Dave Martins - Guitar / Vocals

A Guyanese "country boy" from the small village of Hague, in Guyana, Dave came to Canada as part of the large immigration wave that began in the mid-50's. He began his full-time music career with his own group "The Latins", later "The Debonairs", playing the nightclub circuit in Ontario and the Midwestern U.S.A from the early 1960's to 1963. He later signed as a song-writer for BMI Canada in 1963, still playing on weekends with the West Indian house band at the Club Tropics in downtown Toronto. In 1966, he formed the Tradewinds, and went back to being a full-time musician.

From the beginning, the songwriting ability of Dave Martins would set Tradewinds apart from the many of the talented groups in the Caribbean. A naturally gifted writer, able to achieve the difficult task of writing in many forms (calypso, ballad, folk, pop), Dave Martins has caught the flavour of life in the Southern Caribbean in a unique way. "I've always been interested in the background story -- how something works, why a society behaves in a certain way -- and that state of mind is there in many of my songs," says Dave. "Also, despite our problems, we are fantastic people in the Caribbean, and I'm always looking to reflect that. I think that is one of the less obvious but main reasons for the effect of our songs on Caribbean people--the love and the admiration may not be spelled out, but it's there; they can sense it".