Bremner Fletcher Duthie: the bio....
Bremner was born into a travelling family. After spending the first seven years of his life bouncing back and forth between Montreal and the surreally opulent Long Island suburb of 'Great Neck' (the suburb Fitzgerald satirized in The Great Gatsby), on a street where the Rolling Stones and Leonard Bernstein would come to visit their managers. Duthie's father took him back to his own childhood home: the small north-east Scottish fishing village of Inverallochy, where his dad opened a Bingo hall. Bremner spent some formative teenage years attending the windy halls of Fraserburgh Academy and beachcombing on the shores of Scotland's North East coastline. By the time he left Scotland he was a world class Bingo caller with the extraordinary ability to read bingo cards upside down, sideways and through any amount of cigarette smoke...
In the sixties, in New York, he was surrounded by the Jewish melodies and music of his neighbours, and by the Scottish folk tunes of his father, a lifelong amateur singer. In Scotland the seventies was a ripe decade of musical pop history, and Bremner spent much of his time feeding money into the jukebox in his Dad's Bingo hall; surrounding himself with the sound of the vinyl singles of Britain's top ten: The Osmonds, Fleetwood Mack, The Bay City Rollers, The Moodie Blues, T-Rex and David Bowie. He left Britain in '78, just at the beginning of punk, and returned to Canada, where, with cropped hair and many safety pins, he spent formative years attending concerts by classic canadian punk bands likeDOA, The Pointed Sticks, Nomeansno and Bunchoffuckinggoofs and visiting icons like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys....
In Vancouver (still a hippy enclave) his father worked as a carpenter and basked naked on the nudist beaches. Bremner won a young artist scholarship to study music and first studied ethno-musicology (the rhythmic structures in the Indonesian gamelan). Then, after attending McGill University, returned to New York to begin an opera career. He finally found his true direction when he won two consecutive scholarships to the Banff Centre for 20th Century Music Theatre and immersed himself in the centre's unique focus on modern theatre and song. There, he worked with a vocal teacher from the French-based Roy Hart Theatre Group to push his vocal range to three and then four octaves and took on the punishing role of George III in Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' '8 Songs for a Mad King' Shortly after, Duthie founded a contemporary music theater group in Vancouver and performed in avant-garde events including Crumb's 'Songs and Drones of Death' and Gruber's 'Frankenstein!!'
Eventually he found himself at an impasse. The contemporary opera world seemed filled with dysfunctional egos and bad dates. Looking for a new path, Duthie turned back to one of his first loves, the performance space of Cabaret and the music of Kurt Weill. He began work on an ongoing project 'Whiskey Bars' and began touring. Whiskey Bars is an exploration of the idea of Cabaret: witty, provocative, low budget, about a Master of Ceremonies preparing himself to go onstage and confront an audience. It's also about being at the end of your rope and struggling to get back on your feet, preserve your self-respect and do the work you love. It has received four-star reviews, "Pick of the festival" ratings and receptive audiences.
Now living between Paris and Toronto, Bremner performs music theatre, cabaret, and contemporary song works. A recent highlight was touring Japan with a 20 piece Big Band, and touring France while being the baddest of bad guys in a new production of the 1930's musical 'The Cradle Will Rock' by Mark Blitzstein.
Brem says
'I studied opera in Montreal and New York and for years sang avant-garde and contemporary music and music theatre works. Recently, I've rediscovered that I find truth more easily in a song. Sinatra said he was not a jazz singer, he was a 'boudoir singer'. I think I know what he meant. I think he meant he was trying to create something intimate and true. I think he meant he tried to be close enough to touch his listeners: whether he was in the room with them, whether he was a thousand miles away. My musical sense came to life hunched over the glass bubble of the jukebox in my Dad's pool hall in the north of Scotland. I'd watch the vinyl disks get dropped, almost harshly, on the turntable, and I could feel the music as I leaned against the machine, watching the needle bounce along the single track.
I like that idea. A boudoir singer. Close enough to know whether or not they mean it, whether they're trying to peel away the layers of artifice to arrive at a song.
Where am I from? I probably spend a little too much time thinking about what it means to be 'from' somewhere. I was born a Canadian and an American, I spent the sixties in New York, the seventies in the northeast of Scotland, and the eighties in Vancouver. I've spent the last decade or so drifting back and forth across the borders of Canada, the U.S. and France.
However, recently, on my first day back in Toronto, I found myself getting all teary eyed with pride at the diversity of faces in the Eaton Centre shopping mall ... so does that mean that I'm now a real Canadian?