Note to Ray's friends and fans: Ray's MySpace is maintained by a friend, but Ray does check in from time to time.
Ray Bonneville calls himself a North American. Born in Canada, he moved to the Boston area in his early teens where he started playing guitar and harmonica. His last 30 some odd years have seen him seeking adventure and playing music throughout the world. Being a dual citizen allows him the freedom to live in both Canada and the United States.
Bonneville is a distinctive artist, a man who cooks up a deep groove soup, stirring his own unique percussive electric guitar style, his weathered voice, and soulful rack harmonica lines into songs that can be believed. He uses his index finger and thumb, sometimes a slide, and a Fender tube amp. He also brings his foot down on an amplified piece of plywood on the floor. The result is a powerful and visceral sound, with an almost primitive quality to it and a lot of forward momentum.
"When I first heard good blues and country music I was very young, but I felt a deep excitement within, and I somehow knew right then what I'd do with my life," says Bonneville, remembering his introduction to roots music in Boston in the mid 1960s and early seventies. Over the next decade, Bonneville honed his sound up in the Northeast, Colorado and Alaska, and then moved around between Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris, France in the 1980s.
"I remember playing in Memphis Slim's club in the heart of Paris in the early eighties," says Bonneville. "I'd show up for the gig at four in the morning after doing another show across town. The place would be really jumping at that time of the night. "Slim was often there, as were other jazz and blues players, and a whole slew of late night characters from all kinds of places. After the show I'd take a taxi back to my flat around eight in the morning in the full-on Paris rush hour traffic".
In the streets and clubs of New Orleans, Bonneville soaked up the prevalent back side of the beat attitude that ran through the music being played there. "There were so many great drummers to learn groove and time from, not to mention the piano and guitar players, and man, the singers and horn players too! This was the place that influenced me the most," he says. "It was infectious. In New Orleans, you learn that solid rhythm is like a tightrope on which the notes and words can do their dance."
Says Bonneville: "I'm deeply in love with playing live music. It's the time and place where I really live, where I feel the most centered and alive. When a show is over, I just want to get on down the road to the next one, always looking to get back onto another stage and do it again."
"I write the songs as they come to me, without predictability or in any set way. They come from real life mostly, snapshots of emotions and feelings lived and felt, and the recall of observations of things gone by along the way. I'm forever looking to write another song, find another groove."
Ray won a prestigious Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, in 1999, for his third album, Gust of Wind. His next release, Rough Luck, and his fifth album, Roll It Down, were also nominated for the coveted award.
Ray is currently working on a new recording, slated for release to the world on the Red House label in early 2007.
