Utilisateur:Jfgagnon~frwiki
JETSAM
BIOGRAPHY
The man known as Jetsam was born and raised in a Francophone suburb of Montreal, he spent his childhood and adolescence surrounded by music: his father was an accomplished drummer, and his grandfather was an avid record collector who introduced Jetsam and his brother to a wide variety of music.
With hand-me-down influences from the likes of The Animals, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens and Chris DeBurgh, Jetsam began to hone his English language songs. He picked the name Jetsam for himself out of the dictionary because he liked the way it sounded, but with no French equivalent for the term, he asked his friend to define it:
"She told me that when a ship was in danger of sinking out on the water, jetsam was the stuff that was thrown overboard in order to keep the boat afloat," he says. "I thought that it was a good metaphor for the way I sing, because when I write a song and perform it for people, it’s almost as though I’m throwing my emotions overboard, out into the audience to sink or swim. I didn’t even know at the time if the definition my friend told me was the truth or not."
In July 1994, a lighting technician working on the set of a Quebec television show passed along the demo tape of a then-unknown singer-songwriter to Aldo Nova, who was taping a performance that day in the television studio.
What Nova heard on that tape impressed him enough to pass it along to Sony A&R executive Vito Luprano. Luprano liked what he heard - enough to phone Jetsam the next day, take him to lunch the day after, and ultimately, sign him to a deal with Sony Music.
Armed with a name and a stack of songs written over the past five years, Jetsam moved to New York's Upper West Side in September 1994 to write more material and jam with some of that city's local talents.
Returning in 1995, he settled down at Aldo Nova's Asylum Studios in Montreal to record his album. The two of them put together a band of some of the best session players in Quebec for the record, including Angelo Curcio, Jeff Smallwood, Tino Izzo, Sylvain Bolduc, Paul Brochu, Scott Price, Denis Chartrand, and Nova himself.
The result was the 1997 Sony Music release 'Drive' featuring the first single "You Know Me" and an accompanying video.
DISCOGRAPHY
Singles 1997 You Know Me (Sony) 1997 For The People (Sony)
Albums 1997 Drive (Sony)
Video 1997 You Know Me (Sony/Locomotion)
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