Ottawa Folk Festival: Daytime Acts
A review of some of the Fest's daytime offerings
As always, the Ottawa Folk Festival features plenty of hidden gems
The all-you-can-hear buffet that is the daytime atmosphere of a music festival offered up some tasty tidbits yesterday at Ottawa's 14th annual folk showcase.
All about Britannia Park, surrounded by willows and windsurfers, were tents, stages and halls crowded with personas both new and familiar, each delivering something worthy of attention.
Dave Gaudet, Rose Cousins, Lindsay Jane
On the Ten Thousand Villages beach stage, Galaxy radio programmer Roch Parisien presented a song circle whose reach encompassed Ontario, the Prairies and the Maritimes. Ottawa-based Dave Gaudet, a busy sideman with many a female singer, reached deep into his ever-inquisitive soul and offered up, through signature tunes Spinning Top and Wrecking Ball, unique insights into the modern male psyche, in a distinct and memorable voice that could belong to the love child of Chet Baker and Leon Redbone.
Rose Cousins followed, and affirmed her place as Canadian folk's rising young romantic, with songs like The Dancer, Pale Love and the touching Home, an anniversary ballad written for a longtime couple befriended in Boston. Look for Cousins to break through with a major love song.
The most versatile voice of three, however, belonged to Halifax's Lindsay Jane. Though the songs this Calgary born crooner chose to sing suffered from sameness - how many ditties can you write about dads? - she expressed herself with impressive range and color. The set, in fact, ended on a fun collective jam on Steve Miller's The Joker, where she even revealed the makings of a great blues shouter.
Bram Morrison and Lorne Brown
That's Bram as in Sharon, Lois and...These days, he's making a second career out of publicly perpetuating the legacy of singer-song collector Alan Mills, the late keeper of the Great Canadian Catalogue. Bram's years on the kids' circuit have served him well; he sings with a happy, infectious voice and displays a polished, plucky persona. Comrade-in-arms Lorne Brown is the low-key one, and sings in a style best described as Burl Ives light. Together, the two render loving justice to Mills' fond embrace of the most colloquial parts of our country - songs from Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Quebec - and provide winning anecdotes in between.
Hoots and Hellmouth
This gang from Philadelphia both pleased and puzzled the weekend crowd. As the name suggests, this is traditional folk with heavy metal attitude. Call it garage folk, a genre that constitutes stomping the stage floor to kindling, whipping your shoulder length hair into the audience's face, and strumming your guitar with the force of an obsessive-compulsive cleaning a soup pot. When not in bombastic mode, however, these Mountain music madmen reveal strong musicianship and Van Morrison style leanings. For the most part, though, you can describe their sound in one word: YEEE- HAAA!!!
Quite a smorgasbord of sounds.
