BEDOUIN SOUNDCLASH
With: Carmanah
When: Thursday, Feb. 16, 8 p.m.
Where: Capital Ballroom, 858 Yates St.
Tickets: $38.11 from
Born in Montreal, raised in Vancouver and based for years in Toronto, Bedouin Soundclash singer-guitarist Jay Malinowski moved with his wife, fiddler and stepdancer Stephanie Cadman, to Salt Spring Island in 2019. The couple eventually relocated, with their young son, to Victoria.
In a recent interview with the Times Colonist, Malinowski said he did not expect the move would be so beneficial to his personal and professional growth. Bedouin Soundclash’s sixth album, We Will Meet in a Hurricane, was written and recorded here, and features several notable Victoria musicians.
“We absolutely love it here,” Malinowski said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t have gratitude for where I live. I grew up in Vancouver, but in Victoria there’s just a different vibe.”
Bedouin Soundclash first encountered substantial success with its second album, Sounding a Mosaic. Though the 2004 recording was released in sa国际传媒 on a small independent label, it spawned a career-making hit, When the Night Feels My Song, which led to all sorts of opportunities and achievements for co-founders Malinowski, bassist Eon Sinclair and drummer Pat Pengelly.
A Juno Award nomination for song of the year and tours with reggae luminaries The Skatalites and Burning Spear followed. Sounding a Mosaic (featuring cover art by Malinowski) was eventually certified platinum, for 100,000 copies sold, and made it into the Top 10 of Billboard’s reggae charts.
It was a rollercoaster ride in the years to follow, with Bedouin Soundclash entering into nearly a decade of inactivity as a group. Both Malinowski and Sinclair kept busy with individual projects before regrouping in 2019 for the comeback album, MASS, with new drummer Chuck Treece.
The landscape has changed, Malinowski said, which has put Bedouin Soundclash into new territory as a group.
“We’re like a legacy band now,” Malinowski said with laugh. “Because we’re not really a genre specific band, we don’t have a scene, we don’t really have a time period.”
That isn’t always a bad thing, in terms of career opportunities, he added. “A lot of our friends, who’ve had successful careers, will text me, ‘Hey, man, I’m in Home Depot and they’re playing your music.’ People will be on hold with Telus and hear our music. So we kind of slide into a lot of sort of general place where other bands maybe don’t.”
Bedouin Soundclash begins its Canadian tour to support We Will Meet in a Hurricane at the Capital Ballroom on Feb. 16. The opening act is Carmanah, members of which joined fellow Victoria-based musicians from Current Swell and the New Pornographers, among others, for the recording of the album at producer Colin Stewart’s Saanich Peninsula studio.
The Toronto-based Sinclair relocated to Victoria for six months, mid-pandemic, as the pair wrote and recorded We Will Meet in a Hurricane. Recording during a province-wide lockdown had its benefits for the duo, Malinowski said. It also presented new challenges.
“We had to be pretty industrious. Everything had to get really local, because we weren’t really doing much [playing or rehearsing] outside of Victoria. We were trying to create a choir, but we had to record everything separately, whereas [on previous records] when we were using choirs it was easy to go out and find everything. Everything was very local.”
The five-date Canadian run to support the new album is much smaller than the string of 37 concerts over a six-week period that launched Sounding a Mosaic in 2005. Malinowski said he favours a relaxed pace nowadays. “I have a son now, so I’m in a very different place as a person. We’re not looking to do six-month tours anymore.”
He’s unsure of what to expect in 2023, considering the events of the past two years. The band’s fan base has remained, however, so there will always be an audience eager to listen.
“To be honest, it’s the Home Depot effect. It’s like they did group testing and found out that we calm people down, or maybe it makes people buy more things,” he said jokingly.
“We’ve always really perplexed people, so I feel like people come to us on their own terms. It wasn’t like [music website] Pitchfork wrote about us. We were always a grassroots thing in that way.”
