If you're going to a show anyway, you might as well take the dance lessons. People say, 'I'd love to try that,' but they're too afraid. "I just taught 100 people at the Fort Langley Jazz Festival. Riley will be hosting a swing dance lesson ahead of the show. The record won't be ready in time for Whistler, but that won't stop the dancing. To that end, T Riley and the Bourbon Rebels will be releasing their debut album in October, ahead of the festival. I thought, 'We better have an album and a name,'" she laughs. "This is just supposed to be a fun band and now we're getting hired to go to Ireland and getting all the gigs. That recently culminated in a slot kicking off the Arts Whistler Live! series at the Maury Young Arts Centre next week, as well as a gig at a festival in Cork, Ireland in October. While she also kept playing her solo rock material, she continued to get more gig requests for her jazz music. You know it's going to be good because they're such good players." "I usually play with the same five or six people, but I like having guest players so it can be a little bit of a different experience," Riley says. Together, they formed T Riley and the Bourbon Rebels. She met singer and trumpet player Bonnie Northgraves who, in turn, introduced her to many of the talented musicians in Vancouver's jazz scene. Initially, she resisted focusing on a new genre, but her music career began to unfold so organically, it was hard to ignore. People knew all these moves I didn't and I started taking lessons." "I went to check it out anyway," she recalls. She had no luck at the time, but long after the project wrapped, she received a reply from someone who told her about a swing dance night at a venue on Commercial Drive. To prepare for the video, Riley set out looking for traditional swing dancers to star in it. It wasn't a scam he liked the track and was looking for experience behind the camera. "He said, 'Would you like to do a music video for free?'" she recalls. While the track was markedly different from her rock set, she decided to mix it in at a live show. "This song came into my head and I wrote it in five minutes. Years ago, during a layover in London, she was walking around a park "lamenting why I wasn't home making music," she says. That choice proved to be a good one down the road. While Riley started out as a solo rock act, she also went to music school, where she focused on jazz music because "there was no school of rock at the time." It gives me a lot of time to do my music." "The longest we have is Sydney, Australia-and then I get a lot of time off because the flights are so long. To compromise, she got a day gig as a commercial pilot while continuing to pursue music-and it's kind of worked out perfectly. The only problem? " parents wanted me to have a real job," she says over the phone from her home in Vancouver. Teresa Riley has always wanted to be a musician.
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