For over four decades Powder Blues has been Canada’s leading blues band. The mix of swing, blues, jazz, rock & roll and r & b has an appeal so wide that people from seven to seventy swing side by side at a Powder Blues concert. Over the years the band has toured non-stop through Canada, the US and overseas, sharing their feel-good music.
Powder Blues debut album, ‘Uncut’, was ignored by major labels who said there was ‘no market for the blues’. Undiscouraged, the band sent it to radio stations whose switchboards lit up with calls asking, ‘who’s that?’ After selling 30,000 copies in a few weeks, the same record labels competed to sign the band. To date Powder Blues have sold over a million records worldwide.
Highlights include winning Canada’s Juno, headlining the Montreux Switzerland Jazz Festival, winning the Blues Foundation Award in Memphis, Tennessee and touring the US and Europe with legends like Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, James Brown, Albert Collins, James Cotton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Leader, Tom Lavin wrote many of the band’s best-known songs including ‘Doin’ It Right’ (‘On the Wrong Side of Town’) and ‘Boppin With the Blues’. Born in Chicago, where he played with local bands and blues legends, Tom moved to Vancouver where he worked as studio musician, song writer, band leader, record producer and film composer.
Tom has won BCMIA awards for ‘Guitarist, Singer, Songwriter and Producer of the Year’, a Juno award for ‘Best New Band’ and the American W.C. Handy award. He has over a dozen gold, and platinum records for Powder Blues, Prism, April Wine, Long John Baldry, Amos Garrett, and many others.
2026 is the band’s 48th Anniversary. Their more than dozen CD titles and DVD continue to sell world-wide making Tom Lavin & the Legendary Powder Blues one of Canada’s longest-standing musical ambassadors.
