Festival 2005
by Marnie Parsons                                                                 The Broadside Vol 9. No. 2  August 2005

As the days to the Festival count down, and the names of Accordion Revolutionaries mount up, I can feel my pre-Festival anticipation growing. And I look forward to the lovely “now-this-is-what-I’ve-been-waiting-for” feeling that I ease into once the Festival is truly underway: like the tunes and songs, like the wedgie fries, like the sometimes-riotous dancing, for me, that feeling is the Festival. Then I know it definitely is summer, and there’s music and movement and lovely evenings beneath the stars to erase, for the moment, the memory of April and what passes for spring in this country.

But beyond that quiet ahhhh, what I am looking forward to at the Festival this summer?
The sound of 645, 646, 647 ..... 987 accordions shucking mussels in the corner of Bannerman Park? And the terrific silence after the fact, when we just might hear the collective cry of disappointment from all those accordion players in BC who will, no doubt, have heard us all the way over in Kimberley, and will know they have just lost their world record!? Or the groups of people huddled around the SJFAC’s new nude calendar, and furtively stealing a glance or three at “Bags and Little Whistles”?

Yes, of course, but those things, fun as they are, aren’t the heart of the Festival for me – there’s much more to look forward to.

The morning workshops, for instance. Saturday and Sunday morning from 10 to 1, there are wonderful, informal workshops which give listeners an intimate sense of visiting and local performers, and often offer audience members the chance to join in. The people who attend these will tell you that they are one of the best parts of the whole weekend. As Jeannie Hewson says in her president’s message, they help restore some of the original feeling of the Festival. Come early this year.

Check out the instrument tent, and enjoy

• a fiddle/guitar workshop featuring Common Ground performers Roy Johnstone, Steve Sharrat, Gillian Boucher, Stuart Camerson, Ray and Lester Montague and Jim and Daniel Payne
• a traditional instrument workshop pitting Matilda Murdoch’s fiddle against a slough of accordion wizs
• some fabulous instrumental bluegrass compliments of Caroline and John Clarke, Peter McGuire, Neil Rosenberg, Pat Moran, Frank Davis, George Jarvis and Rik Barron
• a session on stringed instruments with Stuart Cameron (guitar), Jason Whelan (bouzouki), Gayle Tapper (harp) and George Morgan (hammer dulcimer)
• getting to know another side of some of this year’s calendar boys and girls
• hanging out with hooligans Frank Maher, Greg Walsh, Dave Penny, Gerry Strong and Don Walsh at a Hooley

Stop by the oral traditions tent to hear

• tales from the Cape Shore from Agnes Walsh, Kay Coffey and Mildred Dohey
• a musical swap of songs from around the world featuring Anita Best, Mary Jane Lamond, Jeik Loksa, Saraswati Sainath and Curtis Andrews
• a contemporary song session with Roy Johnstone, Steve Sharrat, the Montagues, and Sara and Kamila Nasr with Terry Stone
• a session of storytelling in spoken word and song, with Dale Jarvis, Mary Jane Lamond, Shirley Montague and Ford Elms
• a special Common Ground concert featuring Mary Jane Lamond and the Crowd of Bold Sharemen
• or a traditional song swap with Jim Payne, Fergus O’Byrne, Chris Young and Greg Walsh

Visit the dance stage (aka the Neil Murray Stage) to learn

• a set dance from Ford Elms, Ruth Matthews, Jim Payne or Daniel Payne
• a step dance from Gillian Boucher
• a Morris dance from Jane Rutherford

And new this year, there are two morning craft workshops for children. Saturday, the Anna Templeton Centre will be running a morning workshop in the Neil Murray Stage Performers tent, and Sunday morning Devon House Clay Studio will do the same. Also on Sunday, while the Neil Murray Stage is running, the Newfoundland and Labrador Mother Goose Parent-Child Program will offer quiet stories and reading in the oral traditions tent.

The Neil Murray stage is one of the great joys of the Festival for me – operating afternoons on Saturday and Sunday, it features some of the finest young performers on the island. Fiddlers, dancers, accordion-players, singers and songwriters, these young people are both the future and the present of traditional music in our province. Some are well on their way to being seasoned professionals, others have been performing for just a few years – of course, some of them have only been alive for a few years!!

The Palmer Sisters, for instance, released their first CD and travelled to Quatar last year. Charlotte-Anne Malischewski will arrive back from performing in Japan as part of the Newfoundland Symphony Youth Orchestra, of which Steve Aylward and Emelia Bartellas (of Bart and the Bread Picks fame) are also members, just in time to play on the stage. Bart and the Bread Picks, who will be doing their final performance for some while now as various band-members head off to university, have been doing gigs and benefits around town for the past three years and were the official band for Peg Norman’s NDP campaign in the last federal election. Ellen Power has been singing traditional ballads at festivals since she was three; multi-insturmentalist Fergus Brown-O’Byrne has also been making music since he was three. And Jamie Spurvey, a native of Newfoundland now living in Ontario, will be in town to perform at the Festival; he released his first CD last fall. It’s great to have yet another fine Newfoundland accordion-player on our stage, especially this year!

Then, of course, there are the Penney Folk Dancers, the STEP Fiddlers, Born ‘n Bred, the Mills Brothers, the Meyer Sisters, Katrina Boland, Aaron Collis, Jenna Kelly, Matthew Morey and Peter Green: all of them talented, and all of them at the Festival this year. The future of Newfoundland’s traditional music is tremendous.

All of this, and I haven’t even gotten to the Main Stage yet! This year’s Common Ground programme focuses on Atlantic Canada, and brings together musicians from Newfoundland and Labrador with musicians from New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia. The Crowd of Bold Sharemen, the Montagues, and Ray and Greg Walsh will participate from this province, sharing tunes and songs with New Brunswick’s Matilda Murdoch, a member of the North American Fiddle Hall of Fame whose compositions on the fiddle number in the hundreds, PEI’s Roy Johnstone and Steve Sharratt, a duo renowned for their dynamic performances and their exploration of the marriage of fiddle tunes and old country blues, and Nova Scotia’s Mary Jane Lamond, internationally acclaimed for her stunning versions of treasured Gaelic songs (she broke onto the Canadian music scene when she collaborated with the then-unknown fiddler Ashley MacIsaac on the award-winning “Sleepy Maggie”). Whether you see these performers on the Main Stage or during the morning workshops, you’re sure to be struck by the incredible range and energy of their performances.

This year’s regional focus is on the Cape Shore. Gerald Campbell, a fabulous traditional singer from Branch, will be receiving this year’s Life Time Achievement Award (see Delf Maria Hohmann’s article in this issue). It is a rare treat to hear Gerald sing! And the beautiful songs and stories of the Cape Shore will also be celebrated in a storytelling workshop, in a special song session led by Pamela Morgan and featuring Simone Savard-Walsh, Gerald Campbell, Chris Young, Wanda Coffey and Julia Best, and with a performance by the Cape St. Mary’s All-Stars.

There are many, many fine performers who are not part of this Common Ground exchange or the regional focus, but who will add to the wonderful variety of the weekend. There truly is music for everyone at the Festival this year. If you are going through withdrawal after Mount Pearl’s first bluegrass Festival, you can ease your pain with Five for Silver. For those who love traditional Newfoundland music or Irish fare in a wide range of interpretations and styles, there are Anita Best and Pamela Morgan, Allan Byrne, Art Stoyles and Bob Rutherford, Vince and Glen Collins, the Cormiers, the Cobblestones, the Ray Walsh Family Band, Dermot O’Reilly, and Jim Joyce. If world beat and dance music is more your thing, dance the evening away with Dzolalai, Mopaya and the Forgotten Bouzouki. There will be the fabulous and versatile singing from Sarah and Kamila, Joy Norman, the Rosalines, and the wonderful musical mix offered by Atlantic Union and the Fausty Toutons (yes, that is Fausty Toutons, but they are hardly fausty!). Are you a blues fan? We’ve got the Peter Narvaez Trio. Is jazz what you’re after? How about the Janet Cull Band and the Duane Andrews Quartet? And there will be recitations from Randy Smith, dancing by the Penney Folk Dancers, and the fabulous harp collaboration between Gayle Tapper and Fiona Rutherford.

And the whole Festival will be kicked off by the St. John’s Aboriginal Drumming and Dance Group. Sounds like a fabulous way to start an incredible weekend.