July 30 - Aug 02, 2010

Biography

You’ve got your ace fingerstyle players and your high-speed electric guitar noodlers, but there aren’t too many musicians out there playing electric with the soul of a David Gilmour or a Mark Knopfler. Ray Montford might just be the only guy in Canada pulling it off with such flair.

Ray has been playing guitar ever since he was 12 and got serious about it at 18. He studied audio engineering, production, and performance in the Music Industry Arts program at Fanshawe College and did session work on the side. He also did a term at Humber. Ray continued to do session work after college, while also performing with The Look People and with Paul Meyers’ Gravelberries. He released his first solo project in 1991, a solo acoustic fingerstyle album that was reissued in 2005 as The Early Sessions.

As it happens, Montford isn’t just a distinguished composer and musician. For him, the music and the sound quality are inseparable elements of his work, and his skill as a producer and engineer has made him a darling of the audiophile community.

Discography

• Live Sessions (2010)
• A Fragile Balance (2007)
• Live Imagery (2006)
• The Early Sessions (2005)
• Many Roads (2003)
• One Step Closer (2000)
• Shed Your Skin (1997)

Performance Highlights

Inspired by Buddhist philosophy and by his love of the open road – he’s an avid motorcyclist - Ray Montford, the one-time accompanist for the Rankin Family and Mary Jane Lamond, composes stirring instrumentals that wring emotion from every note. He was named 2007’s Instrumentalist to Watch by Galaxie. Ray's moving instrumentals have been heard on CBC radio and in the CBS television series The Eleventh Hour, the CBC TV documentary Marymount Again, and the PBS/Vision TV series Marginless Living and Who is My Neighbour – among other places. He is a regular at Toronto’s Beaches Jazz Festival and has toured The Netherlands with Autorickshaw’s Ed Hanley.

Ray Montford's web site
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