Meet the Dal student who played six shows in one weekend

By: Lily Van Beek and Jack Wolkove

If you went to the Blueberry Jam festival in Mabou, N.S., this past August, you might have seen Leo Cox on the lineup playing the guitar or bass in a band, or two, or six.4 

Over the past few years, the Dalhousie University music student has been in several bands and has played and composed with other songwriters across Halifax.

“I think people just know that it’s what I love to do,” Cox says. 

Besides being a founding member of the roots-rock band Esdaile and the rock band In The Breaks, Cox plays in the Dalhousie New Music Ensemble and can be found at the Economy Shoe Shop on Tuesday nights with his jazz trio, LC3.

Cox’s love for music began when he picked up his dad’s guitar at the age of eight. 

“One day I heard ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne, and I just wanted to play guitar all of a sudden.”

After breaking his ankle in a rugby incident, he decided to take some time off before starting university. As he spent the year gigging and playing in different bands around the city, a future in music started to feel realistic. 

“I just discovered myself more drawn to — and getting more opportunities in — the music space after high school,” Cox says. “It really allowed me to believe that this was something I could do.”

After two years composing and arranging music at Nova Scotia Community College, he switched to Dalhousie’s music program. 

Along with school and local gigs, Cox has been juggling international performances. He performed in the United Kingdom with fellow Nova Scotian artist, Maggie Andrew, and went to Cuba as part of the Los Primos musical exchange program. 

Between travelling abroad and playing in Halifax, Cox played at the East Coast Music Awards last spring.

“While I was in Cuba, I was learning all of the music for the ECMAs,” Cox says. “Then, when I was at the ECMAs, I was learning and prepping all the music for the music festival that NSCC runs every May, called NOVAFest.”

Cox jumps around the Halifax music scene accompanying and composing with ensembles, bands and solo performers including Halifax musician Eliza Rhinelander. The two have been playing together since their late teens.

“He’s just absolutely brilliant, and also such a great guy,” Rhinelander says. “[Leo is] one of the most versatile musicians I’ve ever met.” 

Cox bears allegiance to no genre, working across folk, metal, jazz and R&B. To him, the focus is on sound and volume, whether it’s coming from an orchestra or an electric guitar.

“You can create super intense, really powerful, impactful, loud sounds, whether it’s across 18 horns or whether it’s a giant amp that’s cranked,” he says. “I like intensity in music, and that’s a quality that I can see in the multiple different types of music that I play and like.”

Six shows, one weekend

Most recently, Cox played with six different bands at Blueberry Jam, an annual music festival in Mabou, N.S.

Local musician Rankin MacInnis, the festival’s organizer, has a history of collaborating with Cox.

“He’s calm, he’s collected, and he’s professional already; things I can’t say I had at his age,” he says. “[Cox] is not just proficient in one instrument; he’s stepped up to the plate with me on electric guitar and bass, filling in on huge nights,” says MacInnis.

Having worked with him on past projects, MacInnis invited Cox to perform at Blueberry Jam, not realizing that several other performers had already asked him to accompany their sets.

“I didn’t know about [him playing five other sets] until I started seeing some of these bands submit their information sheets,” says MacInnis.

In addition to playing with his own bands, Esdaile and In The Breaks, Cox accompanied Avery Dakin, Fiona Clancey, Kieran Campbell, and Rhinelander.

For Cox, the challenge of playing so many sets in one weekend was managing the emotional performance of other artists’ songs.

“It’s an interesting balance to go between music you’ve written and the music you’re learning that somebody else has written,” says Cox. “You have to manage your emotions within all of it.”

Despite his long-standing relationship with MacInnis, Cox was surprised when In The Breaks was invited to perform a set. He was impressed by the audience’s warm reception for In The Breaks.

“People loved [the performance]. It was a bit of a wild-card pick, and it went extremely well,” says Cox. “The experience was magical. Everyone [at Blueberry Jam] is so down to earth; it feels like how I imagine Woodstock would have felt.”

A historic community

One of Blueberry Jam’s main goals, MacInnis says, is to give back to the Cape Breton music community.

“I attribute everything about music to Mabou,” he says. “There’s something about the preservation of the Celtic spirit that really grounds music. It’s approached first as a community before it’s ever thought of as a business.

“To bring the music in Nova Scotia home to these people in Mabou … is a pretty big honour. I’m glad to do it in a way that I think is true to the people and culture there.”

For Cox, the main stage at Blueberry Jam held personal significance.

He says the family that originally lived on the farm near the stage picked his grandmother up at the train station in Mabou, N.S. 

“Being on stage at Blueberry Jam, if I looked to my right, I could see the farm where she moved to in 1951, when she settled.”

Cox says playing so close to the farm was a powerful experience.

“It was an incredibly gratifying and valuable experience for me, personally as well as musically,” says Cox. “I wrote a song about my grandmother, and I got to play it there and tell that story on stage.”