 Lisa Bunkowsky
Bass Guitar, Vocals
Hello Band Fans! My name is Lisa Bunkowsky. I am the primary bass player for the band Legacy. The odd time they let me play electric guitar or acoustic guitar too. I also sing with the band; primarily back up. I play music for fun and for stress relief from my busy job as a Grade 3 and 4 teacher.
I am married to Tom Russell, one of the band’s guitar players. I love to cook gourmet food and enjoy entertaining people in my home and feeding my in-laws at the lake in the summer. Lately I’ve been trying to learn how to fish, but I haven’t been too successful at that yet.
I have been playing guitar in one shape or another since I was 10. It’s funny the bass guitar that I play on most is the one my parents bought for me when I was 14!! I still love my old Fender. I guess they must have had confidence that my skill level would grow enough to warrant buying me such an expensive guitar when I was only 14.
Music infuses my earliest childhood memories. I recall when I was 3 being at my dad’s band practices and feeling like I was a part of something really special. As a small child my attention span for music was endless. My father wanted his children to share in his love of music. When I was 5 he used to sit my sisters Angela, and Heidi (also in the band) and I on chairs and he would play his guitar and we would sing. While my mother did the dishes in the next room or looked after my other sisters, Shannon and Lorelei, my dad would sing song after song with us. I remember learning to sing “Downtown” and not having a hot clue what all those words meant. What could “linger on the sidewalks where the neon lights are pretty” possibly mean to a 5 year old farm girl? However it was the famous “I’ve a Parrot with Feathers” where my father instructed us in the art of singing harmony. We gave our first performance as a family singing act at a function at a Winnipeg senior’s residence. I had no idea what I was in for, so I didn’t know to feel nervous. However, I sure did feel pumped up after the great response from our audience and I was hooked. Now here I am 35 years later and I can’t seem to give up performing.
As a musician, exposure to other’s music often has a profound impact on what you play and how you play. I was exposed to a wide variety of music. My mom had a stash of 45 records that she let us beat up in the basement. I can’t tell you how many times I listened to “Walk Right In”. My Aunt Cynthia gave me my first LP record (and many, many more along the way). I remember feeling so connected to the songs on that recording because it belonged to me. It was called Greatest Dancing Hits, and it had songs like “Knock Three Times” on it.
Early on much of the music I listen to was what my parents were listening to. Something changed when I was around 11 years old. It started when I was baby sitting my cousins Derek, Joel, and Faye. Being the good kids that they were, they went to bed when they were told and I was left with nothing to do for many long hours. I went into my Aunt Kristine’s music collection and found a whole stash of Beatles recordings. The Beatles were not my generation. I had heard of them because my dad’s band played a couple of their songs. I listened to those recordings and something switched on for me. As I got hooked, my sister Heidi got hooked and we started to collect albums. I soon started to notice how many other musicians cited the Beatles as an influence and started to listen for those influences in their music.
My older sister Angela, being the entrepreneurial one in the family, had a chicken business on the farm. She always had more money than the rest of us. She decided to join Columbia House record club. The albums started rolling into the house at an unprecedented rate and as a result I started listening to many other artists.
As I reached the later teen years our family band “The Family Spectrum” became very busy. We felt that we needed to move in one musical direction and so our music became much more country sounding. This was due to our father’s love of this style as well as our own involvement with Ronnie Karlowsky, a local musician who we would sit in with from time to time and who had played with my dad’s dance band in the early days. It was in these years where we worked at perfecting the 3 part harmony that has become our signature sound. For many years we worked in this genre and you can still hear it in some of our songs with our new band.
In 1992 my sister’s husband died in a tragic accident. The music went out of us for a long stretch. Our group had effectively broken up, although we still got together and played for special occasions. During that time my musical interests and tastes really shifted to more of a rock influence. Tom has always been more of a rock player and in the vacuum of not having my family to play with I started to be influenced more by what he had done as a teenager and what we were listening to at home. It was around 2000 that I decided to go back to playing classical guitar and for 3 years enjoyed my weekly music lessons with David Letkemann. It gave me a greater appreciation of the complexities of classical music and gave me a chance to keep my fingers limber.
It was also at that time that I made my first visit to New Orleans. POW! Did that town ever get to me. I felt something shift in me when I was there. It was like my skull opened up and every note I heard poured in and went straight to my soul. When I came home I began to indulge in my curiosity of old jazz. This was a smoldering fire that had been lit by Ralf Jenkins, the trumpet player in my dad’s band. It probably was bred in the bone as well because my mother’s father (who passed away when my mom was 13) and his family played jazz long before my mom was around. So now I have a lot of jazz in my music collection. When our band plays those old songs now I feel a connectedness to all of those players that have come before.
People sometimes ask me why I play music with my family. I wish everyone could feel the pride and joy I feel when I share the stage with my nephews and younger cousins and see the growth and improvement in their playing. I see many members of my family every week. We don’t have to focus on all the bad things that happen in life, but just sit down and play and it feels so good. My husband Tom has been the greatest… not only in granting me all the freedom I could want to indulge in this passion, but works hard to share it with me. I hope you can hear that passion when you listen to our music. Cheers!
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