Reggae pioneer goes old school

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/07/2009 (6277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BIRDS HILL PARK — Though it’s been eons since the Winnipeg Folk Festival was strictly a trad event, it’s nice to see a purist take a place of honour on the main stage.

On Saturday night, the low rumble of reggae bass thundered across the east end of Birds Hill Park as Burning Spear, the 61-year-old Jamaican roots legend, delivered a timeless message of peace and coexistence to a paying audience of 13,300 festival-goers.

If you go back 35 years, the sound of reggae was inseparable from the politics of the music, given the instability of 1970s Jamaica.

But during the ensuing decades, the genre has evolved along the same lines as hip-hop, to the point where modern dancehall can seem positively crass.

Winston Rodney has not sat still for all those years, but the man better known as Burning Spear has continued to stick to his positive program. And during a set that began perilously close to press time, he was working his magic on the Folk Fest audience.

Truth be told, getting hippies to dance to reggae is like getting small children to eat ice cream. But this was the real deal, in both substance and in form.

Burning Spear was preceded by Bellowhead, an 11-piece British ensemble with enough anarchic energy to forever bury any lingering stereotypes about fusty, musty folk from the U.K.

Employing, bouzouki, bass, accordion, drums, three fiddles and a four-piece horn section — with a tuba player, to boot — these people powered their way through a playful set that ran the gamut from foot-stomping Celtic suites to string-driven dance jams to what can best be described as acoustic funk.

Never before has the tuba brought so many people to their feet. These guys appear again this morning on the Green Ash stage.

Before the Brits, Peterborough, Ont. singer-songwriter Serena Ryder brought her powerful pipes to the festival’s mainstage to methodically push through a roots-pop set that culminated in a forceful version of her What I Wanna Know.

North Carolina bluegrass quartet Chatham County Line opened up the mainstage show with 40 minutes of note-perfect picking.

Saturday’s mainstage concert also saw short ‘tweener sets by Winnipeg’s Jackpine, Vancouver’s Tamara Nile and Chicago’s Joe Pug.

At press time, Vancouverite C.R. Avery and Austin, Texas indie-rock band Okkervil River had yet to take the stage.

Daytime stages

 

HIGHLIGHTS from a full slate of Saturday daytime performances included a concert by Montrealer Mark Berube; a highly danceable New Age jam featuring New Zealand’s Pacific Curls, Australia’s Oka and Ontario’s Digging Roots; and the sprawling, cacophonous Big Band Symphony, starring the combined instrumentation of Bellowhead, cinematic Montreal band Bell Orchestre and Malian expat Jah Youssouf, among others.

Unfortunately, the large crowd on Saturday — traditionally the busiest day of the festival — made it difficult for audiences to get up close to the supposedly more intimate daytime stages.

Over the past decade, the festival has grown to the point where its Birds Hill Park site has reached capacity, in terms of the ability for fans to easily move around and a find a comfortable place to sit and watch daytime performances. At some of the stages, even the audio is insufficient to reach the fringes of the crowd.

The good news is the festival is planning a $5-million site upgrade that should expand the number of daytime stages from six to eight by 2012.

Three new stages will be carved out of the forest north of the existing festival site and four stages on the open prairie will be expanded.

Work on the site will begin in 2010 with backstage improvements, executive director Tamara Kater said.

Late-night Friday

 

ALT-COUNTRY singer Neko Case owns one of the most amazing voices at the Folk Fest and she gave it a workout on a relatively chilly Friday night performance.

Case rewarded festival-goers who stuck it out to the end with a gregarious set dominated by tunes from her new album Middle Cyclone, plus more than a couple of cracks about the sweater weather in early July.

Sam Beam, the South Carolina singer-songwriter who performs as Iron & Wine, delivered a more subdued set, but the mainstage audience remained quiet enough to allow the heavily bearded dude to do his ultra-chill acoustic thing.

 

— With files from Rob Williams

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca