For an entire decade, The Slice Bar and Grill has been providing a dedicated live performance venue for Lethbridge music fans. Owned and operated by brothers Jesse and Tyler Freed, The Slice has become an essential hub in the live music community since opening its doors in 2005. Artists from across the country have played there. Dozens of local performers have taken its stage, and it has witnessed the birth and the passing of many great Southern Alberta voices. It’s a local institution that has managed to bring some of the biggest independent musicians and bands in Canada to Lethbridge, and at its foundation it rests on three pillars: The Brothers Freed, and hands-down the Best Damn Pizza in Town. I recently had the opportunity to sit down and interview both Jesse and Tyler, and listen to them recap a decade of growth and discovery as Lethbridge’s premier original live music venue.

It hasn’t been a particularly easy decade for bars in general, and music venues are notoriously difficult to keep afloat. When I asked Jesse how they had managed to stay open, he said, with typical frankness, that the key ingredient was, “a lot of hard work. Work too much to have time to spend money on anything else.” A nearby patron added, quite rightly I think, that Jesse and Tyler “almost run this place like a charity, so that we have a place to go and see shows.”

The Slice is one of a small number of dedicated live music venues in Lethbridge, and probably the only one that regularly has live music six nights a week. To have kept that happening for ten years is, in itself, quite an accomplishment. The Slice has also earned a reputation as a venue that always takes care of musicians, and one that is dedicated to giving a voice to musicians writing original material. Such venues are rare in any city.

Jesse and Tyler did most of their growing up in smaller Southern Alberta locales, and while they aren’t necessarily the most vivacious people when you first meet them, they are friendly in a familiar way. As Jesse explained, they are happy to see you, but they’re also running the entire operation six days a week. “The rewarding aspect of running The Slice is always getting to see the show. Not everyone can be here every night like we can. So we’ve seen a lot of good shows. The challenging aspect I guess is that it’s hard to always be enthusiastic.”

Gern F. Vlchek [of the band United Steel Workers of Montreal] gave a kind mention to the Slice in his book Turn Right, Turn Left, Repeat: Life on the road for the Canadian indie band , where he noted that Jesse is quiet at first, but soon warms up and endears himself to the musicians he hosts. “That’s the thing,” Jesse continued, “when a band shows up in the afternoon and you’re trying to serve people and get prepared for the show, it’s hard to express a lot of enthusiasm. I really do get excited but it’s hard to be, you know, bubbly.”

In a bigger centre, Jesse explained, audiences tend to be more selective, which makes sense because there are more people and more choices in terms of performances. A big city lends itself to following your personal tastes, and allows you to find people who enjoy the same artistic niches as you do. That means that a venue can appeal to a specific audience, and that audience can be counted on to provide a fairly constant group of customers. In a small town, however, people basically follow the party, and go where the rest of the people are.

With a population just below 100,000, Lethbridge is straddling those two social worlds – that of the small town and that of the burgeoning city. It’s venues like The Slice that are linking the two worlds together. For Jesse and Tyler, this has meant incredible dedication to their values as business owners and patrons of the arts, which they refuse to compromise. Tyler put it to me plainly. “It’s been tough, really tough, but I would say that the touring bands now are better than ever, and the reason is because it’s only the good ones that are surviving in this climate.”

The bands that are surviving, are surviving in part because of venues like The Slice that promote original music, even though their bottom line suffers for it. “I don’t think we’ll ever completely overcome the separation in Lethbridge, between people that are playing original music and those playing in cover bands,” Jesse explained. “There are a lot of great musicians that play great cover tunes, and people like to go out and watch that. If they can draw a crowd they deserve to make good money. If you’re trying to get your craft out there as an original artist, you are generally going to have to play for less until you’ve built a name for yourself. Cover bands and original bands are two different markets, but it’s the same scene in Lethbridge. That’s the problem that we can’t really fix.”

“Based on the population of this city,” he continued, “there’s a relatively small group of people that are kind of the arts crowd, and everything that Lethbridge has to offer in terms of the arts is run by this small group of people. For the most part, it’s just that group of people and tourists and students that are enjoying the arts in Lethbridge. A lot of people don’t even know what’s out there. Basically, there are those people who expose themselves to the culture of the city, and those who don’t, and it’s amazing to see how strict that divide is.”

This situation can be very hard for touring bands. “There are the touring acts that are great,” explained Tyler, “and have been making a living at it for 10 or 20 years, and people don’t come out to their shows when we host them. On top of that, there’s a cover charge, which people aren’t used to in Lethbridge. We didn’t have a cover charge when we started, and it made it almost impossible to survive as a business.”

When you do pay a cover charge at The Slice, you can rest assured that the money will go to the performers, as it always has. While the ethos and the spirit of The Slice has been constant, the scene around it has changed. When I asked Jesse what changes he had witnessed over the past ten years, his response was both positive and optimistic. “It’s gotten a lot bigger. More studios, more live music, more venues that are willing to do original live music, there are way more jams – it’s growing. There’s a lot more great independent music in this town than there was ten years ago. CKXU 88.3FM has grown hugely. We’ve at least provided a venue that wasn’t biased against original bands, and the more we can do it the better the whole scene grows.”

Tyler also gave a response tinged with his own brand of sentimentality. “What has surprised me the most is how much talent there is, local, touring, everything. There is so much incredible music. You know, I was kinda raised on the radio, my dad had a bunch of old country albums, and there was a band at the school and a band at the church and they both sucked. Going out to see a band I’d never heard of, and especially paying money, it was like, ‘Why the hell would I do that?’ Now I would. If I was in a different city and there was a bar with a band, and I had money in my pocket, I would go check them out.”

And then there’s the pizza, which is Tyler’s delicious legacy. Made from scratch at The Slice, it has no rival in Lethbridge. Meat is smoked and cured in-house, herbs are grown in-house year round, and all meat and produce is as locally sourced as possible. Tyler’s menu has changed very little over the last ten years, and nobody’s complaining. To the extent that it has changed, the trend has been towards focusing more and more on the pizza. “Well that’s basically the great thing about pizza,” explained Tyler. “It can be what anyone wants at any time, as long you have diverse enough selections amongst your pizzas. People come in for fish, people come in for chicken, people come in here for steak…You could eat here every night of the month and eat something different ,and I think people like that.” If you think that sounds intriguing, check out the menu now with new vegan and gluten-free options and substitutions!

When I asked Jesse and Tyler to list some of their favorite shows, a number of names came up – Peter Karp and Sue Foley, Prairie Oyster, Elliott Brood, Five Alarm Funk, Little Miss Higgins, Danny Michel, Loot, among others. “There are also so many good local bands, and that’s something we really enjoy seeing as well,” added Jesse. I can attest to the fact that the local bands enjoy and appreciate it as well.

So what does the future hold for the Brothers Freed and The Slice? If the past decade has been any indication, we have good things to look forward to. As Jesse put it, “A lot of great Canadian acts aren’t as big as they should be in Lethbridge, but we’re working to change that.”