Tangled up in blues

Friday was a night for big stages. And there shoulda been more. The day's Bluesfest schedule was so highly ambitious, there really was not room for it all.

Audrey, Ottawa's biggest pop fan, insisted that INXS, on the MBNA, was the act to see, and the IO, Conch, and Painted Stick were mere tails in the wake of her irresistable comet. INXS had crisp sound, crisp playing, crisp packaging -- consumate pros. Singer JD Fortune is still growing into his new role (Duuude! Stop asking the crowd if they're having a good time! They are. And the near-constant F-bomb? Adds little if anything to your street cred. You can sing, already.) but he and the band know what they're doing.

Earlier, on the Rogers, some of us enjoyed Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, music jazzily elastic, undefinable, wierd, lovely and utterly compelling. And better than her discs. Live, you can see the musical gestalt and feel Edie. She talked about finding the end of a double rainbow in Central Park, one day with her kids. Presumably her husband, Paul Simon (Yes, that Paul Simon) was there as well. They didn't find any gold, but what the hey. They've both got gold records.

The indy hipsters probably wished their preferred acts had gotten bigger stages -- the vast crowd for breathless Newmarket power-post-pop-punk band Tokyo Police Club gridlocked the Black Sheep venue completely, then kept coming. They didn't quite flatten a security guard that vainly tried to stop them during the mob scene at the gate. But the indy hipster crowd is very good at giving rent-a-cops the collective "Huh? You mean moi?" look, and keeping right on going. Great band, terrific fast tunes, fully worthy of the buzz. Then hipsters moved on to a similarly packed scene at the River Stage to watch local alt-conceptual darlings, Metric. And probably hold their breaths some more.

Dinosaur rockers were also out in full force, spilling in to the Black Sheep for a reconstituted Ten Years After as hipsters fled in droves. Coyote ventured there briefly, despite Audrey's strong persuasive powers, but soon evacuated, pointy ears near bleeding from the sound pressure. When last seen, he was holding his head in his paws and (very quietly) yowling, 'Now I know what killed all the dinosaurs to extinctedness...'

Photos, Top(ish) to bottom(ish): Edie Brickell channels Steve Tyler - in a good way; INXS and JD Fortune cop major rawk star attitude; Tokyo Police Club bassist and singer David Monks; Ten Years After bassist Leo Lyons and 'new' guitarist/vocalist Joe Gooch, amid lotsa smoke and lights and noise.

Rainin' nothin' but the blues

The amazing thing about the blues -- and all wistful, gut-wrenching music, for that matter -- is it ends up making you feel not sad, but just right. And Thursday night was a fine example of how some wailing licks and plaintive vocal tricks can help it all shake down.

Blue Rodeo reminded everyone why they're Canada's Poster Band. By turns playful, sentimental and darkly soulful, they held the crowd fully in sway during their varied set. A few new tunes, due out this fall, added spark and surprise to a welcome roster of familiar numbers.

Who else can tunefully compare a broken relationship to an iceberg adrift at sea? Hell, they ain't got no icebergs in Texas, so stop lookin' there.

Coyote, who captured several more ace images at all four stages, summed up Blue Rodeo nicely: "Reliably excellent."

Lucky Peterson and wife Tamara revved things up on the River Stage (hey, you can actually see the river before sunset), with a rollicking, borderline campy but greatly inspiring run through classics including Proud Mary. I haven't seen a crowd having more fun in a long time.


















Throw in some new sounds from Michael Nau and his band Page France, a dose of the Strong Persuader himself, Robert Cray, plus rain, rain that stayed away another day, and you've logged another worthy notch on that guitar indeed.

Cryin' the Blues about Chairs

Well, I do find it amusing how the Bluesfest just couldn't figure out how to manage the "chair" problem. So now it's back to the free-for-all mayhem that we've become accustomed to. We might have a new opportunity. Now that Mayor Lex and his posse have stopped funding the crack pipe program, maybe they can divert the saved funds for umpire chairs to distribute to those "standingly-challenged" Blues-festers.

A New Piece on Swabbin' th' Deck

I've a new Google Poem over on my other other blog.

Northern-fried blues

Take Yoko Ono on a bad crack jag, the possessed chick in The Exorcist and one of them sea lions from the San Francisco pier and you've got a rough sense of the sound Tanya "Tagaq" Gillis gave birth to on the Bete Noir stage Wednesday night.

Part Cambridge Bay ingenue, part grand mal seizure, Tagaq held onlookers spellbound with the help of her DJ partner's Apple notebook-created soundscapes. In the delightfully harrowing process, she dragged Inuit throat singing -- screaming, groaning and ululating -- into the 21st century.

When a couple of beatbox homeboys joined her on stage, she taunted one with: "You better be good, or I'm going to hurt you."

And when her voice jammed up, she quipped: "Throat singing doesn't work when you've got a ball of phlegm in your throat. You need water -- or whiskey."

The highlight was an extended duet with her cousin Celina Kalluk that showcased their northern hypno-trance to mesmerizing effect.

A night earlier, Alejandro Escovedo dedicated a song to Joe Strummer on the same stage. Joe would've approved of Tagaq.