For nearly three decades Powder Blues has been Canada’s favourite blues band. Their music incorporates elements of Swing, Blues, Jazz, Rock & Roll and Rhythm & Blues into their unique and instantly identifiable sound. This broad approach has resulted in an appeal whose demographic is so wide that it is not unusual to find people from seven to seventy swaying side by side at a Powder Blues concert.  Throughout the years they have toured ceaselessly throughout Canada, the United States and overseas, spreading the joy of a music that makes people smile and dance.

Band highlights include winning Canada’s most prestigious National Music Award, the Juno, in 1981, headlining and recording a live album at the world famous Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1983, being presented with the W.C. Handy Award in Memphis, Tennessee in 1986 and touring the Soviet Union and being released on Melodya Records in 1990. They have appeared in concert with such legendary names as Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, James Brown, Albert Collins, James Cotton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the Who, ZZ Top, the Doobie Brothers, Edgar Winter and Tower of Power.

The Powder Blues latest CD titled ‘blues + jazz = BLAZZ!’ on Blue Wave Records was released in 2004. The band continues to tour regularly and has never played less than 40 shows and sometimes as many as 300 shows in each of the 28 years they have been performing.

Leader Tom Lavin has written many of the band’s best-known songs, including ‘Doin’ It Right’ [‘On the Wrong Side of Town’] and ‘Boppin With the Blues’. Tom has been singing and playing guitar for a living for over 35 years. He has been presented with a number of awards including B.C. Music Industry Association awards for ‘Guitarist, Singer, Songwriter and Producer of the Year’, a Canadian Music Industry Association Juno award for ‘Best New Band’ and the American W.C. Handy award for ‘Best Foreign Blues Band’.