New Music!

'Leak of the week' for the Calgary Folk Festival coming in July...

THE HEAD AND THE HEART
This is a Seattle band with a lovely gentle sound that I am quite enamored with.

Composed largely of transplants to the Seattle area, The Head and the Heart write poignant, soulful songs that speak to fresh starts and ghosts left behind. Textured harmonies, catchy piano, a trio of harmonies and an almost symphonic use of strings weave together layers of indie Americana that is sonically adventurous, yet achingly familiar.

Summer, where have you gone?!?

Hard to believe my last post was in June - but that is what happens when summer rolls in. I didn't even finish talking about our wonderful the trip to Italy, as we headed east to Venice then south along the coast to visit friends in Fano. A lovely country and both of us are anxious to go back and spend more time there exploring different regions.

As soon as I returned home from Europe, I headed off to Victoria on Vancouver Island with 5 of my closest friends. This was our fourth year of gathering for art, food, and great company! This year I drove out with ND, so got to extend the travel time by four extra days - road trip!

ocean fun!

Spent an afternoon at Frenchs Beach and made temporary beach art - my contribution:

Returned back to Calgary for a visit from my cousin down in Portland. She came up for an art class that we took together - here are some of my decorated pages that became a book.


We also managed to squeeze in a trip to the mountains - Lake Louise and Moraine Lake (the only sunny spots in southern Alberta that day!)


the Valley of the Ten Peaks seen on back of the old Canadian twenty dollar bill


Another highlight of her time here was I finally got to take in MARKET COLLECTIVE art sale that happens sporadically in the old Ant Hill retail space in Kensington. It is mainly filled with recent ACAD grads (photography, drawing, textiles) plus musicians and cooks who are discovering how hard the artist life is! I got this lovely little mug there.


And then it was the yearly 4-day weekend spent on Prince's Island Park jamming with ~50 neighbours at the Calgary Folk Festival.

Here are shots of CAT EMPIRE from Australia.


and Alberta's own IAN TYSON.


Then it was time spent at the cabin, with the dog loving her swims in the Bow River...


the prairie vistas driving to and from...




and treasures left behind from a friend who visited when we weren't there...

More folk festival...

While touring the videos posted on YouTube, I found this one with me in it! It shows how close we sit to the stage, like I said before there are over 10,000 people behind us and the stage right in front!

I am sitting in the green chair in the tank top - it was +30c that day! And here is Glen Campbell playing Classical Gas.

Calgary Folk Festival 2009 - 30th anniversary

Another amazing year of music, sun, peace and love - everything you expect from a folk festival. Four days spent on Prince's Island in the middle of the Bow River that flows through Calgary, with the sun shining throughout - by the time Monday morning arrives one is burnt out from all the good times!

Here are some of the musicians I heard (out of the 60 that attended) - click on their names to hear their music.

Vasen from Sweden. I love Scandinavian tunes...
Lee Harvey Osmond, an artist collective with Tom Wilson from Blackie and the Rodeo Kings and oldtime folkie Brent Titcomb.
Michael Bernard Fitzgerald from Calgary. And he is so cute, he gets two links!
Arrested Development, an alternative hip hop group from Atlanta. Gets you up and moving!
Mark Berube & The Patriotic Few, group from Montreal.
Vishten an Acadian group from PEI, so get ready for some Celtic toe-tapping tunes!
Kid Koala, table-turner extraordinaire. The sounds he gets out of a turntable are out of this world!
Amazing, amazing guitarist (among other things) Steve Dawson from Vancouver. He is primarily known as a producer for acts like the next group.
Sojourners, moved to Vancouver from the deep American south and became Canadian citizens last year - bringing with them the tradition of gospel music.

Banff - Day 15

Stitching is slow! I started on another piece composed of little pieces of cotton and of silk layered on a cotton backing cloth. Day 1 was cutting them out, Day 2 was pinning them onto the background, Day 3 and 4 have been hand stitching them on. I finally finished all of the inside squares by the end of today, and now I have to attach the larger outside squares. This piece originated as a sample for a dyeing process at the end of the month, but I am liking the colour combinations quite a bit (orange, yellow, brown, green, red) - will have to see what happens to it - the dye pot? or the background for another piece? or both?

I love this mountain and how it changes every day - to walk to the restaurant we have a 10 foot ramp that we have to go outside on from the residence, and this mountain stares us in the face as we cross it - here are many shots of it from various times of the day and in different weather. I think it is Rundle Mountain (but don't quote me) and it doesn't have one of those pointing finger signs!
above: sunrise, you can see the sun coming up in the lower left corner through the trees

today: it snowed on and off all day here and when it wasn't snowing it was socked in fog.


Tonight's concert was Quebecois music - a mixture of French, Scottish, Irish - a very folkie sort, and I loved it. The band Le Vent du Nord had played in the Calgary Folk Festival in 2003 and currently tours around the world educating and entertaining people with their traditional music from Quebec. A rousing show!

four days of the CALGARY FOLK FESTIVAL

Today marks the start of the 29th annual Calgary Folk Festival. Our neighborhood uses this event as a social outing and over 20 families come out to help "run the tarps" each morning in order to secure prime seating for the maximum viewing pleasure.

This photo shows the line-up (waving their regulation sized blue tarps) ready for the gates to open when the mob descends onto the grassy lawn before the main stage used over the four evenings. I am actually in the green striped shirt on the right hand side laden down with chairs, coolers, and backpacks of all the runners. This is fun! We start lining up at 7 am each morning, in preparation for the gates to open at 3:30 pm. This applies to Thursday and Friday mornings, but on Saturday and Sunday we actually have volunteers who sleep on the grounds overnight to save our place in line.

This year I am looking forward to hearing the acts: Andrew Bird, Torngat, Consonant C, Jesse Winchester, Woodpigeon, Les Tireux d'Roches, Basia Bulat, Kobo Town, Eliana Cuevas, Beija Flor...
and, best of all, discovering new ones in the process.