Blue Skies Music Festival in Clarendon
There were two nights of concerts at the Blue Skies Music Festival this year, and all of the workshops at the festival had already finished before the festival was shut down due to rain, cancelling the Sunday evening concert.
Eight bands performed full concerts at the festival between Friday and Saturday, along with four shorter curtain shows, and it was a banner year.
Saturday started with a show by Jake Blount, who was originally scheduled for Friday Night but was waylaid by Air Canada. Jake Blount is a musician, musicologist and one of a few people who have brought forward the African American roots to Americana music. He played a set of haunting old Time Appalachian tunes on fiddle and banjo, bringing a calm, meditative energy to the festival.
The Saturday evening show started with Divka (pronounced as Diva with a k) a duo from Toronto. Alina Kytasty Kuzma, on bandura (Ukrainian national harp/zither) and vocals, and Zoë Santo, on viola, and sometimes vocals.
They play Eastern European folk music, from the Ukraine, Bulgaria and elsewhere, and recently released their first album, Folk Fatale. They focus on tunes of joy and resilience carried by women over the centuries. They come at their music from a modern perspective, performed on traditional instruments in the original languages. Their sound is both upbeat and intricate, and they quickly captured the audience who were unfamiliar with both the language and the rhythmic patterns of the music.
By the time they reached the end of their set, the audience, now well-established fans, of the at times cheeky and at times dark folk traditions that Divka brings to life, happily bleated along when asked to become goats during the final song.
Divka were followed by Trout Fishing in America, a duo from Arkansas made up of Keith Grimwood and Ezra Idlet, who performed at the festival for two years in a row in 1990 and 1991, came back in 2016, and drove 25 and half hours for their fourth appearance, in over 35 years.
They have been playing together for over 50 years, so they finish each other's sentences most of the time. Their set featured some of the songs they played when they first came to Blue Skies, to the delight of audience members who were a lot younger at that time, and a bunch of more recent tunes.
The next concert was a collaboration between two quartets, Turkwaz (Maryem Tollar, Brenna MacCrimmon, Sophia Grigoriadis, and Jayne Brown), and Medusa Quartet (Saskia Tomkins, Georgia Hathaway, Lea Kirstein, and Marta Solek)
The blend of Turkish, Bulgarian, Eastern European, Greek and Arabic repertoire that these two groups of percussion and string players bring to the stage is endless. While they are all musicians who have graced major concert halls across Canada, they don't take themselves too seriously. At the start of their set, Maryem Tollar said they “we are Turkwaz and Medusa, or as I like to call us, Octo-Pussy”.
The collaboration featured some trading of songs, and in most cases, a coming together at different times. Medusa is a string quartet including cello, fiddle, Nickleharpa and Suka, and Turkwaz is percussive and vocally based. All eight of them bring their own style and personality to the music, making it a challenge even for the audience to tell who is doing what, at any given time. Each song is like a musical puzzle being put together at breakneck pace, fascinating to watch and listen to. They were a highlight of the weekend.
Lynn Miles, an Ottawa based master songwriter, kicked off the second half of the evening. She was accompanied by her long-time vocal collaborator, Rebecca Campbell, and Keith Glass, a founder of Prairie Oyster, on guitar and vocals.
Lynn Miles writes perfect songs, each word building on the last. Between her own vocal understanding of what the songs are meant to evoke, and Campbell and Glass always intervening to make the sound richer, without taking away from the core of musical and vocal idea the songs are built around, it was a magical set.
After Lynn Miles, Kobotown, the eight piece Calypso-based band led by Trinidadian-Canadian singer/songwriter Drew Gonsalves, capped off the evening with a dance set that kept the crowd on its feet, and moving, well into the night. Kobotown were making their second appearance at the festival. They first came in 2007. And propelled by Gonsalves' easy charm, they seemed to share the evening with the audience, performing with them as much as to them.
No one knew it at the time, but there would be no Sunday Concert at this year's festival, so happily Saturday's was a night to remember. Festival goers will have to wait at least a year to hear the Sunday bands that were slated to play the Sunday Night Concert, Allysann Mei, Mama's Broke, Moonfruits, Vicki Brittle and SHEBAD.
The festival site is only used for two camps in July and the festival itself, so it will have a full year to fully recover from the combination of the heavy rain, people and tires that overwhelmed it on Sunday afternoon and night.
