Corb Lund scores hat trick at Edmonton Music Awards
The mandolins and big butch bass bull fiddles have taken over music in Edmonton. They’ll come for our guns next. We can see by the 2013 winners of the Edmonton Music Awards that we seem to be trending into folk music – like everywhere else you can hear Mumford and Sons on six different radio […]
Van Wilmott under no pressure to revive the past
An astounding thing is discovered in talking to Edmonton music guru Van Wilmott to mark his 20th year of producing musical theatre for the Mayfield Dinner Theatre – there isn’t a trace of his old band Grace Under Pressure on the Internet. No photos, no videos, no music, just a little entry in the Canadian […]
Open Sky Music Festival postponed for this year
Another fledgling Edmonton festival is taking a hiatus – at least for one year. Producers of the Open Sky Music Festival have announced the postponement of this year’s event, originally scheduled for June 7-9 at Hawrelak Park’s Heritage Amphitheatre. Nathan Richards, who founded the festival in 2010 to showcase bands of the reggae, “surf rock” […]
Alice in Chains comes to Edmonton in July
There is great rejoicing in Mudville today – for Alice in Chains is coming to town. One of the best bands to come of the Seattle scene of the ‘90s will perform at Rexall Place on Thursday, July 4. Tickets go on sale Friday. Back in the day, vocalists Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley created […]
Overlooked classical composer only Edmonton Juno winner
If you don’t count k.d. lang’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Vivian Fung is the sole Edmonton winner at the 2013 Juno Awards. “I feel so honoured to be recognized and acknowledged by the Canadian recording industry,” she says. “It’s a wonderful feeling.” If you have no idea who Vivian Fung is, […]
Moving to Edmonton will get you into the Velvet Underground
Growing up in Beaumont, Alberta, a Francophone farming community of 14,000 located three kilometres South of Edmonton, Brazilian Money’s Garrett Johnson remembers listening to Velvet Underground for the first time. “I thought it was total garbage,” he says. So how did the Beaumont musician end up appreciating the context and musicality of Lou Reed’s legendary […]
OPERA: Dark ache of an unhappy soul in Eugene Onegin
There’s a burning question about opera that most opera buffs never talk about because they fear they’ll look like complete idiots. No problem here: Why not just perform all operas in English? Most of opera fans speak English – so why do they keep coming to operas performed in languages they don’t even understand? Imagine […]
EXTREME METAL REUNION: Disciples of Power rise again
It’s hard to believe there was a time when an extreme metal band from Edmonton could get on television. Disciples of Power first hit the MTV and MuchMusic airwaves in 1989 with “Crisis,” a thrashy technical-death metal number denouncing environmental degradation, from its debut album, Power Trap. The coming years saw the band relocate to […]
WHO NAMED THE RAPPER: Classified no secret
“It’s not a good story,” warns rapper Luke Boyd, better known as Classified, on how he picked his rap name. It’s not a very good rap name, either, let it be said – though not to his face when he was in Edmonton for a promo tour a couple of months back. He’s back to […]
Don’t cry for New City, Edmonton, it’s the cycle of life
If you go back about 25 years to remember Edmonton’s best live music bars, the landscape is unrecognizable: People’s Pub, the Grinder, Boiler Lounge, Sidetrack Café – all gone, their very names meaningless to younger folk perhaps more familiar with places like the Starlite Room or the Pawn Shop. Point being that the recent closing […]
HARPSICHORDIA! Antique instruments fight for cool factor at Early Music Festival
You won’t find a musical instrument as misunderstood and maligned as the harpsichord – not the doleful bassoon, not the dreaded dulcimer, not even the hideous pipes, the pipes, the pipes calling from glen to glen and down the mountainside are as hated as the harpsichord. Avant-garde composer John Cage compared the harpsichord’s buzzy chime […]
Rock and Folk Festivals working for the same weekend
The stakes in the Great Edmonton Summer Festival Poker Game just went up. The table is getting crowded. This year’s Edmonton Rock Music Festival happens on the same weekend as the Edmonton Folk Music Festival – and everyone is crossing their fingers that the crossover between classic rock and folk music isn’t too huge. The […]
