Happy Birthday Canada!
Well, here we are again - sharing the backstage with a whole ton of friends and musicians from across the country here to take part in the biggest celebration in Canada. It's an honour to be a part of it for the fifth year in a row!
As you know from my rehearsal day blog, Wayne Lavallee played Voyageur tonight for his two-song set. He came off the stage beaming - saying he believed it to be his best performance ever! It looked great and sounded great. Once Doug has processed the photos he took tonight, I'll post them on Flickr.
Was hoping to catch Ron MacLean backstage tonight but he was long gone by the time I got there. Still lots of other friends to see including crew-members Robert, Jeff and Paul, musicians Hey Rosetta and Alex Cuba (pictured) and managers Ian Menzies and Andres Mendoza.
Thanks so much to everyone for making Six String Nation part of the Canada Day experience in the nation's capital yet again:
Mark Kristmanson, Raj Nigam (who also gets this entry's photo credit), Wayne Lavallee, Ian Menzies, Andres Mendoza, Alex Cuba, Donald K. Donald Productions and the amazing backstage crew on Parliament Hill.
Posted at 11:10 PM
Continuing the Canada Day Tradition
The Six String Nation would not have been possible in the first place had Mark Kristmanson from the National Capital Commission not invited me to debut the guitar on Parliament Hill on Canada Day 2006. It's now become our annual tradition for Voyageur to spend Canada Day with the NCC's Canada Day event - both doing public portraits and spending time on stage in the hands of artists.
Major's Hill Park opened to the public at 11:00am. Doug and his son Gabriel, Gabriel Dube and myself were set up and ready to go. At 10:59 we see a group of people striding purposefully across the park toward us. It was the Sheehan family and son Kyle told us that we were the reason they came to Major's Hill Park this Canada Day. How fantastic is that!?!?! So, they were the first of 120 sessions today - somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1500 individual portraits with around 400 different people. The line-up you see in the photo stayed that way right until we closed up at 5:00pm. For some reason, CBC Radio nixed any idea of incorporating Voyageur into the song circle on the MHP stage but I suppose it's just as well given how busy we were all day.
Gabriel Dube has now taken Voyageur over to the Parliament Hill stage and I'll join him there shortly.
Thanks to Julie Descoteaux, Kay Kanbayashi, Joel Delaquis, Mark Kristmanson and all our Canada Day visitors today.
Posted at 6:26 PM
Gearing Up for Canada Day, Ottawa
I've arrived in Ottawa a few days before the big day in order that Voyageur can be part of rehearsals. On July 1st, things move like clockwork with the portrait booth established in Major's Hill Park, then shutting that down in time to get to Parliament Hill for the evening show. We had hoped to have Voyageur included in the daytime show this year because the Prime Minister and the Queen will be there for that but the timing won't work out.
Never mind, because I'm thrilled that this year, Wayne Lavallee from Vancouver will be playing Voyageur for his set in the evening show. Wayne is Cree-Metis originally from Winnipeg but he's been on the coast for a long time. He's got one of those great raspy-voices that seems just built to rock and yet he delivers gentler singer-songwriter-type stuff just as effortlessly. I've known him for some time and he played Voyageur just about two years ago when he played Mitzi's Sister at the end of my street in Toronto so it's great that he'll get his second turn in front of about 80,000 people on Parliament Hill (not to mention the TV audience watching at home).
He'll be doing two songs - including a great version of Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" with the Montreal group H'Sao backing him up on vocals.
Thanks to Wayne Lavallee, Ian Menzies, Raj Nigam, Pierre Boileau, Donald K. Donald Productions and good old Dr. Bob.
Posted at 5:02 PM
Streets Alive!
Yesterday was the second of our Six String Nation Orillia Trifecta - the first being Park St. Collegiate and the next being Mariposa - but this was Leslie Fournier's Streets Alive! Festival. The festival began as a kickoff to the annual lamp-pole banner art festival but this year Leslie brought it down to ground level with fifty 7-foot tall blank-canvas guitars (modeled after Larrivees) that were painted up by local artists with the help of local sponsors. The guitars will remain up on the streets of Orillia all summer long so by all means visit if you can - otherwise, you'll find some of the popular favourites pictured here. Ron Schell's entry is pictured at right.
With the guitar theme of the exhibit and the city focussed on the 50th anniversary of the upcoming Mariposa Folk Festival, it was only fitting that Leslie asked us to be part of things. Doug and I arrived while the festival was still setting up (in the pouring rain, I might add) and established our portrait studio in the back of the Gilbert Guitars store in the heart of the festival zone on Mississaga St. Lots of folks came through - including Ted Cormode, whom you may recall I wrote about during my visit to the First People's Traditional foods conference in Victoria BC. For his portraits, Ted wore the jacket his daughter wore on a trek to the summit of Kilimanjaro!
After a long day doing portraits in the store (and dinner at Chris Lusty's house), we headed over to City Hall (once the home of the Tudhope Motor Buggy Factory!) where I did the Six String Nation presentation for a warm and appreciative audience in the council chamber.
Special thanks to Leslie Fournier, Chris Lusty, Eli Lusty, Nancy Nevala and Jeff Gilbert.
Posted at 1:20 PM