Blues band serves up Duck Soup
After more than a decade of playing together, The Mighty Ducks Blues Band has released its first album, Duck Soup.
Fenwick resident Jim Casson, drummer and vocalist with the band, said people suggested a number of times to put together an album.
“We kind of laughed about it for a few years, then really started to think about it,” he said. “When the ability kind of fell into our hands to make it more realistic, that’s when really start to say, ‘OK, yeah, maybe we should do this.’”
Mostly Niagara-based, the band is made up of Casson, St. Catharines resident (Canada) Dave Torosian who plays the organ, Niagara-on-the-Lake resident Dave Curry who plays guitar and sings, and Torontonian Gary Kendall who plays bass and also sings.
Casson said they each have other projects they work on and bands they work with, too, but they enjoy coming together to play blues music. They used to play at The Golden Pheasant, nicknamed The Duck — which is from where they drew the band name — for nine years. After it closed last year, they moved their performances over to The Bar Upstairs, above the Ballhockey.com Athletic Centre in St. Catharines. Their next show there is Sept. 23.
They’ve gathered a pretty good following from the gigs and now have something their fans can take away with them and listen to at home. Their album is available as a CD and is also available on iTunes.
Casson said it came together in roughly six months, including writing, recording, producing, mixing and all things that go into putting an album together.
Casson has his own recording studio and knows how to produce an album. In addition to that, he did the artwork for the CD. Beyond that, the group wrote, arranged and recorded the songs themselves. Some songs were already written and they just needed to work on arranging them for the album
The group has released a music video for one of the songs, available on the band website mightyduckbluesband.com.
Duck Soup features the talents of nine guest singers, who appear on a number of the album’s 12 tracks.
There aren’t any plans for another album, but Casson said it’s not off the table. For now, the group just wants to see how this one does and then go from there.