by Adrian Chamberlain - Times Colonist

There’s Michael Bublé, Josh Groban … and William Joseph.

William who?

All are protégés of David Foster, the Victoria-born music producer blessed with an ability to transform relative unknowns into easy-listening titans.

Joseph, 29, is the latest to get the Big Foster Push. Indeed, Foster’s so keen to tout Joseph, he contacted the TC offering to chat about the pop-pianist from Phoenix, Ariz.

So we did.

Foster says Williams is playing Vancouver Island dates (Victoria, Nanaimo, Courtenay and Campbell) as part of a Western Canadian tour to hone the pianist’s concert chops. In a sense, this tour, wrapping in Winnipeg on Jan. 30, is the equivalent of an off-Broadway run — the U.S. and international market being “Broadway.” Travelling with a small band, it is Joseph’s first tour as a headliner.

“This is a great training ground for him to get prepared for what’s about to come,” Foster said this week.

The producer compares Joseph’s situation to that of the pre-fame Bublé. At Foster’s suggestion, Bublé fine-tuned his live act during a five-night run at the 75-seat Cinegrill club in Los Angeles’s Roosevelt Hotel. Bublé went on to sell more than 10 million albums … and capture the hearts of middle-age women worldwide.

Foster believes Joseph might achieve the career he envisioned for himself before becoming a wildly successful producer, overseeing sessions for Celine Dion, Michael Jackson and other stars. Both men share a love for playing cinematic pop piano with classical flourishes. On his debut disc, Within (produced by Foster), Joseph plays his own pop/neo-romantic pieces alongside adult-contemporary reworkings of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir and Kansas’s Dust in the Wind.

Foster first encountered Joseph in 2003 at a charity event honouring Muhammad Ali. Joseph’s previous manager, Gregg Ostro, introduced the pianist to Foster. Joseph says all he imagined was shaking Foster’s hand and giving him a demo recording.

Instead, at Ostro’s suggestion, Joseph was also invited to play the piano. The musician immediately knew it was a make-or-break opportunity.

“It was exciting and horrifying all at the same time … I was scared out of my mind,” Joseph recalled. “But I was just trying to contain my excitement and play it cool.”

Foster was tremendously impressed with the pianist’s rendering of his original song Within (the title track of his album). The producer gave Joseph the high-five, then invited him to be the opening act at the charity concert, headlined by Rod Stewart and Reba McEntire. That performance went over well, too.

“I knew it was a big deal,” Joseph said. “But I didn’t know how big of a deal it was.”

Foster then invited the pianist to his Malibu studio to record Within for his 143 Records label, now operating under the Warner Bros. umbrella. The pair are collaborating on a followup disc, recorded with a 72-piece orchestra.

Joseph performed in Victoria last April as the opener for Il Divo. Just like the Il Divo gang, Joseph is a good-looking, clean-cut young fellow. While this is great for marketing purposes, handsome dudes who deliver easy-listening music are often a target for critics — something of which Joseph is well aware.

“Sad to say, the world relies a lot on image,” he said. “[But] the No. 1 thing should always be music and talent first.”

For his part, Foster is under no illusions about the road to stardom. Even if the whole package is there — the right look, the right song — it’s still a long way from playing soft-seaters to selling out sport stadiums.

“It’s a challenge,” Foster said. “But it’s a challenge I’m right on top of. I love it.”

Source: Times Colonist

by John P. Mclaughlin, The Province

There are a lot of people in Vancouver music circles who still remember David Foster as the wiry guy with big hair playing keyboards for Skylark on their 1972 mega-hit, “Wildflower.”

He was a 23-year-old Victoria kid, and even then, quite noticeably and prodigiously talented. When he waved from the window of his southbound VW van and said he was off to conquer America, not many doubted him.

In no time, he got session work with the likes of Barbra Streisand, Rod Stewart and Hall and Oats — not to mention the Beatles — and the upward climb had begun.

Fourteen Grammys later, should Foster put his imprimatur on an emerging talent, it’s prudent to pay attention. Think Michael Bublé. Hell, think Josh Groban, whose Foster-produced Noel record was the biggest seller in the U.S. last year, moving 3.7 million copies — and it was released only three months ago.

Foster, as you might guess, is invited to many galas and he’s a regular at the annual Celebrity Fight Night star-fest in Phoenix, Ariz., the benefit dedicated to a variety of charities, most notably Muhammed Ali’s Parkinson Center. Seats are $5,000 US minimum and they raise five or six million in a single, talent-gorged, black-tie evening.

Three years ago, rehearsing for the event, Foster was approached by someone from the Boys and Girls Club about a local young man in his early 20s, who they had helped out with piano lessons a few years earlier. He just wanted to look at Foster’s piano. That was it. So, as the band tuned up, this good-looking young fellow named William Joseph stepped up and Foster said, “Hey, go ahead, play the thing.

“And the guy sits down and he rips this kind of classical piece that he wrote,” Foster recalls. “That night, I was supposed to open the show with my little “Winter Games” song that I wrote in ‘88, which I love but I keep using it to open all these shows because I haven’t written anything better. So I said, ‘Tonight, you open the show.’”

As Joseph remembers it, about 10 seconds into the piece — it’s called “Within,” the title of his current album — Foster got the attention of the band and began conducting them to join in with the piano.

“And the next thing I knew, I’ve got this world-class band playing along with me and I’ve got David Foster next to me conducting and I’m praying in my head, ‘Please, don’t mess up.’ It was quite a moment. When I finished, everybody that was in there setting up started applauding and David gave me a high-five and he said, ‘What was
that?’
I said,
‘I wrote it.’
Then he
said, ‘Tonight you’re
going to open the show.’‘What was that?’ I said, ‘I wrote it.’ Then he said, ‘Tonight you’re going to open the show.’So we had another run-through and I had to run home, change and come back that night and perform. I’ve never been more scared in my life.”

Much like the Skylark-era Foster, Joseph was a young, precocious talent, but hadn’t yet busted out of Arizona. He played the organ at Phoenix Coyotes games, did corporate gigs and got work every Christmas at a local mall where he played seasonal music 12 hours a day. But right away, Foster saw something. “His music was like Josh Groban without the vocals, just a little edgier, but still the Il Divo, Josh Groban camp. I like to call it ‘popera’ but everybody hates that term.”

In no time, Joseph was signed as a Warner recording artist and had his debut recorded and ready in two months to join up with the Josh Groban tour. He lived at Foster’s Malibu house (this was just before the Foster family’s unfortunate Princes of Malibu reality TV show), recorded the album and hit the road. Since then, he’s also been out opening for Il Divo and Clay Aiken. Joseph’s Vancouver show is part of his first headlining tour.

Still to come is a tour of Canada’s East Coast this spring and there’s a good possibility of a tour to China. And what would Joseph be doing these days if not for that fortuitous meeting with David Foster?

“Restaurants and weddings.”

Here’s a video with William Joseph performing “Kashmir” at MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 2004.

Source: The Province - Canada.com