Steve Wallace

Wallace, Steve

Steve (Steven Scott) Wallace. Bassist, b Toronto 16 Aug 1956. He studied guitar privately with Gary Benson and double bass 1975-6 at Humber College with Lenny Boyd. In 1979 he began working in Toronto jazz clubs - eg, Bourbon Street until 1984, George's Spaghetti House and, 1982-3, Lytes. Wallace has backed such Canadian and visiting (US) jazzmen as Pepper Adams, Ed Bickert, George Coleman, Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis, Harry (Sweets) Edison, Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché, Pat LaBarbera, Rob McConnell, Sam Noto, and Zoot Sims. He joined the Boss Brass in 1983 and was briefly a member of the Moe Koffman Quintet in 1988.

His affiliation (initially through Bickert and Fraser MacPherson) with the Concord Jazz label of California brought him to international notice by the mid-1980s. He has toured with MacPherson (USSR 1981, 1984, 1986), the Woody Herman All Stars (Europe, Japan, Australia 1985), and the Concord All Stars (Japan 1987), and travelled 1988-9 with Oscar Peterson and, beginning in 1989, with Oliver Jones.

Wallace, who is valued as a strong ensemble player with heavy, yet buoyant tone and supple technique in the older-fashioned manner of a Ray Brown, appears on recordings by Bickert, the Boss Brass, MacPherson, McConnell, Noto, Archie Alleyne, the Keith Blackley/Michael Stuart Quartet, and others. His albums with the Concord All Stars and the US singer Rosemary Clooney are listed in the Bickert discography.