51st Annual Blue Skies Music Festival

Jeff Green | Aug 07, 2024

It just may have been the hottest year of the 51 years of the Blue Skies Music Festival, this past weekend. To make matters more complicated, the ice delivery was late, and the water test came back clean from Kingston Frontenac Public Health just in time.

That being said, the festival went off without a hitch, thanks to the efforts of over 100 dedicated volunteers. The efforts of the first aid team at the festival were particularly important this year, as the number of heat related incidents was high along with tick bites by the dozen. And on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon, at 2 and 5pm, festival goers had the opportunity to be hosed down.

New artistic director Kate Weekes continued the tradition of bringing a wide variety of global music styles to the Clarendon, Ontario stage, each of the three festival nights. Among the many highlights were Tamar Ilana and Ventanas (flamenco with a pan-mediterranean beat – all the way from Spain to Turkey) 19 year-old blues-rockabilly guitarist Nicholas Campbell from Peterborough, Valérie Ékoumè from Cameroon (via France), Beau Nectar from Victoria/Saskatchewan, Japhy Sullivan from Maberly (via Halifax), Diogo Ramos from Brazil (via Montreal), Appalachian old time duo Porch Couch and the Ontario folk quartet Vinta.

But the show that most people were talking about after it ended, from 8 to 80 year-old attendees, was that of Les Mal Coiffée.

Les Mal Coiffée are four women from the Languedoc region of Southern France, who play instruments that were unfamiliar to most of the audience, including the bombo leguero, petadou, and balal Malgache. They sing in Occitan, a medieval language that is distinctive to the Languedoc region which is much closer to Catalan than it is to modern French. Although Occitan (also known as lenga d’oc) is a threatened language, there are 600,000 people who speak it, most of them live in the Languedoc region and in small pockets further away. With language comes culture, and Les Mal Coiffée have been creating culture as part of a collective known as Sirventes for the past 20 years,

Perhaps partly because they have been devoted to maintaining a suppressed language and culture for over 20 years, Les Mal Coiffée have a cultural/political intent to their presentation, promoting cultural and linguistic diversity in all forms.

The four members of the band, Karine Berny, Myriam Boisserie, Marie Coumes, and Laetitia Dutech, play a variety of instruments, and they all sing, often in unison. The music seemed to come from a collective place, but they were all doing different things much of the time.

Even though the audience could not understand the words they were singing, the music had a profound emotional impact on them. People were dancing, laughing and crying, in full measure, all generated by the skill and commitment to creating a collective sound that the four women have spent over 20 years developing.

It was a glimpse into a new world for the rapt audience. At the end of their set, the audience were not ready to move on, even though they were not the final act of the evening. They finished their set with an acapella song, their voices soaring and dropping off in turn, a lullabye of sorts. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.