Ear Candy

Brent Saklofske has been a working guitarist in Calgary for more than four decades, moving between rock bands, theatre pits, big bands, orchestra stages and his own instrumental records. Classically trained, he has played nearly every style on the instrument and spent much of that time teaching it to Calgary students.

His earliest documented recording credit dates to 1980, as a member of Mega, a Calgary rock band that played around town in the early 1980s. The band's single on Aurora Records (ARS 8003) paired 'Running Blind' with 'Make It', two harder-rocking, straight-ahead songs that Saklofske wrote and arranged. Debbie Hughes sang lead, Doug Wong produced, and Richard Harrow engineered the sessions at The Living Room studio in Calgary.

Over the following years he became one of the city's first-call guitarists. He backed Ronnie Spector, Irene Cara, Percy Sledge, Florence LaRue of the 5th Dimension and Canadian country singer-songwriter Ray Griff. With the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra he played behind the vocal jazz group New York Voices and took the solo mandolin part in a concert of Italian film music. For more than ten years he held the guitar chair at Stage West, and he played touring theatre productions at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium and the Jack Singer Concert Hall. He was also a regular in the Prime Time Big Band.

In the early 1990s he opened Sak's Music in southwest Calgary, a music school and shop offering instruments, printed music and lessons in classical guitar, fingerstyle, folk, jazz, rock, country, theory and improvisation. By 2017 he had been teaching guitar for 35 years.

Sak's Music doubled as his record label. In 2006 it issued I Love Guitar, an instrumental CD that ranged across jazz, rock, world, classical and flamenco. Ear Candy followed in 2008, released jointly with The Earth Kings Productions Inc. Saklofske wrote ten of its eleven pieces and arranged all of them; the eleventh is his reading of Bach's 'Prelude' (BWV 999). Across the album he switches between nylon-string, steel-string, acoustic, electric, slide and synth guitar.

The Ear Candy sessions ran through Emerald Ridge Studio, with David Horrocks and Phil Krawczuk engineering, and Middleman Studio, with Jerry Proppe at the board. Doug Elliott played bass and Krawczuk played drums and percussion, with Gavin Sorochan on drums for 'Home Sweet Home'. Proppe added keyboards, accordion and drum loops. Lillian Penner recorded her cello, violin and recorder parts at Infinite Wave Studio, and Kevin Sands blew harmonica on the closing 'Thunder Road'. Horrocks mixed and mastered the record.

Sands and Krawczuk also played in The Earth Kings with keyboardist Glen Rowley, and the band's production company shares the Ear Candy release and publishing. The Earth Kings issued their own album, Ascending, in 2018.

He kept turning up on other people's records and stages. He performed with singer-songwriter Cori Brewster at artsPeak in 2006 and joined Lindsay Ell and other Calgary musicians at a January 2010 benefit concert for Haiti. He played guitar on Tone Indbryn's album Down, recorded at Emerald Ridge, and on 'The June Song' and 'Une après-midi à Carsac' from Marc Lamontagne's 2020 album Reflections in Melody. He has played in the Suzie Q Classic Rock & Roll Dance Band and serves as musical director, guitarist and vocalist for The Beverly Thrillbillies. Into the 2020s he has continued to accompany Tone Indbryn at venues in Calgary and southern Alberta, backing her folk songs on acoustic and electric guitar.

-Robert Willliston