Terry Tufts - musical triple threat

Terry Tufts should be a lot more famous.

Terry is a singer-songwriter and guitarist who lives near Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He writes wonderful songs about relationships, the environment and tabogganing. He is also an incredible guitar player.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I don't have to go into a lot of detail about Terry. I can just link you to his website and his record company's website. Read his bio, buy his CD's or pay to download his latest, The Better Fight, at emusic.com.

You can find one of his truly wonderful guitar instrumentals on a compilation called Six Strings North of the Border, volume II.

Penguin Eggs

Spring 2006(Canadian folk roots music magazine)

critic's albums of the year

1. Lynn Miles - Love Sweet Love

2. Eliza Gilkyson - Paradise Hotel

3. John Prine - Fair & Square

4. Le Vent Du Nord - Les Amants du Saint-Laurent

5. Amadou & Mariam - Dimanche a Bamako

6. The Duhks - The Duhks

7. Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate - In The Heart of The Moon

8. Tom Russell - Hotwalker

9. Melwood Cutlery - Campfire

10. Terry Tufts - The Better Fight

The Better Fight - review from Penguin Eggs, spring/summer 2006 - by Mike Sadava

"It's hard to dispute Terry's promo material. The guy has a rich voice, nimble fingers and serious songwriting ability. This album should give Tufts more of a national stature. There's a lot of depth here, a lot of reasons for coming back to this disc. He can write a convincing love song, an edgy polemic, perform a worthy cover of the Isley Brothers I've Got Work To Do and work an instrumental along the lines of Don Ross.

The Better Fight - review from the Toronto Star by Greg Quill

Ottawa songwriter and guitarist Terry Tufts is a gifted musician with a strong sense of melody and structure, and sensibilities rooted in the golden age of the big-voiced folk-pop troubadour, circa 1975.

This collection of 13 originals, produced by Borealis boss Bill Garrett, is as good as or better than anything those guys ever did. Always eminently listenable, and notwithstanding the anachronistic overtones, Tufts takes a big step out of the folk realm that has been his home for the past few years and onto a musical stage that embraces elegant, almost symphonic arrangements, world music, jazz and progressive pop elements, as well as traditional forms.

Melodies are breathtakingly beautiful, as is Tufts' pure and steely tenor, and his stunning guitar work is allowed to anchor every piece, though he's surrounded in these songs of warning and diminishing hope for a better world by some exceptionally fine players, among whom pianist Mark Ferguson, drummer Ross Murray and back-up singer Jesse Winchester are outstanding.

-Greg Quill

The Better Fight - review from Dirty Linen by Mitch Ritter (Beaverton OR)

Strip away the techno accoutrements of Bruce Cockburn’s last two decades. Filter the Canadian giant of song’s Christian humanism through the less jaded global outlook sported in Cockburn’s jazzier late-70’s/early 80s Further Adventures of period, then add homey charisma amid rhythmically astute session players, and voila! Terry Tufts’s tracks blossom like spring after a dark brooding winter.

Not quite free of den fever or shorn of hibernation’s hairier excesses, such as the uncharacteristically lame instrumental “Pursuant To My Nature,” Tufts gives his sparkling rhythm section its head as Mark Ferguson’s runaway piano noses out Tufts’s own meteor-showering acoustic guitar picking on the very next track, “Awake Ye Drowsie Sleeper.”

Biloxi “Rhumba Man” Jesse Winchester revisits his cool blue northern redoubt joining Tufts’s Ottawa sessions to add giddy backing vocals on “Black Velvet Elvis” (a Briggs-Francey-Tufts co-write, not Rex Fowler’s caped crowd pleaser from his Aztec Two Step hiatus).

Rob Graves adds Afro-Brazilian polyrhythm with Kalimba and a percussion section. Ross Murray’s drums, alongside John Geggie’s bass, accent Tufts’s hammered-on steel string notes as they spring forth, double-helixing a marvelous melody line around Mark Ferguson’s chiming touch on piano strings.

Add Memphis-stacked trombone (Ferguson again) to a solidly bassed Oakland bottom on the Isley Brothers soul-inspirer “I Got Work To Do.” Mix in Tufts’s scatted vocalese and funkily arpeggio’d acoustic guitar, and we get an above-Average White Band activist anthem streaming from suburban windows out to any rainbow coalition ready to get the war-stopping job done.