When The Adam Brown jumped onto the stage at Wild Bill’s Legendary saloon on March 9, the audience was ready. The crowd had been prepped by two sets of mellow, melodious tunes by two other bands – Gigi and Ohbijou – and most of them were reluctant to give up spots staked on the dance floor that fronts the small stage. They weren’t disappointed. With a shriek of electric guitar and a tight drum beat, The Adam Brown pounded out their set to a mass of new fans.

That Sunday night was the last event in what had become an intense, groundbreaking musical experience — the first-ever Banff Centre Indie Band residency. Created from a kernel of an idea — to give rock and alternative musicians the same opportunities the Centre has long offered to classical and jazz musicians — the residency quickly became a case study for the innovation and renewal of the Centre’s arts programs during this 75th anniversary year. Garnering a feature story in the Globe and Mail and a mention on Stuart Maclean’s “Vinyl Café” radio show, it was a remarkably rewarding experience for the musicians, the audio engineers brought in to work with them, the many staff members involved in building and running the program, and the audiences.

The three bands chosen for the inaugural residency, Gigi from Vancouver, Ohbijou from Toronto, and Montreal’s The Adam Brown, each brought their own sets of strengths and expectations. Gigi is a group of sessional musicians who had recorded several experimental tracks together, but had never played a live gig before arriving in Banff. The Adam Brown, favourites of the Montreal indie scene, includes the lanky and energetic eponymous lead singer, backed up by three inventive musicians cranking out rock songs that sound classic and entirely new at the same time. Ohbijou, with a lush and complex wall-of-sound style that evokes The Arcade Fire, is hard at work on a second record, a process helped enormously by the residency.

All three were brought together with producers and engineers who worked with the bands a week at a time. Tony Berg, a Los Angeles-based producer with his own imprint on Columbia records, has produced albums by Tom Waits, Jakob Dylan, and Pete Yorn. Josh Dolgin, the singer also known as socalled, has created his own intricately crafted Yiddish rap albums, and has appeared on more than a dozen other musicians’ recordings as a singer, songwriter, arranger, pianist, and producer. Montreal-based Howard Bilerman is co-owner and head engineer of hotel2tango recording studio, and has produced records for The Arcade Fire, the Dears, Vic Chesnutt, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Shawn Everett, who appeared to live in the studio through the two weeks of the residency, is an alumni of the Centre’s Audio program, and now works with Berg in Los Angeles.

Each band had a schedule chock full of rehearsal, writing time, recording, and live performance, a chance to concentrate on nothing but new music for two intense weeks. “The Banff Centre is the finest example of the artist being cherished and mentored,” says Bilerman, who was on hand with Dolgin for the first week of the residency. “Musicians have had this ugly marriage with the recording industry, and I’m always shocked that so many people on the industry side don’t realize that if musicians stop writing music, the industry would collapse. Here, the musician is at the heart of the equation. I wanted to come to The Banff Centre because the values here align with my values about how artists should be treated.”

For Shawn Petsche, bassist with The Adam Brown, the experience of having the time and space to write and work out new songs was unprecedented. “We wanted to get out of our comfort zone,” he says. “We wanted to question our songwriting process, and we’ve had 24-hour access to a rehearsal space, which we don’t have at home. We were locked into the space together and it sounds great in there and we didn’t have to worry about the technical side of it.”

The pure creativity of the process engaged Bilerman in ways he didn’t expect. Musicians from other residencies — and music program director and violinist Barry Shiffman — were spontaneously asked to sit in on recording sessions. Members of the three bands collaborated on ideas, and became supportive audiences for each other.

“The six days I spent in the studio informed my own work,” Bilerman says. “I’d never seen an environment like this, where people are so open to other people’s art. Everyone here has turned off their filters about what’s good and what’s bad.”

He talks about two recording models he has long admired. One is the “retreat” method, used by The Band to produce their 1968 debut album, Music From Big Pink, in a rose-coloured bungalow in upstate New York. The other method is what Bilerman calls the “Capitol Records or Motown method” in which signed musicians are surrounded by a huge wealth of talent, and a string section can be procured on demand. “I’ve never seen those two models fused together,” he adds, “except for here.”

Though it was an intense process, each of the bands came away with a new understanding of their own creative capacity. Casey Mecija is lead singer and frontwoman for Ohbijou, a band that has done its share of recording, touring, and performing. She says the residency helped to focus the band’s members. “Although we all agreed that one more week of residency would have been perfect, the experience made us realize that we can do things in a much shorter period of time, things we used to think we needed all the time in the world for,” she says. Ohbijou will release their second record in early fall. “Banff was good for igniting a desire to finish it,” Mecija adds.

Each band left Banff with a small store of recorded music, and a mass of ideas, song fragments, and contacts. With a world-class recording experience behind them, they’re all back in their hometowns with renewed focus. “The sky’s the limit as to what they can do with this music,” Bilerman says.

Above photos: (l-r) Producer Howard Bilerman in the recording studio. Marissa Johnson and Nick Krgovich of Gigi. Sound engineer Shawn Everett and Barry Shiffman, director of Music, in the studio with Ohbijou.

Below photo: Producer Tony Berg (l) in the recording studio with audio assistant Monica Gil and sound engineer Shawn Everett. Photos: Don Lee, Laura Vanags.