Adkins can’t stop playing: ‘It’s an addiction’
Coming up: His debut CD, featuring trad songs and originals
Thom Adkins has been playing guitar for 50 years — from Norfolk County’s South Coast Jazz Festival to the Koło Bluesa Festival in Poland, not to mention special events and house gigs closer to home.
Lately, Adkins has been sitting-in at local open-mike jams, winning audiences over with his rich baritone vocals, easygoing stage charisma and smooth acoustic fingerpicking.
The former Kitchener resident, now a Simcoe-based artist, was raised on swing.
He loves Ella Fitzgerald and the “brilliant phrasing” of Frank Sinatra.
“I was listening to jazz all my life,” he recalls. “When I was a kid, jazz was always on.
“As soon as we did not embarrass our parents at a restaurant, they were taking us to live jazz clubs in Toronto. Remember the Colonial?
“There was a pickup band that used to show up all the time. They were called Saints & Sinners — guys like (sax player) Buddy Tate, (trumpeter) Buck Clayton, (vibraphonist) Red Norvo, and (soul singer) Jackie Wilson — all these old American jazz guys. Then there was Canadian pianist Carol Britto (Chet Baker).
“I thought everybody did this,” says Adkins. “I knew I wanted to do something with music because there was just the magic of being enthralled.”
Guitar is the only instrument he has ever played and back then it was the “hot deal.”
“The first guitar I ever played? Oh my God. I brought it from a guy down the street. He sold me this horrible Stella Harmony,” recalls Adkins.
“I spent $14 on it and I was 14 years old. I saved that money cutting grass for a whole month of July. I started playing on the long weekend in August.”
The guitar was terrible. The strings were too high off the frets but Adkins learned the basics and built calluses fast.
“The only way I was going to meet girls, which was my main goal, was to play guitar so I played guitar,” he says with a laugh.
“I was playing every weekend. I am still playing. It is an addiction. You can’t stop!”
As a young man, Adkins needed some advice about choosing a music career.
“I talked to these old jazz guys and I said, ‘What do you think? Should I go with the music?’ Every one of them said, ‘No no no! You are going to starve to death!’
“I did not know whether it was lack of talent or they were going by their own example,” he admits.
“It is very hard to make any money.
“I made a deal with myself — my mother being a painter and my father being an engineer, you had to synthesize the two parts. The engineer brain took over and said you are going to be an artist of some stripe. I was not sure how it was going to work out. So while I was working I always had a gig every weekend right from high school on.”
Adkins went to Toronto a lot when he was younger because he felt it was the “big gravity well for everything.”
When his sister was in university and came home to Kitchener, he would stay at her place in Toronto and busk on the streets of Yorkville during the tail end of the hippie movement.
“It was Yorkville. Wow! Let’s get high,” laughs Adkins.
Adkins eventually got a job with Canadian National Railway as a special projects officer/ instructor then worked at BC Rail for 23 years.
He also played solo and duo gigs in jazz/blues twosome Fretwork (with guitarist Don Erhardt) before returning to the Southern Ontario music scene.
Currently, he plays in a duo called Sharp Dogs, with Bob Boisclair on lead guitar and Adkins on percussive, finger-style rhythm guitar.
The duo’s name comes from the Polish expression “uvaga zly pies” (beware of dogs) or “ostre psy” referring to “sharp” patrol dogs who guarded half-finished houses during Poland’s rollercoaster real-estate boom.
He is currently finalizing songs for his debut CD — a mix of traditional tunes and originals.
Adkins says his lyrics are influenced by iconic lyricists like Lieber and Stoller, the Gershwins, or Cole Porter mixed with life’s adventures.
He likes the music of Tom Waits, Steely Dan, Bruce Cockburn, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.
Adkins is very specific about the kind of player he is.
“I am a B stage guy, and I like to get people’s ears opened for the main act. I do not consider myself a great guitarist. I am a vocalist and rhythm guitar player.
“I am that Gordon Lightfoot guy — strum the guitar, sing the song.
“I am constantly working on it. I practise every day and I get two or three hours in every day. That is what drives me. I think that’s what’s got me this far.
“I get guys to play with me. I get playing and get a groove. I do a lot of groove music as opposed to beat. With groove I can bend things!”