Two Manitobans bring home the Juno hardware

Manitoban musicians Sebastian Gaskin and Big Dave McLean joined the first-timers club at the 55th annual Juno Awards.

McLean missed his usual jam session at the Time(s) Changed while he was in Vancouver on Sunday picking up his first-ever Juno as a solo artist.

“I had my money on somebody else,” says McLean, who had been nominated as a solo artist five times before taking home Blues Album of the Year for This Old Life, a record that highlights McLean’s gravel road drawl.

“I had 30 seconds (to give an acceptance speech) — everybody had 30 seconds — and they played me off with my own music,” says McLean, who, with the Muddy-Tones, played on the Juno-winning compilation Saturday Night Blues, which shared the award for best roots and traditional album with Loreena McKennitt’s The Visit in 1992.

Gaskin, who hails from Tataskweyak Cree Nation and is now based in Toronto, won Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year.

The first Juno statuette in the 29-year-old’s career was in recognition of Brown Man, a song the Nehiyaw singer wrote in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.

“Oh my gosh, this means the world to me. I worked really f–king hard to get here, than you so much,” Gaskin said after thanking loved ones and his management team from the stage during his acceptance speech.

Gaskin didn’t expect to win, he told the Free Press ahead of the ceremony, but in the end edged out Adrian Sutherland, Tia Wood, Snotty Nose Rez Kids and Celeigh Cardinal for the honour. Gaskin has worked with Snotty Nose Rez Kids and came up with Cardinal, he said.

Other local 2025 Juno nominees included the Secret Beach, Boy Golden, Jordan St. Cyr, Jocelyn Gould and James Ehnes.

On This Old Life, McLean’s first album with Cordova Bay Records, the 72-year-old raconteur (“About 62 American,” he jokes, estimating the exchange rate) looks both in the rear-view and across the dash, mixing originals with covers of predecessors Willie Dixon, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Muddy Waters.

“One of the things Muddy said to me was that ‘You gotta play it like the guy who wrote the song is sitting in front of you.’ I said, ‘Actually, he is.’ From then on, I don’t care if anybody else likes me — Muddy Waters liked me, and that’s all that matters,” recalls McLean, who opened for Waters for the first time in 1977 at the Winnipeg Concert Hall.

With the 2024 album, McLean reflects on a half-century career that began in Manitoba after his father, a Presbyterian minister, and mother, a concert pianist and church organist, moved their family from Yorkton to Winnipeg in 1960.

As a boy, McLean favoured the harmonica before a chance encounter with John Hammond at the 1969 Mariposa Folk Festival changed his tune.

“I’m just now scratching the surface, as far as I’m concerned. I need a couple more lifetimes to get to the bottom of it.”– Big Dave McLean

“I was sitting under a tree with a $5 guitar and didn’t know how to play at all,” he says, recalling the moment he saw the highly respected blues guitarist walk by. “I said, ‘Can you show me something?’ And such a gentleman, he showed me how to put it in open D tuning and how to play the simplest version of I’m A Man by Bo Diddley.”

Since then, McLean, who has received the Order of Canada, has passed the favour onward, mentoring dozens of blues artists on and off-stage. Since 1987, at his official home base, he Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club, McLean has hosted weekly Sunday night jams.

When he’s out of town, longtime bandmate Chris Carmichael keeps McLean’s seat warm. But after a well-earned hiatus, the newly minted Juno winner plans on getting back to business at the downtown honkytonk this weekend.

He’s still got plenty to learn about his craft, McLean insists.

“I’m just now scratching the surface, as far as I’m concerned. I need a couple more lifetimes to get to the bottom of it.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.

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