The Musician
Brian Jantzi is a roots singer-songwriter, an acoustic & electric guitar player, and a multi-instrumentalist. He performs many genres of music with songs that come from folk, blues, western, jazz, pop, rock & roll, bluegrass, psychedelic and world roots. Brian is featured regularly at Hamilton & Toronto area venues and stages, accompanying on Key West stages, and he has performed at southern Ontario's Mariposa, Winterfolk, Summerfolk and Eaglewood Festivals, and the Key West Songwriters Festival.
Brian is a certified jam-aholic who aspires to one day being booed at Newport. He's been called Canada's Warren Zevon and his songs and performances are reminiscent of the spirit of John Prine, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Murray McLaughlan, Bruce Cockburn, Jerry Jeff Walker and Traffic. With strong lyrics and straight ahead performances - Brian sings it like he means it, because he really does mean it.
Both on stage and in studio, Brian's stylings and jams are often complemented by a wide variety of masterful musicians.
Music & His Life, in His own words
My Mom was all about music and groaner humour. When I was little, her and my Dad would stick me on a train alone to North Bay to stay with my Irish Grandparents and their Irish CPR trainmen boarders for a few weeks each summer. Evenings there were beer, whiskey, cards, howling and dancing jigs & reels. When the trainmen were out on the rails, it’d be 78s & LPs from the 20s, 30s, 40s, newer crooners, Hank Snow, and French-Canadian music 24/7. There was no escape - it was music saturation bombing - and little me, I mostly hated it.
Somehow, it all soaked in like I was a sponge. I don’t know how those old songs are structured but my fingers sure know where the songs are going before they get there, and I so love disappearing now inside those songs and emerging on the turning notes. Genres are irrelevant, but I love how genres can weave across one another and become the feeling you absolutely needed to have in each moment.
Prime counter-culture of my teenage youth delivered me to Bob Dylan & The Songwriters via a guitar in my hand, and I became one, a guitar-slinging songwriter – although I didn’t quite recognize it then. Over the years living up and across Canada, I’d quietly sit in with musical people you know but mostly, mostly don’t know.
Serendipity brought me back to my home town of Toronto to find its music had bloomed in my absence, and graced me into the middle of it, and I'm now based in Hamilton ON.
Serendipity led me to new and old kindred spirits, my Songwriters. And Serendipity brings me to you, who come to this music and my songs with your open hearts. Thank you for coming, and thank you for what you bring to these songs as you listen. May you enjoy this journey across geography, time, genres and feeling. Here we are.
