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There's a great moment on an episode a few years back in which the family visits a fairground where Bachman Turner Overdrive are playing. Before the band of "pleasant old gentlemen" can even start, Homer interrupts with a bellow of "Play Taking Care of Business!"
For lead pleasant old gentleman Randy Bachman, that's not an uncommon occurrence in real life.
Except these days.
"I've done a couple of shows and they're absolutely loving it," says Bachman before laughing.
"Nobody's yelling out for Taking Care of Business or anything."
The reason for that is because these days Bachman is satisfying a jones other than the rock one he followed to great success with B.T.O. and legendary Winnipeg act The Guess Who. These days Bachman has gone jazz -- finally.
He's released a new album titled JazzThing, which was recorded with some superb players including saxophonist Curtis Stigers and guitarist Joel Kroeker, and he's now embarking on a full jazz tour, which brings him to Kaos for a show tonight.
And although he's a seasoned veteran, Bachman says both the album and the tour are bringing back feelings he hasn't felt since he was first starting."It's frightening and enjoyable," he says from his Salt Spring Island home. "It was only a little private comfort zone for me, at night to sit there and play jazz or in the dressing room. To go on stage and do it is a little intimidating."
Well, maybe a little less intimidating then when Bachman first turned on to jazz, in the 1950s in Winnipeg.
Back then, his friend and future jazz legend Lenny Breau -- who appears posthumously on Jazz Thing thanks to some studio wizardry -- took it upon himself to sit Bachman down and play him the music of Chet Baker and countless others.
And even though Bachman took a different direction with his own music, jazz stuck with him and helped inform the songs he would later make classic rock anthems.
"Lenny Breau was really getting into it and it was terrifying me -- too many notes and chords, so I went the simple, three-chord rock 'n' roll route," he says. "But I always had that little bit of jazz in me."
And for the moment, Bachman is just enjoying the ability to have another musical outlet and will accept anything that comes with it.
"It's like the beginning of something," he says. "Depending on what I do next and where it all goes it could be a nice road for myself to travel."