JASON WILSON and his band will play a unique blend of Reggae and Celtic in the Wellington Room at Rebekha Sushi on Saturday night. Born and bred in one of Canada’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods – Toronto’s Keele and Finch – Jason Wilson is a product of his environment whose versatile musical style will be on display Saturday in Orangeville.

Those who pay the $10 cover at the door for the 8:30 p.m. start at the Wellington Room in Rebekha Sushi on Armstrong Street will be treated to an eclectic blend of Celtic and reggae, which has become a signature sound for Mr. Wilson, as well as other genres performed by the versatile Juno nominee.

“We don’t follow any set rules,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “Reggae is certainly our foundation, but we like to incorporate different influences.”

The show, which is being presented by Soulyve Caribbean Foods and Aardvark Music and Culture, will feature local band Riddum Forward, as well as Mr. Wilson’s seven-piece ensemble.

It will be akin to a theatre production that debuts in a location before hitting the bright lights of Broadway, insofar as the band’s performance will be a dress rehearsal, of sorts, for an upcoming tour of Scotland.

“It will be a unique night,” promised Mr. Wilson. “We’ll be moulding Irish and Scottish traditional music with reggae and we’ll be doing seven or eight songs we’ve never performed live before.”

Two tunes on his Dread & Blue CD exemplify Jason Wilson’s fusion of reggae and Celtic music. Walk on Sunday Morning and Those Long Winters contain Celtic instrumentation and lyrical composition, but the cadence of both songs is distinctly reggae.

To purists of either genre who might disapprove of melding the two styles, Mr. Wilson is unapologetic. “I don’t mean any disrespect,” he says, “but the people who are most resistant (to such fusions) are usually not musicians. The best proponents of music are always fusing.

“Bob Marley fused tons of different things into his reggae music.”

There is also a sincere Canadian tone to the music. Dread and Blue features a jazz reggae song “Keele Street,” relates to Mr. Wilson’s musical roots and helps answer a question he is constantly asked. What’s a white guy doing playing reggae?

“I have a stock answer for that question. It’s the music I grew up with. It’s the music I heard on the streets.”

Another of his albums,

Peacemaker’s Chauffer, features a song called Langford vs. Johnson II. It’s a tribute, sang with a high-tempo gospel beat, to Sam Langford, an African- Canadian boxer from Nova Scotia who has been referred to, by some ring historians, as “the greatest boxer nobody knows.”

The song refers to the epic fight, in the early 1900s, between Langford and Jack Johnson, a Mike Tyson of his time whom everybody thought was near invincible.

He beat Langford in a controversial decision and never granted him a rematch.

To sum it up in a word, Jason Wilson’s music is multicultural or, as he puts it, “we’re a reggae band with no boundaries.”

For more information on Saturday’s show, call Aardvark at 519-941- 4100.