me that had this together. It was a scary thing on one hand because you had to let go of the level you were on and just be sucked in by the power of this music that was being created spontaneously. It was incredible. And that stuck with me forever; every time I see Domenic I remind him of that night, ‘cause he was a big influence on me that night. Then I met my wife and she went to Vancouver, so I followed her to Vancouver, and the band ultimately wound up in Vancouver as well. We would do all these gigs, and play a club called The Smiling Buddha. Out of all that, though, while that was going on we were constantly listening and catching other players. Gay Delorme, guitar player, had a band called Django, and it was just an incredible band. Mike Hanford played in that; Kenny Pascarelli, who went on to play with Elton John, played in that band; Gay, of course, is a well-known guitar player in Canada and L.A., so I got to know him. But we would just keep widening our scope and keep jamming and keep learning, and it was right around that time that I got interested in music theory and I started reading and studying and learning. Then my dad called and he was sick and asked me if I’d come home for the winter to help look after the horses and everything. So I went home, back to Portage - Beverley went with me - and wound up in the middle of a scene that wasn’t quite as developed as the west coast, so I had a slight leg up in a sense. So I looked for other players and just put the thing together. And over a two year period, my father eventually passed away and Beverley and I got married and I also went back to Edmonton for six months and went to music school for a little bit, then came back to Winnipeg and at that time I formed the Dale Russell Music Ensemble. I found Leonard (Shaw)...
Steiss: How did you find him?
DALE: Well, I was just playing down at the Ting - this guy had this coffee house called the Ting, which is a symbol out of the I Ching, and every kind of music imaginable went on at the Ting on different nights - there’d be a stoned hippy playing his solo guitar, to us doing freeform jazz to, if a band was passing through town they’d come down and jam, so it was a really cool place. Could not make much money at all. I was looking for players and he had just finished a band with Seymour Koblin, whose nickname was Mojo, and he knew another bass player named Kinsey, and we’d just set up in my basement and jam a little bit and found that we had a chemistry so we started just doing this freeform stuff. And then this woman named Patricia Charter, who became our manager - Lenny Breau was living at her house and Lenny Breau was like - all through my formative Winnipeg days before that, in between going out on the road in different bands, I used to watch Lenny play and I sat right at his feet and listened and watched and was just taken away by his music, really heavily influenced by him. Actually, there was one name that I really should mention, Stan Winistock. Stan played fiddle on “Orly”. When my dad was teaching me, and my uncle, and I was doing a little finger picking, I used to go over to Stan’s house and he used to cultivate me and bring me along. He had worked with Lenny Breau in Lenny’s parents’ band - Hal “Lone Pine” Junior. So Stan knew Lenny, and that was another “in” to Lenny for me. Stan was really good to me. He played fiddle on my solo album. He used to sit in with the Music Ensemble too - played fiddle with us. Basically the Ensemble was Mojo and Kinsey, who is now a producer at CBC Canada; Mojo - Seymour Koblin - is down in San Diego; he plays but he also runs a school, The School of Healing Arts - he teaches shiatsu and all
