Wicked Grin No rest for
By JIM HURCOMB Don’t look now, but it looks like we have
another Ottawa Blues success on our hands. A few years ago, Monkey Junk exploded
onto the scene, and since then it has been recognized nationally, then internationally, as a force to be reckoned with. Now it seems the torch has been passed to
Ottawa’s Wicked Grin. When Wicked Grin was named “Best New
Artist” at the recent Maple Blues Awards in Toronto, Murray Kinsley couldn’t help but chuckle. This “overnight success” only took 10 years to achieve. Murray’s story goes back much further. He
48 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
played with a Boogie Rock band called J.D. Lucas in clubs and pubs around Ottawa in the 70s. Then it was a group called Fat Shadows, which was one of the area’s hottest club acts in the next decade. But as he got older, and perhaps wiser, Murray decided to back off on the rock and
move more towards the classic sound of R&B. He put together a 12-piece band called “The Crowd”. “It was nuts,” he recalls, “trying to keep it
together with a band that big. Gigs were few and far between. So I started thinking about where this music came from, and I started listening to more and more Blues.” Frustrated with the bulky show band,
Murray pared the unit down to a four- or five- piece, and started playing a more stripped-down style of Blues. That was the birth of Wicked Grin, named after a line in a Tom Waits song. Today Wicked Grin is a four-piece. Murray
plays guitar, sings and fronts the band. Liam Melville is on drums, and Rod Williams lays down some amazing harp. On bass we have Leigh-Anne Stanton. The thing about Leigh-Anne is that I have
never seen a photo or video with her not smiling.
www.bounder.ca
Photos By DAVID MCDONALD
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