The Ottawa Folk Festival
Today through Sunday at Britannia Park
Headliners include: Don Ross and Andy McKee, Vieux Farka Touré, Dala, Broken Social Scene, Colin Linden, Sarah Harmer, The Sadies, Odetta, Rufus Wainwright
Tickets: (at the gate, outlets around town)
Four-day pass: $95
Daily passes: $25 today; $49 tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday
Information: 613-230-8234, 1-877-730-8234 or ottawafolk.org.
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Eco-police won’t be strong-arming offenders, but this year’s 15th edition of the Ottawa Folk Festival seems to be almost as much about protecting the environment as it is about music. While folks like Rufus Wainwright, the legendary Odetta and Sarah Harmer pour on the main stage sounds over the next four days, the already leafy festival site at Britannia Park promises to turn an even deeper shade of green.
Parking lot fees are now an ouch-inducing $10, up 25 per cent over last year to encourage biking, car-pooling and public transit use. Solar-heated water will sluice over reusable plates (no more bendy plastic utensils this year, either, just the real thing). Pedal-powered cargo trikes will haul around supplies. There will be green printing for promotional materials, compostable water bottles and beer cups and a partnership with Ottawa Riverkeeper and Ecology Ottawa. Thanks to these initiatives, and the return of such festival institutions as the EnviroTent with its cornucopia of presentations, you can leave your eco-guilt at the gate.
Which is exactly what some of the performers will be doing.
Harmer, who headlines the main stage Saturday night after guitar great Colin Linden, blues lady Roxanne Potvin and others get the evening rolling, has vigorously advocated for protecting the Niagara Escarpment from quarry development. Like many other headliners, Harmer is also playing the busy daytime stages, including Sunday’s self-explanatory Tuned Into Nature session on the Point Stage.
Toronto’s revolving music collective Broken Social Scene, main stage headliners tomorrow night, have contributed to a project to restore polluted waterways.
Rufus Wainwright—catch him Sunday night on the main stage right after Odetta—launched Blackoutsabbath earlier this year: New Yorkers, he proposed, should turn off all power for 12 hours on June 21 and think about the environment. Since there were no reports of a city-wide blackout, it’s presumably back to the drawing board for eco-Rufus.
Winnipeg’s the Duhks, meanwhile, have clambered aboard the green machine with a vengeance. Members of the Juno-winning, Grammy-nominated roots quintet—they open Sunday evening’s main stage show—drive a biodiesel-fuelled van, wash with earth-friendly shampoos and soaps, and use carbon credits to offset CO2 emissions.
While recording their adventurous new album, Fast Paced World in Nashville, they lived in one house, car-pooled to the studio and munched on organic food. They also won the battle with their record company to have the album released in cardboard sleeves rather than the petroleum-based plastic cases that still rule the CD roost.
“Musicians tend to be on the cutting edge of things,” says fiddler Tania Elizabeth, spearheader of the band’s green ways. Eco-consciousness “is a new wave of culture and a lot of them are inspired by it.”
Elizabeth says that at North American festivals this summer, the Duhks have played on solar-powered stages and chowed down using biodegradable, corn-based cutlery (although detractors have argued that cutlery may be less eco-friendly than is assumed).
All this green consciousness makes perfect sense, says Tamara Kater, executive director of the Ottawa Folk Festival. “A folk festival is about music but it’s also about community. And as a community, we care about the environment. Even in their founding moments, folk festivals were among the first to be very conscious of the environment.”
This year, the Ottawa Folk Festival launched its first Sustainability Committee. “Music festivals are known for their large environmental footprint,” says committee chair Julia Adam. “You get thousands of people concentrated in one small space, away from where they live and have their own recycling systems, and they get self-indulgent. Even if people need to bend out of their comfort zone a bit to be more conscious, in the long run it’s better.”
If folks are a little bent out of shape by this intense green, they should bounce back fast enough thanks to the music on the festival’s seven stages. The festival opens tonight with Malian guitar champ Vieux Farka Touré headlining the main stage, while the new, 8000-square-foot dance tent with its sprung floor kicks off a weekend of fancy audience footwork with dance callers, instructors and bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Donna the Buffalo and the Sadies.
Dance shares centre stage with music during Saturday and Sunday performances of the Cross-Cultural Artist Collaboration. The project pools 14 musicians and dancers from various cultures and countries—West African-born Mohamed Diarra and alt.country/bluegrass musician Jaxon Haldane among them—to create new works for presentation on daytime stages. The whole gang also teams up on Sunday evening’s main stage.
You’ll also want to catch “Cheesy Songs We Love” with Spiral Beach and others at the Beach Stage, and “How Can I Keep from Singing?” a Tree Stage concert featuring Odetta (78 this year), Tao Rodriguez-Seeger (grandson of folk singing icon Pete Seeger and long-time member of the Mammals) and Ottawa’s Finest Kind. Sunday afternoon, there’s the promising “Old Blues” session with Michael Jerome Browne, Colin Linden and others at the Beach Stage.
As always, the festival features a landslide of other events. There’s a Ukulele Jam on Saturday’s Beach Stage for lovers of the tiny, perfect instrument and a Ukulele-Building for Kids workshop. Lynn Miles and her side project Experimental Farmers are among those paying tribute to Ottawa institution Rasputin’s Folk Café, recently closed by fire, during Sunday’s “Here’s to Rasputin’s” at the Beach Stage.
And festival-goers are invited to put their hand to Music in Your Eyes, a huge participatory mural dedicated to the late Willie P. Bennett, revered Canadian songwriter and performer. The finished mural will be sent to the Peterborough Folk Festival for display in the city where Bennett lived for many years.
(C) Ottawa Citizen