Last Wednesday night was the curtain call for Oceans Five. The quintet, which formed as the back-up band for jazz legend and Haligonian Bucky Adams, played its last gig at the Harbourview, the bar in the Northwood retirement home on Gottingen Street.
Present were about 60 residents, and a dozen or so visiting well-wishers, friends and relatives of the band.
Between sets, band members and hangers on attempted to give me a history of the band but memories were fading, and many of the details contradicted each other.
“Bucky had just come back from Montreal,” explained Wayne Thorne. (Thorne is no relation to The Coast’s Tara Thorne, but is the father of filmmaker Chaz Thorne.) “And he got back together with Art Doucet” —Thorne waves across the room to Doucet, who had come to bid farewell to his old band.
From there the comings and goings of the various musicians become impossibly complex. The short of it: Adams, Doucet and Steve Penny recreated an earlier incarnation of Adams’ band, called the Basin Street Trio, brought in a couple of more musicians and dubbed it the New Basin Street Band and started playing regular Wednesday evening gigs at the Harbourview.
Eventually, Adams took up residence at Northwood, and he died last year. The band, however, kept on. The Wednesday Oceans Five lineup consisted of Thorne as singer and on the congas, George Ewanick on sax, band leader Gordon Fader on piano, and Charlie Doucet on bass and guitar. “Special guest” Steve Penny played banjo on a handful of numbers, and local actor Kitty Farmer sang a couple of songs. (See more on this story at thecoast.ca/bites.)
The band ended with “Strangers in the Night,” the dancefloor packed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Thorne, “that’s it for us, for the evening, for the night, forever.”
This article appears in Jul 4-10, 2013.