Thomas Kovacs

THE MUSICIAN

“Congratulations … you passed the audition!!”

Several months later, in March 1991, Thomas Kovacs flew from Toronto to the island country of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to perform for U.S. troops during Desert Storm.

Kovacs interrupted his jazz vocal studies at Humber College to be the lead singer for the newly formed rock/dance band Sister Moon. The band would play in the large two-hundred person bar of the Cunard Princess every night for the next five months ... close to 150 performances!

The Cunard Princess was a 900-passenger luxury ship on which U.S. soldiers would spend three days of rest and recreation away from the desert. Soldiers were not allowed to drink alcohol in Saudi Arabia so understandably the bar was their most popular destination! Performing for troops every night for five months was a tremendous influence in developing Kovacs as an entertainer.

Tyler Viaene, Thomas Kovacs, Chris Taylor-Munro, John Carroll, and Sean Dimitrie together formed Sister Moon in 1991.
Eighteen years later, Kovacs won first place over almost 3,000 speakers to win the Toastmasters District 60 Humorous
Speech Contest with a speech titled I Swear Mom! It's Good to Sing for Troops in the Persian Gulf.
A video of the speech can be seen on youtube.

In 1996, Kovacs began a nearly five year stint as the weekly house performer of the Kiwi Kick Restaurant in the trendy High Park area of Toronto. He built upon the skills he learned on stage in the Persian Gulf by singing for audiences who wanted to leave their workday behind for an evening of fun!

In 2001, he was invited to be the musician aboard an Adventure Canada cruise in the Arctic. Incredibly, the flight carrying AC staff and many passengers landed in Iceland on September 11, 2001, about six hours before the 9/11 tragedy.

Since then, Kovacs has been the musician on board eleven Adventure Canada cruises and traveled with guest passengers such as Margaret Atwood, Bill “Father Goose” Lishman, and Farley Mowat; cruises that took Kovacs and his singing talents to Iceland, Greenland, the Northwest Passage, many Inuit communities in Nunavut, as well as to Baja California, and the Galapagos Islands. He is scheduled to return to the Arctic with Adventure Canada on their Into the Northwest Passage 2011 adventure.

In January 2010, Kovacs left his job as a computer programmer at Canadian Tire home office to pursue full-time his passion for music. In July of that same year, he graduated from the online Berklee College of Music with a Songwriting Specialist Certificate. Shortly after, he spent two weeks in Nashville to learn more about the business of songwriting. While there, he sat in on five songwriting sessions with local writers and sang at several open stages including the famed Bluebird Cafe. He’s since been back to Nashville in May of 2011 and will be returning in November of the same year.

In the meanwhile, Kovacs lives in the Caledon area and performs extensively throughout the Peel Region of the Greater Toronto Area as well as in Barrie, Orangeville, Sauble Beach, Uxbridge and Port Perry.