“I lost my dad on March 10th, 2025,” Scott Cook says, without preamble. The album’s title, Guy Fawkes Day, 1947, is explained in the same breath: November 5th was his father’s birthday. His dad was British. The date is specific because specificity was the point, a name embedded in a calendar date, a way of saying this one is yours.
Cook is 52, a guitarist and songwriter based in Montreal, holder of a PhD in classical music theory, and a teacher at Vanier College. His debut record, Topics, came out in 2021 and was, by necessity and circumstance, almost entirely a solo effort, recorded during the lockdown months when the world had closed down around everyone. Guy Fawkes Day, 1947 is something else. It opens outward.
The shift toward a live band was driven by something practical before it became something personal. “The idea of bringing my friends, and these ones in particular, into the process was really motivated by my desire to play live,” he says. “When I wrote the songs, I felt that assembling a band to learn specific parts would be tough.” The solution he arrived at came from his experience in jazz, where musicians work from lead sheets and find their way through improvisation rather than rote rehearsal. “I just thought that if I treated my songs like I would a jazz tune, write charts and hand them off to the musicians, it would likely be a quicker path to being able to play them live.” Recording, he says, was almost an afterthought. “A reference. All that to say, I wrote the songs, melodies, chords, lyrics, form, but the performances were somewhat improvised during the recording process.”
The band he assembled around those charts is not a casual one. Kenny Bibace on guitar, Paul Shrofel on keys, Dave Watts on upright bass, Rich Irwin on drums, Frank Lozano on saxophone, Julia Jones contributing additional vocals. “Most of these friends are some of the best jazz players around.” That’s a statement, and he says it plainly, because it’s just true.
Two of the seven songs on the album had appeared on Topics in earlier forms. Cook kept them not because he felt they were unfinished, but because they were the ones he wanted to play live with this particular band. The revisions are modest but pointed. “The new version of ‘The Pin in My Grenade’ has a sax solo. Plus, I figured if I was going to make that addition, I might as well add a key change in the song to go with it.” The changes are small, but significant enough to include them on the new record. It’s the logic of someone who understands that a song isn’t sealed when it’s released, that the arrival of Lozano’s saxophone changes the shape of what was already there.
The record was mixed by Dave Traina at Freq Shop Studios, which is worth pausing on. Traina’s work with The Damn Truth sits in a very different sonic register, hard rock, muscular production, a world away from upright bass and jazz drumming. Cook knew this. It was partly the appeal. “I thought that having a rock drummer mix a jazz drummer could be another way of making this record sound a little different.” There’s something slightly reckless in that reasoning, or at least pleasingly uncautious. “I know that what I brought him, including upright bass and sax, is not normally what Dave works with.” They’d had bands that played together in the early 2000s. Trust built over two decades and an instinct that the friction might produce something.
Cook’s approach to genre has the texture of someone who spent years studying music formally and then kept listening in spite of, or alongside, that training. He has a PhD in classical music theory and teaches it, but when he talks about how he actually hears music, the categories dissolve. “I will listen to Stravinsky or Philip Glass the same way that I listen to Jeff Buckley or Bjork, Bill Frisell or Chet Baker, Bad Brains, The Exploited or Meshuggah.” What he describes isn’t eclecticism exactly. “If I like it, there’s an emotional connection that overrides genre.” The influences surface in the writing not as conscious decisions but as residue. “When I write songs, I can trace a line from one idea to something that it reminds me of, though it’s often not too explicit.”
His lyrics, he says, are “for today; they are my now.” That phrase is worth sitting with. It’s a specific kind of commitment to the present tense, a refusal to write from abstraction or nostalgia. “I want lyrics that are representative of who I am as a person today, the man that I am now, and that I feel comfortable and confident singing out loud.” The honesty isn’t confessional in a self-indulgent way. Some of it turns outward. “The Author,” he says, “is actually about not wanting to be another Joe-Rogan-wanna-be that I seem to see so much of these days. Haha.” The laugh at the end of that sentence is doing a lot of work.
The album’s dedication sits against all of this. He had been working on the songs while his father was still alive, trying to finish them in time. “He was sick, and I wanted to get them done in time for him to hear them. But with everything that was going on, they didn’t come out how I wanted them to.” The songwriting was complete. The recording only began after his father passed on March 10th, 2025. He doesn’t dwell on this, doesn’t frame it as transformation or catharsis. It’s just what happened.
The launch takes place at Casa del Popolo on May 29th, full band, doors at 7pm, show at 8:30. Cook has played there once before with a previous project. “I like the room and figure that, for a new artist, it’s an appropriate size.” He already has new songs. He’s looking for chances to play, even alone if that’s what’s available. “I really, truly love it,” he says, about making music. “And I really love playing with others and am lucky to have such talented friends.”
The album is named for a date that belonged to his father. He’s already writing the next thing.
