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Artscene Oakville Beaver · Wednesday, September 27, 2006 By Krissie Rutherford OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF www.oakvillebeaver.com 30 David Clayton-Thomas feels rejuvenated as solo performer David Clayton-Thomas has played Oakville many times in his nearly 40-year professional music career, but Saturday marks the first time he'll be here under his own name. The former Blood, Sweat & Tears front man has opened a new musical chapter and is now promoting his latest effort: David Clayton-Thomas in Concert, A Musical Biography. "I'm very, very lucky in that I've done the first half of my musical career as Blood, Sweat & Tears, and now I have an entire other era as David Clayton-Thomas to explore," said the 65-year-old singer, who plays two shows Saturday at the Oakville Centre. A multi-Juno Award winner, Music Hall of Fame inductee and recent Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, Clayton-Thomas, who left Blood, Sweat & Tears in 2004, is excited about the freedom his solo career brings. It's Clayton-Thomas who's responsible for writing many of Blood, Sweat & Tears' biggest hits, including Spinning Wheel, Lucretia MacEvil and Go Down Gamblin.' "It's great to come home to Canada and become a songwriter again, which is what made Blood, Sweat & Tears famous in the first place," he said. Clayton-Thomas' Musical Biography is just that ­ a combination of old Blood, Sweat & Tears classics and some new tunes he wrote recently. The album, which is released by Justin Time, was recorded live last year at Toronto's Opera House. "I've already resigned to the fact I'll be playing You Make Me So Very Happy for the rest of my life," he said, laughing. "And why not? A lot of them are my songs, and of course I'll bring them with me the rest of my life. They're very much a part of my musical biography. But I didn't want this to be a re-hash of the old album, I wanted it to show we were moving ahead." On top of the new songs on the album, the band is more "back to basics," he says, compared to Blood, Sweat & Tears. ClaytonThomas also added an acoustic section. "I didn't just want to clone the Blood, Sweat & Tears sound, so we expanded the band from eight up to 11 people and we wrote a lot of the charts so they were a lot deeper and a lot more breadth to them," he said. The band includes some of his old friends who are among Canada's best, "jazz giants and hall of fame musicians," he says, like Russ Little and Bruce Cassidy. The band "is not interested in going on the road, we've done that," says Clayton-Thomas. "We're selecting festivals and places we want to play." Oakville was on the list because it's a smaller, more intimate theatre, and since he grew up in Toronto, "it's like playing at home." "Family and old friends like Duff Roman (his manager when he was starting out) are coming to this concert," he said. "It's a chance for us, after we've been playing big, big events all summer long, to come home and play an intimate night for our local people here in the Toronto area." As for putting on shows, Clayton-Thomas says it gets better as he gets older. "I think you get more comfortable with it, more professional, you get more at ease on stage, whereas going on stage in the early days used to be a fairly traumatic, and we used to medicate ourselves to do it," he said, laughing. "We were all very young and unsure of ourselves and being thrown out in front of crowds of 30,000 ­ it was scary. "As you get older, you get more confident." David Clayton-Thomas plays at the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts Saturday, Sept. 30 at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. For tickets, visit www.oakvillecentre.ca or call 905-815-2021. -- Krissie Rutherford can be reached at krutherford@oakvillebeaver.com. David Clayton-Thomas "This allows me to come back home and work on a whole new creative era," said the Toronto resident, who in 2004 released his solo jazz album, Aurora. "I'm writing songs again, which is what I started out doing." He left Blood, Sweat & Tears mainly because there was no interest in writing new songs, which he called "suffocating." FREE Brea kfast Ne 's ie & Lea e Call Mook s ood Hou ighbourh