Big Rude Jake

Biography

Big Rude Jake was a songwriter and musician, and a kind of legend on the Canadian music scene.

His passion for classic Americana and his talent for writing compelling lyrics resulted in powerful, highly original albums for a loyal fan base around the world.

As a craftsman of song, Jake was favorably compared to Ry Cooder, thanks to the deft way in which he experimented with a number of styles, mixing blues, ragtime, jump, jazz and rock together. As a lyricist, Jake was aligned with such noted luminaries as Noel Coward, Jaques Brell, Berthold Brecht, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. Some suggested that his voice is reminiscent of Willie Nelson when he’s crooning, and Howlin’ Wolf when he’s shouting, which is often.

Jake enjoyed some international notoriety in the late ’90s, and developed a reputation as a daring and exciting front man as well as an intelligent writer.

The enthusiastically crowd-funded live album, Live & Out Loud launched October 3rd, 2012. It gave listeners the chance to capture the feeling of "being there". Ask anyone who's experienced a "Jake" show in person.

Two more albums were not far behind. Rude had been busy with his pet side projects:

Rockabilly band, Tennessee Voodoo Coupe’s 2nd album, Over the Moon launched at Viva Las Vegas 2013.
The release of Blue Mercury Coupe’s 6 piece retro punk (with horn section!) recording, Band of the Future followed just a few weeks later.

2014 brought more big endeavours. He created and launched Blues for the Red Door, a cleverly conceived annual blues extravaganza in support of the Red Door Family Shelter.

The next BRJ album was going to be The Jackhammer Sessions, which will be released in the future in some form. At this point, one single, IDIFTM, is available for download and streaming in the usual places, with more to follow. Jake made his own video for it.

He left us with more work to be released. It will take TLC, time and money, but it's coming.

Jake's 2009 album, Quicksand, represented a return to the recording industry for this hard-working player. After several years of pursuing other interests that took him away from the spotlight, Jake decided to get back in the game to pen a whole new collection of songs, this time emphasizing his growing interest in gospel and classic "pre-Dylan" American folk, as well as ragtime, jazz and blues. The songs have a more intimate quality to them as compared to previous BRJ recordings. This is due, in part, to Jakes' desire to play more intimate shows, avoiding bars for proper theatre-style venues when booking BRJ & the Quicksand Combo, or, on other occasions, singing his own songs as a solo act or in a duet, featuring his adept finger-picking acoustic guitar style that gives a classic "rural blues" quality to his already passionate material. The effect transports the listener to another time and place as, all the while, Jake played his new and thoroughly modern material.