The Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival is one of my personal highlights of the summer and something I look forward to every year. This years line up promised to be very eclectic.The thing about festivals is that I never go knowing who's going to be playing or what's scheduled for the day. Going to experience the music, whatever it is, is the point. Often, the most magic moments don't take place where you are looking, but off the beaten path.
I arrived just after 11 AM on Sunday (I'm usually only able to go for one day) and checked out the schedule, then decided to see Rose Cousins at the Shade Stage. She plays a light, traditional style of country and folk. Her set was pretty good, and she worked best with accompaniment. She had two members of Winnipeg's Oh My Darling with her, playing bass and fiddle. It was a plus I was able to sit down on at a picnic table in the shade for the concert too. It was a nice, relaxing way to start out the festival.
I popped over to the Blues stage for my first workshop of the day. Workshops are often where magic starts to happen. What you get is 3-4 musicians together on a stage with a rough idea of what theme will happen, and the musicians work on that theme, often making some collaborative, improvised music. At least, ideally that's what happens. The blues stage featured Alvin Youngblood Hart, Little Miss Higgins, Jim Byrnes and Herald Nix. Jim Byrnes I've seen before, at Salmon Arm a few years ago, playing some very traditional blues and gospel with the Sojourners. Hart impressed me quite a bit with his intricate guitar playing. This session was disappointing otherwise. Everyone was great, but they didn't work together. Instead, they just played songs individually. Byrnes tried to do a bit of playing along to a couple of tunes though.
After a quick lunch, I was back at the Shade Stage for a second workshop n traditional folk music, featuring Doc MacLean, a blues player from Ontario, Mandolin Orange, an old-time folk band from North Carolina, and the country/folk band Oh My Darling. Here is when the magic started. After a couple of solo numbers, Oh My Darling did a traditional French Canadian tune, which turned into a bluegrass tune, which turned into Mandolin Orange taking it over and finishing it off. The last track they played was pretty similar, starting as traditional folk, into bluegrass, frantic fiddling and MacLean playing blues harp. Awesome session!
I dropped over to the Focus stage for another workshop, featuring Chloe Albert and Rolla Olak, whose albums I both liked. I was expecting something more on the country end, but instead got a singer-songwriter style of acoustic rock, a style of music I find grating. Sure enough, local artist Jesse Mast started into a "guy with a guitar" style tune, a style that's all over the radio right now, and it turned me off. Rolla Olak's tune wasn't much better. I stuck around to hear Chloe Albert play, once again expecting a country tune, but got the same, plus her husband playing the bongos. I headed out to the Barn stage to catch the last two songs from Vancouver's Good for Grapes, who are a decent indy rock band. They had the crowd jumping at least.
Next up was one of the bands I was excited to see play live: Jr. Gone Wild. These guys as close to Canadian royalty in indy-rock as you can get. They'd been broken up for a long while through the 90s and recently started touring again, so seeing them means I'd be seeing a tour-seasoned and experienced band. Sure enough, they played a quick 5 song set with American mandolin player Dan Zanes that was excellent. They had the feel of a good party rock band, but with the maturity of a seasoned band, merging fun rock and roll with country themes. They left the stage for Black Joe Lewis, from Austin, TX, who turned in a quick set of blues-drenched guitar rock. His style was like a punked-up Delta blues, a lot like the first couple of Black Keys albums, before they got huge and onto commercial radio. Awesome set.
After dinner, it was time for the main stage to start up. Paul Pigat's rockabilly band Cousin Harley was the first act of the night. I have a soft spot for rockabilly. Pigat is a stellar finger-picking guitar player and his back up band are actually both jazz players, so the playing was excellent. The band is very high energy too. They brought out rockabilly legend Bill Kirchen for the second half of the set, who played a cool extended version of "Hot Rod Lincoln", which included about five minutes of "spot the riff", playing riffs from songs from Muddy Waters up to the Sex Pistols. The whole set was great.
Oh My Darling were back up, making it the third time I got to see them that day. Like the previous two times, they did some nice old-time folk, from light poppy numbers to energetic bluegrass. I've already gushed about them, so not much to add here.
By this time, the sun had begun to dip below the mountains. Around this time in the festival is when the bugs start to swarm (and overwhelm the bug spray I had on) and the pot-smokers come out, which began to give me a massive headache. The next act on the stage was Josh Ritter, who isn't my cup of tea, so I headed back to the Barn stage hoping to catch MonkeyJunk. They took a long time to set up, I waited as long as I could but unfortunately wasn't able to see any of their set.
Overall, it was a great festival. It wasn't on par with last years festival (Malcolm Holcombe and Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside blowing my mind) but it was immensely fun!
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