420TUNES TALLBROTHERS

Tallbrothers are the global award-winning reeferjazz band based in Vancouver. They are Bill and Tom Small, actual brothers who grew up in a musically-gifted farm family in southwest Ontario. Their father was 5 when he began performing out of town one-nighters in a child prodigy duo with his sister and their mother was a young Debussy fan who learned Clair de la Lune by ear off of a 78 record. Five of six siblings are music professionals and the other one sings in the church choir.



Bill led 70’s rock bands in his early teens and jazz bands with horn sections soon after. He married young, had kids, and very quickly sold a hundred-million-dollars in real estate until work related stress and life-threatening ulcers forced him to re-evaluate the meaning of life.
He divested all of his real estate holdings and became a Red Cross director then formed a bluegrass band with brother Tommy and started gigging solo in Montreal clubs honing formidable jazz vocal and guitar chops. Upon discovering that marijuana had cured his ulcers he moved to Vancouver and launched the British Columbia Compassion Club Society with Hillary Black initially operating out of his apartment. This organization provides low-cost, high quality organic medicinal marijuana to anyone with a doctor’s prescription. Still strong after over 10 years, the club now services more than 4000 members and has assisted another 2500 sadly departed.



Tommy began playing different instruments at age 5 and writing music at 8. At 14 he was the main featured soloist in his high school jazz orchestra that took 1st place in the Canadian Stage Band Festival competition.
He studied Music Industry Arts at Fanshawe College under the tutelage of producer Jack Richardson (Alice Cooper,Stephen Stills, all Guess Who records, many others, the Coca-Cola "I'd Like To Teach the World to Sing" commercial and mentor to protégé Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd,Peter Gabriel etc.))
After college there were formative years: pursuing private music studies/audio engineering and busking/travelling/playing many genres of music in many bands. He found fledgling Django tribute Swing Dynamique in Montreal in 1992 and played bass with them for the next 6 years until they were a Montreal jazz/bop/lounge institution. This group featured two but as many as five Duke Ellington alumni at once and boasts 60 former alumni including the legendary Guy Nadon on drums. They played for crowds of up to 250 000 people at the Montreal Jazz Fest and their self-titled CD still receives regular airplay "judging by the royalty checks" quips Tom in a recent interview.
Tommy moved to BC’s Sunshine Coast in 2002 to join Bill and Tallbrothers were deployed to satisfy a growing niche market spinning off of BC’s famous seven billion dollar pot industry. He wasted no time writing up charts for three sets of 30’s and 40’s reefertunes gleaned from the archives of Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and many others. The band moniker derives from one of these entitled “Man With the Jive” (“Light up baby and get real tall!”). Their own songs soon eclipsed these classics in quantity and perhaps in accesibility too, updating the genre to address today’s heroes and issues for a younger generation while maintaining the sonorous bounce that turns grandma into a teenager again.
Their fame spread internationally when they headlined the 2004 Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam and last September 2008 swept the Global Marijuana Music Awards in Texas. They continue to enjoy success with song licensing deals in TV, film, web-casting and their overnight internet sensation hit CD “Simply Business.”



Myspace Codes
I edited my profile at Doobix.com



Layout by:



> Myspace Contact Tables -