Tito Deville Band
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Tito Deville Band
It would be easy to misjudge Vancouver’s Tito Deville Band. For someone going solely on their sound and their image, one may think the band is steeped in glamour 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and drenched in spotlights while drinking champagne in the back of limousines between sold-out gigs. But strip away the glitz and sit down with the quartet in their humble East Vancouver rehearsal space, and one quickly begins to see that behind it all, they’re like any other hard-working musicians making a go at the art they’ve put their hearts and souls into for the last 24 months, if not most of their young lives.
A blend of big-bottom dance-club beats provided by turntablist DJ Kenya and drummer Adam Zulkifli, with electro inspired rock riffs churned out by Will Ripley all setting the ground work for Tito’s hip-hop and R&B style vocals, surely sets them apart from any other act on the city’s and the world’s vast musical landscape. It straddles an odd fence between Electro, Rock, Pop and Hip-Hop, which has seen them drop jaws of audiences in dance clubs and rock and roll bars alike.
“I’ve been doing music for years,” Deville says. “We just wanted to do something different.” The band nods in concurrence. “We’ve always set out from day one that we’re not going to get pigeon holed into one thing,” Kenya adds.
The versatility inherent in the band’s sound garners them enviable appeal across a wide spectrum of modern music fans, which guitarist Ripley happily recognizes and laughs at past gigs at clubs that aren’t accustomed to hosting live musicians when a single DJ usually suffices.
“When you ask somebody, ‘what kind of music do you like?’ so many people, they’ll say ‘I like everything’,” Ripley says. “We’re a band that a lot of different people can come out to and enjoy. We have something for everybody.”
In the midst of honing their live show, the band released live remixes and original material on a mix-tape and now has an EP in the works to take them to the next crucial step of going out on the road and hopefully breaking into the United States, a hugely important market for Canadian artists, Deville says.
“We launched 2000 copies of a mix tape about six months ago, which was kind of a revolutionary idea. That’s the kind of thing DJ’s will do a lot, put together a mix tape to represent themselves, so I had the idea to put together a mix tape of the band,” Kenya says. “We’ve designed a powerful live show and now we’re in the phase of recording our band from the ground up. This is property that we have 100% control of and can distribute ourselves, so that’s a major step for us.”
But whatever happens for the band in the near future, the foursome recognizes, will only result from a whole lot of hard work and determination, which doesn’t seem to intimidate them one bit.
“I don’t walk into anything having the expectations that things are just going to be given to me. At the end of a long day, you have to work harder.” Deville says. “We’re fortunate to be collaborating with some amazing people on many different levels right now. We’re just hoping for the right people to be able to see it and hear it.”
