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Crooner comes out swinging

Singer takes on music just Like Someone In Love

John P. McLaughlin, The Province

Published: Thursday, October 19, 2006

Doug Laalo pursues his avocation of jazz singing with a concert and CD release at the Norman Rothstein Theatre.

Before Michael Buble got his wedding-singer job at Brian Mulroney's daughter's nuptials, fortuitously meeting David Foster and Paul Anka and soon after, launching his big career, he was thinking of applying to BCIT, finding something else to do with his life. The music thing was going mostly nowhere.

Who knows, he might have made a great gasfitter, a superb IT technician. Problem was, until luck was his lady one night, young Buble had not much else to fall back on, not atypical of most music types.

Doug Laalo, on the other hand -- much more of a jazz interpreter, a Chet Baker to Buble's Sinatra -- decided to cover his financial butt early on. Sudbury-born but mostly raised in the same North Burnaby/East Vancouver neighbourhood as Buble, the 53-year-old Laalo took a good shot at a music career as part of an early '70s acoustic folk/rock trio called Sunflower.

They gigged around town, did a little recording, got written up. But eventually Laalo got married, had kids and settled down. He still played in different cover bands through the years but sank roots with Marmon/Keystone, a huge metals distribution company with offices in Canada, the US and Mexico. Thirty years on, Laalo is product manager for stainless steel. It's no day job, he insists. It's a career.

That said, in 1989 he saw When Harry Met Sally, featuring the Grammy- winning soundtrack by Harry Connick Jr. and something clicked. Emphatically clicked. Soon after he went down to (now defunct) Chardonnays on Hastings to see veteran Vancouver singer Kenny Colman, whom he'd never met.

"I was actually down there with my then wife for our 15th wedding anniversary," says Laalo, "and Kenny sort of spotted me and came over and introduced himself. I guess he saw another musician in me and asked if I sang and I said yes. And he asked me on stage and I declined. I'd just started developing my interest but still hadn't developed any repertoire."

Almost 10 years later Colman had started up the Casbah Jazzbah and Laalo, who had been working on his jazz chops, dropped in. Amazingly, Colman recognized him and again invited him up to sing. This time Laalo accepted, singing "You Make Me Feel So Young" backed by the likes of Rene Worst and Oliver Gannon.

"The first car I ever drove was a Cadillac," he laughs.

Eventually Coleman offered him a night, Laalo put together a solid band and did fine. On one of his visits to Colman's club he met bassist and producer Rick Kilburn and they started recording, demos at first, building up until they had an album, Why Do People Fall In Love, released in 2001.

The brand new Like Someone In Love is Laalo's second album and features Kilburn, pianist Miles Black and trumpeter Kevin Turcotte. (He'll be backed tonight by Kilburn, Black, drummer Buff Allen and Vince Mai on trumpet -- another Caddy.)

Laalo's been careful in his selection of material, avoiding the Great American Songbook standards everyone else is doing. Yes, he's drawing from the catalogues of the greats: Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, Rogers & Hart, but songs like "My Heart Stood Still" and "Everything Happens To Me" are still fresh, helped in no small part by Black's arrangements.

Looks like Laalo has found a genre custom-made for a guy in his 50s who just wants -- loves -- to sing.

"It's like playing golf," he says. "I can go on with this forever. I think with age comes that life experience so when you're singing the lyric, you've lived it."

jpmac@gmx.net