Chart-topping music producer David Foster couldn’t divulge too much about the lineup for his charity fundraiser here next year. But experience told him you may not have been satisfied even if he did.  "Here’s the thing about the lineup — that’s always the question. Then when I give a lineup, which I don’t have yet exactly, then they always say, ‘Oh yeah, who are the surprises going to be?’ Meanwhile you have Bryan Adams and Celine Dion and Kenny G and Paul Anka and they’re still saying, ‘Who are the surprises?’ So no matter who I name they still want more, which is just human nature."

Foster flew to Halifax from Europe on Friday morning to appear at a news conference to promote Crescendo, a David Foster & Friends charity gala and concert March 28 to 30. The centrepiece will be a concert that weekend at the Metro Centre which could raise about $1 million for the David Foster Foundation, which assists the families of children receiving organ transplants.

Foster, a Victoria, B.C., native who has worked with a lengthy list of talent including Barbra Streisand, Dion, Anne Murray, Chicago, Gordon Lightfoot and Earth, Wind & Fire in addition to producing the all-star charity single Tears are not Enough, let slip that comic Sinbad has already been enlisted but he has an appropriately extensive list of contacts that he can call on for a favour.  "I’d like to ask Michael Bublé to come here because I think that would be great for Halifax and I am definitely going to ask him. I want to ask Josh Groban, who is another one of my artists who I think is incredible. I want to ask Phil Collins.  "I know it sounds like name-dropping but they’re do-able asks for me. I promise you it’ll be somebody like that that’ll headline this show. I will not let you down in that department."

Foster’s foundation, started 22 years ago, is said to have one employee overseeing the enterprise and is usually put in touch with families through social workers at hospitals.  "We now can proudly say that if your child in Canada is getting a transplant we are going to help you. And there is no red tape," said Foster, who credited an encounter with hockey legend Wayne Gretzky as the inspiration for something that now consumes about 25 per cent of his working time.  "He was about 26 years old and he had this foundation. . . . I thought, ‘I’m 36 and I’m doing nothing. I’m just trying to make my way in the music business.’ That kind of got me going."  He apparently hasn’t stopped. The most recent concert for the foundation was staged a couple of weeks ago in Calgary and he sounded keen to insert Halifax as a regular stop in the rotation.
"Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Victoria, Vancouver — that’s going to be our life until we have enough money so that every single family can always depend on us long after I can’t even play a note on the piano," said Foster, who proved to be spontaneously amusing despite claiming to be jet-lagged.

"I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only been here once in my life and it was a very short stay. This one’s going to be a longer stay. . . . We now feel like we are nationwide."  Foster, 57, said help to 340 families from his foundation has ranged from as little as $500 to upwards of $200,000 for complicated ongoing treatments.  Out of 90 Canadian families currently being supported, the foundation is helping six in Atlantic Canada including the Brewsters of Bannon, N.B. Four-year-old Britney received a heart transplant in January but it required a lengthy stay in Toronto.
"Well, it’s a very emotional time when your child is going through a very serious medical condition that you can’t do anything about," mom Jennifer said at the news conference while Britney, dressed up with sparkly pink clips in her blonde hair, nonchalantly took a seat next to Foster.
"Having the apartment and having the help of the foundation made us feel more like a family. . . . We still had all of our finances in New Brunswick and neither one of us working and we had finances in Toronto, too, which would have been too much. We just wouldn’t have been able to do it."

Foster, who has been on the TV talent shows American Idol and Nashville Star, has incorporated a similar component into his gala weekends.
Information will be available at starsearchatlantic.ca for Ovation, which will allow undiscovered vocalists in the region between the ages of 14 and 29 to compete for a chance to perform in the big show.  "What we’ve been doing lately is we’ve been holding star searches and trying to find a singer in the community that is worthy of opening the show for us," said Foster, who introduced Calgary co-winners Kayla Iovan and David Vanden Enden.   They joined him on Friday around a piano for an impromptu version of his song The Prayer, popularized by Andrea Bocelli and Dion.

"One of the things that maybe you know about me is that I love to find new singers. It’s worked very well for me in the past, the latest one being Michael Bublé who’s a find from Vancouver. So you never know, these two could end up having a recording contract soon and someone from the Maritimes is going to be opening our show."  While Crescendo is marketed primarily to a corporate audience willing to pay thousands of dollars for a table, the Los Angeles resident said that the Halifax venue lends itself to perhaps providing some availability for individuals.

"I just went to look at the venue, the Metro Centre, and it’s spectacular. It’s such a cool place to do a concert and they’re going to dress it up unbelievably. One suggestion that came up was maybe there’s a way that we can fill those seats after the dinner at a very, very reduced price so that there would be maybe two, three, four, five thousand people that could come for a very limited amount of money."