Al has been a respected presence on the Vancouver music scene for more than five decades. Following early music lessons begun in 1954, Foreman began performing initially at Templeton and then Britannia High School. At Brit, he co-founded the Rhythm and Blues Record club in 1960. In his late teens in 1961, Al joined “Little Daddy and the Bachelors”, a respected blues band that featured Tommy Chong on guitar prior to his success with the comedy duo “Cheech and Chong”. While attending the University of British Columbia from ’61 to ‘65, Al played weekends with Donny Gerrard and the Checkmates.
His professional career began in 1968 when he joined the musician’s union and became a member of the legendary “Night Train Revue”. The nine-piece R & B group embarked on a two-and-a-half-year tour throughout much of the U. S. and Eastern Canada. Foreman’s tenure with the Night Train Revue served him well. His expertise on the Hammond B-3 continued, his harmonica playing was getting stronger, and he added singing, composing, and arranging to his list of skills.
Al was a founding member of Scrubbaloe Caine in 1972. The band had solid commercial success with their RCA album “Round One”. Al played keyboards and harmonica in the band and wrote much of the original material. His compositions “Feelin’ Good on Sunday” and “Travelin” received national airplay.
Al and his good friend and drummer from Scrubbaloe, Bill McBeth, teamed up to write “I Wonder What You’re Doin’ Tonight”, a national hit for the Foreman Young band in 1977, and a song for which he and McBeth received a Certificate of Honour from Socan. The song was a highlight when the Foreman Young band opened for the Beach Boys at the Vancouver Coliseum in 1978.
Al teamed up with Vancouver blues musician and singer Jim Byrnes to form the Foreman-Byrnes Blues Band in 1978. Al met Jim while creating a blues history project entitled “Summertime Blues: An Appreciation”, a critically acclaimed concert which Foreman scripted, produced and directed.
Al returned to school in 1982, enrolling in a commercial music program at Capilano College, studying arranging, theory, voice, composition, and private instruction. He put his newly-learned arranging skills to work the following year and released the self-composed single “Everybody Wants More Money” on his own Munchkin Records label. It was a regional success and received solid local airplay.
In 1986, Al released “Deep in the Heart of Vancouver”, a composition he had written for Expo ’86.
Throughout the eighties and into the nineties, Foreman continued to perform with the Al Foreman Band and worked as a solo entertainer, enjoying successful performances in Munich, Amsterdam, and Zurich.
Following a successful six-year run with his band at Jake O-Grady’s Restaurant, Al took a fifteen-year hiatus from performance. He returned once again to Capilano College, this time to enroll in a two-year music therapy program. He received his Bachelor of Music Therapy degree and from 2000 to 2015 enjoyed a rewarding and satisfying career as a successful Music Therapist.
Recent projects have brought Al back to the performance stage. He has written an autobiographical retrospective entitled “Reflections in Blue” which showcases his love for blues music, and has also created “New Orleans Gumbo”, a themed concert that shines a light on the many Louisiana performers and songwriters that have inspired his love for New Orleans based rhythm and blues.
Al is enjoying a new resurgence as both concerts have sold out at each performance, and as he states at the end of his “Reflections in Blue” show with an acknowledged tip of the hat to the late Chuck Willis:
“I don’t want to hang up my rock and roll shoes…”