Love & Sas

In late 1991, David Bendeth, vice president of A&R at BMG Music Canada, told RPM, “There hasn’t been a breakthrough dance act yet in Canada.” He and his songwriting partner Richie Mayer thought they had found one in Love & Sas, the pairing of Vancouver singer Lovena Fox and Toronto vocalist Saskia Garel. Within eighteen months the duo had won two Juno Awards.

Mayer came to the project from Chicago, where he had played in the power-pop band Loose Lips. When a development deal with Epic Records fell through, an A&R man at BMG/RCA Canada suggested he move to Toronto, and he spent the next eight months there writing R&B songs. The label’s president gave him a direct brief. BMG had no Black artists on its roster. If Mayer could find the singers, the company would fund the album.

The search took a while. Bendeth first tried to build a trio around Garel, but it fell apart over a clash of egos. He went through sixty or seventy tapes before a Vancouver modelling agency sent him one by Lovena Fox, and Mayer remembered auditioning twenty-four singers in all. Once Fox and Garel were in the same room, they hit it off. They took their stage name from their own names, Love for Lovena and Sas for Saskia.

They came from very different places. Fox grew up in Vancouver, where the duo’s 1991 press said her parents had run the Harlem Nocturne, the R&B and jazz cabaret on East Hastings Street. In 1983 she was singing in H.B. Concept, the Vancouver band led by her cousin, bassist Henri Brown, who said the two of them had been trying to put bands together since they were children. That year the group played a week at the Plazazz! Showroom and won the CBC television competition Fame Game. She went on to sing background vocals for Bon Jovi, Colin James and Little Caesar, and toured with the Payola$. Her stage work included Ain’t Misbehavin’ and the Arts Club’s 1987 Black & Gold Revue. Garel was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to Toronto at six. She earned an honours degree in York University’s jazz department, won the Oscar Peterson Award, and sang with the Latin and world-beat group Coconut Groove while still a student. Fox became the lead singer, and Garel brought the raps.

Call My Name came out on BMG/RCA in 1991. Mayer and Bendeth wrote and arranged all ten songs, with Scott Humphrey joining them on ‘Change of Heart’, and Mayer wrote the lyrics. The two of them programmed the keyboards, bass and drums. Mayer produced and Bendeth co-produced, working at BMG Studio, SoundTown, Phase One and Beat Factory in Toronto and at Tanglewood and Universal in Chicago. Tom Coyne mastered the album at the Hit Factory in New York. The Chicago sessions brought in house-music pioneers Jamie Principle and M’Doc, who programmed ‘One Step Closer to Heaven’. The background singers included Vancouver’s Candus Churchill, Sugar Jones, Henry Brown and Karen Holness. The result moved between club tracks, swing, funk and soul ballads, with Fox’s big theatre voice out front.

‘I Don’t Need Yo’ Kiss’ led off as the first single and video. Garel wrote its rap with Sandy St. Aubin and Karen Holness. By mid-December 1991 the single was up to No. 8 on RPM’s national dance chart, and the duo was on the magazine’s cover. ‘Call My Name’ followed onto RPM’s Hit Tracks chart in the spring of 1992. In March it won the Juno Award for Best R&B/Soul Recording, and the 12-inch mix of ‘I Don’t Need Yo’ Kiss’ was nominated for Best Dance Recording at the same ceremony.

‘Don’t Stop Now’ kept them on the radio through the summer. It spent seventeen weeks on RPM’s Hit Tracks chart and peaked at No. 15 on CKLG in Vancouver in August. The video was nominated for Best Dance Video at the 1992 MuchMusic Canadian Music Video Awards. That September RPM listed Love & Sas among the judges of the Great Canadian Talent Search, alongside Sue Medley, Mitsou and Glass Tiger. The fourth single, the ballad ‘Once In A Lifetime’, went to radio on a promo CD and jumped fifteen places into RPM’s top 40 in late September. At the 1993 Junos it won Best R&B/Soul Recording, the duo’s second straight win in the category, and ‘Don’t Stop Now (Extended Original Mix)’ was nominated for Best Dance Recording.

Call My Name was Love & Sas’s only album. Fox went on to a career in musical theatre, joined the Canadian workshops of Ragtime and went on to play Sarah in Chicago and on the U.S. national tour. She released her solo album Now’s The Time in 1997. Garel was cast as Mimi in the Canadian production of Rent. While Rent was playing Vancouver she won the role of Jasmine on the series Night Man, and she later appeared in thirteen episodes of the American sitcom One on One. Mayer signed a publishing deal and wrote for other artists and for film and television soundtracks.

-Robert Williston