P.E.I. musician Koady Chaisson, part of the Juno-winning three-man band the East Pointers, has died at the age of 37.
P.E.I. musician Koady Chaisson, part of the Juno-winning three-man band the East Pointers, has died at the age of 37.
Chaisson played banjo and tenor guitar for the group, which included vocalist and fiddler Tim Chaisson and guitarist and keyboardist Jake Charron.
The band’s management confirmed his death to CBC News Friday morning. No cause of death has been released.
The East Pointers came together in 2014. They performed across Canada, the United States, Australia and the U.K. and recorded three studio albums, the last two produced by Gordie Sampson.
In 2016, The East Pointers won the Canadian Folk Music Award for Ensemble of the Year. They accepted the Traditional Roots Album of the Year Juno in 2017 for their first album, Secret Victory.
The trio also won the East Coast Music Award for Songwriter of the Year in 2020, after taking home the Song of the Year ECMA for Two Weeks the year before.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which followed on the heels of the release of Yours to Break and its single Wintergreen, The East Pointers stayed busy by coordinating livestreamed weekly readings from the Prince Edward Island classic novel Anne of Green Gables.
Koady Chaisson read the first chapter of the L.M. Montgomery book in that “#Annedemic” project.
The band went on to headline a live reading of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown on Dec. 16, but a second performance on Dec. 17 was cancelled because of new COVID-19 public health restrictions.
As of Friday, the band’s website was still listing more than a dozen upcoming concerts in the United Kingdom and the United States, starting in February.