappointment was the non-appearance of Joyous Porous vocalist Mary Margaret O'Hara, who proved herself even more elusive than the Henrys. The nicest surprise, to my unacquainted ear, was the elegant opening set by Dan Kershaw, who joined with fellow guitarists Burke Carroll and David Baxter for a short set of fine-grained urban country songs, including one about a girl named Maybelline that fused affection and parody in a tune that chug-chugged along at the speed of an old 78. ------------------------ Music that dares to colour outside the lines Globe and Mail, Toronto, Monday, April 26, 1999 DAVID MACFARLANE A friend of mine, who is the fount of all popular and not-so-popular musical knowledge, had me over the other day to listen to three CDs by a Toronto band called The Henrys. "A band whose name does not give us the highest of hopes," said New York's Time Out magazine, which more or less summed up my own misgivings when, on a rainy April afternoon, my friend suggested I drop in and give the complete recordings of The Henrys -- Puerto Angel, Chasing Grace, and Desert Cure -- a listen. Not that I tend to doubt my friend's musical suggestions, although his Bulgarian-choir phase a few years ago did give me some pause, as does his undying enthusiasm for Captain Beefheart. On the other hand, he does like The Kinks, Alan Sherman and the esoteric jazz of Toronto's Bill Grove, a triangulation of tastes that I can't share with very many other people on the planet. He introduced me to the music of Kevin Breit's excellent Toronto band, The Sisters Euclid. And he lets me know whenever the guitar player's guitar player, Richard Thompson, is coming to town. He even manages to overlook the fact that I have been to a Rolling Stones concert in recent memory and, what's more, profess to have enjoyed myself there. He knows that musical tastes are full of strange twists and turns. If I want to sit a quarter of a mile away from a stage populated by very old and very rich rock stars, he's not going to be too critical. What I admire most about my friend's musical taste -- aside from what we might call his 24-hour, completely obsessional enthusiasm -- is his disregard for musical boundaries. I've always wanted to know how he answers the question, "What kind of music do you listen to?" that stereo-equipment salesmen always ask before they go get the Eric Clapton or Pavarotti or Themes from the Movies or Bill Evans CD to show off their speakers. My friend likes both Otis Redding and Nirvana, both Louis Armstrong and Ornette Coleman. He is, I believe, the only person in the world who has listened to the Basement Tapes so closely and carefully that he realized -- with a bit of a start -- that at one point on this collection of fascinating but generally godawful 30-year-old recordings, Bob Dylan and The Band are goofing around with an obscure Ian and Sylvia song whose lyrics were written by "a Toronto newspaperman" named Peter Gzowski. Dylan's version was news to Gzowski. Basically, my friend listens to anything that's interesting and anything that's good. Beyond that, he doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about categories. Bebop, rock, blues, country, rock 'n' roll, folk, swing, folk-rock, big-band, fusion, bluegrass -- he couldn't care less. You don't know what random is until you've heard my friend put a half-dozen CDs in his Rolls Royce of a stereo system and push Random Select. There aren't many living rooms where you can go from Spike Jones to Duke Ellington to Phil Ochs to Nick Lowe to Miles Davis to his latest discovery, Eleni Mandell. Which is why he wanted me to hear The Henrys. I think there are two things that my friend likes about them. One was immediately obvious: The Henrys are good. Very good, really. With Don Rooke on slide (and "Hawaiian") guitar, Monte Horton on acoustic and electric guitar, John Sheard on organ and keyboard, Michael Billard on drums, David Trevis on bass, Michael White on trumpet, and with a little help from friends such as singer Mary Margaret O'Hara, violinist Hugh Marsh, and sax player Ernie Tollar, The Henrys produce exquisite music. "Wonderfully arranged, sharply talented, and springing from the sheer joy of playing. In a time where most see 'roots rock' as a return to simpler folk forms, the Henrys distinguish themselves by adding flourishes that accentuate and decorate the music into something extraordinary," said Ink Magazine. But -- and this is the second aspect of The Henrys that I believe draws my music-loving friend to them -- they are utterly without category. You might call them blues-country-jazz. On the other hand, you might not. No clerk in Sam's or HMV would easily know exactly what rack to put them in. Not many radio stations would know what to do with them. They are, as a matter of fact, a perfect reflection of my friend's discerning but absolutely unbounded musical taste: They're good, and that, apparently, is good enough for them. And that, my friend believes, is why they are not more well-known. They aren't difficult or inaccessible. A lot of their music is downright pretty. But they can't be easily pigeon-holed, and commercial success is increasingly dependent on the need to be slotted -- by marketing people, by PR people, by radio and television stations, by distributors, by purchasers, and by clerks in music shops whose job it is to put the right CDs on the right shelves. If you're adventurous, talented, irrepressible and prone to drawing inspiration from all over the musical map, you're not going to end up in the front window of Sam's or HMV -- however much you deserve to be there. Just being good isn't a narrow enough category these days -- except, of course, in my friend's living room. Being there won't pay many bills, I know. But on a rainy April afternoon, there are worse places for the real music of real musicians to end up. ------------------------ INDIE EYE - eye magazine May 20, 1999 Desert therapy Getting drunk on the Henrys BY MICHAEL BARCLAY In Webster's New World Dictionary, the term "intoxication" is defined as: "to affect the nervous system so as to cause a loss of control." Local instrumental combo the Henrys don't cause the kind of loss of control that a rock show or rave might, but their mesmerizing music is capable of intoxication. The slow, loping grooves and intricate playing on their latest disc, Desert Cure, is capable of crawling between your synaptic gaps and prodding your neurons like fine scotch. The Henrys' not-so-secret weapon is leader Don Rooke's deft skill on a variety of slide guitars, particularly the Hawaiian kona, which lies at the core of the band's dream-state soundtracks. When asked to explain the neurological effects of his music, Rooke wryly turns the question back. "I don't know. I've never heard that. Have you been drinking today?" Well, no, but investing in the Henrys' discography is akin to discovering a mythical liquor cabinet that's never bare. Described by Rooke as "roots music with a jazz vocabulary," it's also tailor-made for the Tired Rock Critic Cliche of the Month, providing "soundtracks for a film that doesn't exist." Despite the band's cinematic, moody nature, no one has had the vision to incorporate the Henrys into a film. "No matter how many times people have told us we'd be good for that, it hasn't happened," says Rooke. "That's a natural evolution, and I'd love to give it a try. Our music was used on a couple of TV shows, like Black Harbour and The Rez. It'd be nice, but I don't know how to hustle it. I just hope that if we stick around long enough, someone might notice that potential." How long is long enough? The Henrys are celebrating their 10th anniversary this year, albeit in their typically low-key style. They were formed when Rooke was serving as Mary Margaret O'Hara's touring guitarist; his heartbreaking slide work is immortalized on O'Hara's solitary masterpiece Miss America. Rooke started the Henrys with bassist Paul Passmore, who recently returned to the fold. The line-up has always been in "a state of flux, either to change the sound or people moving on or whatever," Rooke explains, and currently features Rooke, Passmore, drummer Michael Billard and organist Gary Breit. The connection with the elusive O'Hara is a frequent entry point for newcomers. She's appeared on each Henrys album, sometimes debuting her new songs; "Dark Dear Heart," later covered by Holly Cole on her album of the same name, first surfaced on the Henrys' Puerto Angel in 1994. On Desert Cure, O'Hara's role is mostly improvisational, with the exception of "The Goddess Maya," co-written with Rooke. "She always fits into my mind beautifully, and it's great to have her perform on the record," says the soft-spoken Rooke. Don't expect any surprise live appearances from O'Hara, however. Hometown live appearances by the Henrys are infrequent themselves; Wednesday's Rockit show (re-scheduled from the Oasis) and a NXNE gig on June 10 are two rare chances to see them. Rooke, who admits his band pursues "not exactly an aggressive marketing strategy," says the only place the Henrys' records have distribution is Italy. Whether it's the universal language of instrumental music, the O'Hara connection or the possibility that great music will find an audience no matter what, the Henrys have made some valuable connections abroad. In January they participated in a New Zealand festival, where they managed to snap a picture of Elvis Costello proudly holding a copy of Desert Cure. In July, they'll play the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, alongside Ben Harper, Bill Frisell, Isaac Hayes and other artists of their calibre. "We'll be a minor attraction," says the ever-modest Rooke. The Henrys play Rockit Wednesday. ----------------------- Thursday, January 14, 1999 Copyright 1999 The New York Times Pop Life: Treats for Off-the-Menu Tastes NEW YORK -- When critics say it was a mediocre year for music, that's not the whole story. What they mean to say is that it was a mediocre year for popular music. With more than 25,000 albums released last year, the laws of probability predict that at least a few dozen will fit each taste. The problem is finding them. Record labels and radio stations often make their decisions based on trends, genres and lifestyle instead of along purely musical lines. When the right music is released at the wrong time, it can slip by unnoticed. Below, the pop and jazz critics of The New York Times list some favorite albums you may not have heard last year. Some are hard to find because they are on small independent or specialty labels; others were released only abroad, and a few were neglected by their own U.S. record companies. Hunting for some of these records can be an adventure. 9. The Henrys, "Desert Cure" (Trainrec/Canadian Arts Council). Don Rooke's work on various slide guitars, from the kona to the lap steel to something called a sonar zombie, recalls the erudite ramblings of Bill Frisell. This ensemble (which sometimes includes the vocalist Mary Margaret O'Hara) surrounds his playing with sunset tones. ----------------