
Vancouver Folk Festival: A classic Neil Young album reimagined, plus 5 must-see performers
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On July 19, 1974, Neil Young previewed his fifth solo album, On the Beach, at a surprise concert in Los Angeles. As a nod to that event, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival presents On the Beach: Neil Young Reimagined on July 19 at Jericho Beach.
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Featuring the Hen House All-Stars backing band led by Juno Award-winning guitarist and producer Steve Dawson, the lineup of musicians honouring Young's legacy includes Krystle Dos Santos, Sue Foley, Margaret Glaspy, Rich Hope, Marcus Mosely, Marin Patenaude, Samantha Parton, Kenneth Pattengale and Julian Taylor.
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This is part of a continuing series of performances at the Folk Festival that explore the work of iconic acts, such as Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, as interpreted by artists who put their own distinct twist on material considered part of the classic-rock canon.
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Dawson says the fact that such an oddball could arrive in Los Angeles in the early 1960s and become the toast of the town is something that defies all music industry conventions. Mining his own distinct brand of guitar playing and songwriting to great success is something that can't be copied and has made Young a role model and inspiration for generations of Canadian musicians.
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'He's not like other iconic Canadian songwriters who reference the country a lot in their material either, like The Tragically Hip,' said Dawson. 'But anyone, in any country, would have a huge amount of respect for what he's done and how he's done it. It's one of the reasons so many amazing voices have taken on his songs, and hearing them interpreted by the singers we have for this event is really exciting.'
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Award-winning Black Canadian/Mohawk artist Julian Taylor, who also appears as a feature act at the folk festival and at the incredibly popular gospel workshop on Sunday morning, admits that Young is an inescapable presence.
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'There are some records that resonate with me and are personal favourites, such as On the Beach and Tonight's the Night, but he loses me a lot of the time as well,' said Toronto-based Taylor. 'For musicians working in my area, his influence is everywhere, and trying to think of another artist who has that definitive folk style but isn't afraid to really crank it up is rare.
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Winnipeg Free Press
6 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Orchestral expressions
Back in 2004, the front page of the Free Press Arts & Life section (then called Entertainment) ran a glowing tribute by Morley Walker to one of the most august careers in Manitoba's arts sector. Rita Menzies was retiring. Some expected she'd make more time for favourite pursuits — cooking, travel, family, opera, art— especially after such an eventful finale to a long career. The year before, Menzies — who'd been with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra for 24 years as its first general manager — had been tapped to take the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's reins in an interim capacity. Jeannette Menzies photo Rita Menzies on a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland. On the face of it, the move may have seemed improbable. The WSO was 10 times the size of the MCO and had a $3-million deficit. But Menzies' reputation — her crack command of budgets and structures, coupled with a soft, deft touch for people and politics — preceded her. 'There were a lot of highfalutin people who came in and absolutely burned out within a month,' recalls violinist and WSO concertmaster Karl Stobbe. 'I really have to give (Rita) credit for saving the WSO in a time when people were not sure it could be saved.' Amazingly, the WSO finished its 2003-4 season with a considerable surplus. Walker playfully cast aspersions on her resolve to retire after this success: 'Oh, did she not tell you? She has accepted an honorarium to run the Agassiz Summer Chamber Music Festival in June … But in July, she plans to take it easy. Honest.' What's that saying about best-laid plans? Before long, the retiree was the annual fest's director, a role she held for a full 11 years. She also returned as the WSO's interim executive director in 2006 and served as Agassiz's board president until her death in June at 83, after a short battle with cancer. 'How fitting that Rita worked in the frontline of Winnipeg's arts community until a few weeks before her passing — she was always keen to contribute and to help others,' says Agassiz artistic director Paul Marleyn. 'She developed (Agassiz) and she worked every day — her famous and proudly Mennonite work ethic. Rita had extraordinary values, values about which she never preached.' Jennifer Menzies Photo At Ponemah Beach, Menzies and granddaughter Olivia work on art projects. Menzies took up drawing and watercolour painting in retirement. Rita Menzies' career charts the rise of a certain type of pillar in Manitoba's arts and cultural life. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a coming-of-age for Canadian culture, with the government using the Centennial to invest heavily in the sector. However, the path to the MCO's emergence was often far from smooth. For seven lively years, the MCO (founded in 1972) was administered as a volunteer-driven passion project, operating out of insurance manager Bill Stewart's office. 'Maybe I was paying more time to the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra than I was to my business,' says Stewart with a chuckle. 'It became apparent … that we would have to get some kind of administrative help.' MCO's early history is hard to separate from Westminster United Church — a stronghold of a broadly liberal Protestantism, known for its deep love of classical music. Its congregation criss-crossed with MCO's audience and with its beautiful acoustics and central location, the church eventually became the organization's primary venue. It had a celebrated organist in Don Menzies, who held the post from 1966 until 2022. Just down the road, his wife Rita — born in Kitchener, Ont., in 1942 — taught math and English at Kelvin High School. She was also an accomplished organist and her musical passion was about to make its way to the centre of things. Jeannette Menzies photo Menzies (right) with her husband Don in France. Though technically retired, Menzies ran the Agassiz Summer Chamber Music Festival for eleven years. By the late 1970s the MCO was operating out of another makeshift office. The hum of a typewriter — clattering out accounting reports, marketing plans and musician contracts — filled the basement. 'I have vivid memories of a filing cabinet and card table propped up in the laundry room,' recalls Jeannette Menzies, a Canadian diplomat, former ambassador to Iceland and Rita's daughter. 'We loved having her around when we were young and hearing the sounds of classical music at home.' But for Menzies, juggling a young family — which included daughters Tanis and Jennifer as well as Jeannette – was only half of it. As well having suddenly traded in English lit for budget sheets, Menzies had to learn and quickly master the art of balancing those budgets. 'She told me once that the first thing she did every morning was read the entire business section of the Winnipeg Free Press,' says Stobbe, who got to know Menzies in the 1990s while playing with the MCO. JOE BRYKSA/FREE PRESS In 2003, Menzies (right) moved from the MCO to the struggling WSO as Interim Director, seen here in 2004 with violinist Claudine St Arnauld. Potential funders, donors and board members — Menzies was, by all accounts, always on the hunt for allies and resources to better the organizations she led. With its footing now secure, the MCO could find a proper office and finally start delegating. By the 1990s, the orchestra had hired Elise Anderson as its office manager, Jon Snidal as its designer and systems manager and violinist Boyd MacKenzie as its concert manager. 'Find(ing) good people. That was a real strength of hers,' says Vicki Young, Menzies' successor at the MCO. 'To bring on people like Elise and Jon and Boyd — I think is pretty incredible.' All of them are still associated with the MCO in some way, while today a new generation of staff and musicians carries the torch, including Sean McManus, executive director since 2023. The original team supported the orchestra through a showing at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, tours across the world and countless commissions of new Canadian music. Supplied Menzies was an accomplished organist, which can be traced back to her early practice sessions at the family piano. The MCO was also earning a rep as a solid stop for famous touring soloists, with Joshua Bell, Marc-André Hamelin and Liona Boyd all sharing the stage with the orchestra in those years. When Young assumed the MCO's reins in 2003, she had a rarity in her hands: a classical ensemble with loyal employees and musicians, a consistent streak of balanced budgets and a deeply engaged, supportive audience base. '(Rita) was always thinking ahead and setting a really good foundation for what was to come,' says Young. Over the next 20 years, the MCO saw a continued streak of balanced budgets, more growth and further professionalization of its board, touring and movement towards more multicultural priorities. It benefited not just from Menzies' foundation but something more ineffable. Menzies was valedictorian at her Grade 12 graduation. Veteran staff will tell you about a cultural throughline at the MCO — a democratic ethos with a strong, trusted leader acting as first among equals — that they trace back to Menzies. 'She was described as kind of having a calming effect on an organization,' says her daughter Jeannette. 'I saw her as a trailblazer. But I think my mom would probably be mortified (to hear that) because she really would give equal credit to Jon, Elise and others.' Though Menzies' so-called retirement was packed with Agassiz commitments and volunteer work, her tireless sense of industry found rhythm in the pastimes she loved most. She was known as an extraordinary cook and a lifelong learner, picking up watercolour painting in retirement. As a consummate hostess and longtime member of the Westminster Concert Organ Series Committee (founded by her husband in 1989 and running until the pandemic), she prepared many dinners for guest organists and the receptions following concerts. The couple sometimes oriented their many trips across the world around performance opportunities for Don and made regular pilgrimages to the Ottawa area to see their granddaughters, Grace and Olivia Kennedy. 'Behind everything was Rita's love of life, her family, music, the arts, of people and of the Winnipeg community,' says Marleyn. Menzies with her daughters Tanis, Jeannette and Jennifer. 'She avoided the stage and public attention, yet somehow quietly lead her workplaces with elegance, industry, effectiveness … Rita gave us all such a magnificent example of what the qualities of honesty, kindness, hard work and love can achieve.' Conrad SweatmanReporter Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.


Winnipeg Free Press
7 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Enchanting interludes
Somehow, Heather O'Neill has crafted a delightfully fleeting, 200-plus page epic. Valentine in Montreal has the principal features of the daunting form, but all in charming miniature. O'Neill, much and justly celebrated as a resoundingly successful Canadian poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, novelist and journalist, was able to fashion this riff on the traditional literary genre by adapting another conventional publication form: Valentine is not so much a modern novel as it is a compendium of a traditional serial. In 2023, a Montreal Gazette editor asked O'Neill to compose a serialized novel, very much in the Victorian mode. Suspecting failure would accompany the unusual effort, O'Neill nonetheless dove in, hoping it would not just challenge her chops but connect her with writing and writers past, especially Charles Dickens. More, it could help her realize her belief that good fiction ought to be democratized, something the archaic serial form had done — and perhaps could still do — so expediently. Elisa Harb photo Heather O'Neill (right) has enlisted her daughter Arizona (left) to illustrate her two most recent books. O'Neill is probably most famous as the unicorn double winner of CBC's Canada Reads: her own extraordinarily beautiful and moving novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006), won the 2007 competition, and she last year was victorious in championing Catherine Leroux's 2020 L'Avenir (in English as The Future, 2023 translation by Susan Ouriou). O'Neill's credentials roster is long, wondrous and vigorous, including cherished novels in 2014, 2017, 2022 and 2024 (the most recent The Capital of Dreams), as well as collections of poems (1999) and short stories (2015). Throw in the scripts for a difficult-to-find but lovely-to-behold feature film, Saint Jude (2000), and the eight-minute short End of Pinky (which can be found on YouTube), and you have here an artist bursting with talent and skill at the absolute and sustained top of her astounding game. Our micro-epic voyageur here is Valentine Bennet, a young, shy, lone-but-not-lonely and humble heroine who is utterly content with her modest work at a dépanneur at the Berri-UQAM métro stop. Valentine lives to dwell in her métro beneath and amidst the city, and is therefore deeply disturbed when her entrenched patterns are upset. She is quickly thrown much outside her world — or at least much further into it. Valentine, orphan (Dickens!) and amateur poet, learns that she has a doppelganger, Yelena, a ballerina, an artist of a different stripe. Valentine must quest out into the urban world, more Yelena's than her own, using her métro as her steed. She must acquaint with eccentric strangers, she must dodge the dodgy and she must figure out who she really is. All this in 30 quite steadfastly short, serial chapters. These instalments are all discrete and intended to be read, as O'Neill herself announces, in a single, Saturday-morning-with-coffee-and-eggs sitting. To be sure, there are recaps of whence we've been and dangles of whither we go, but it is all done without inelegant intrusion. En route, there are cases of mistaken identity, there in an unearthing of an aged common ancestor who herself used to galivant across Europe in full bohemian but somehow lucrative mode. And there is a forbidding Montreal underbelly, something literally called 'the Mafia,' but barking more than biting. And there is also a very dear romance in this little Romance. The dalliance cannot and does not fully fruit, but it is there, and it brings with it, too, the requisite wisdom and sadness. Valentine in Montreal just abounds in interlude. There are moments in each of the 30 little pieces to make you grin, to make you chortle aloud; all gracefully connect and carefully construct. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. More, the book is accompanied by delightful, childlike illustrations — a least one, and often several, per chapter. The artist, Arizona O'Neill (the author's daughter), typically poaches a moment of the text, usually a figurative one, and runs with it in an absolutely frolicsome way. Because one has to pause over the images to realize what is going on, the artwork is able, most delicately, to enhance the text. Throughout, Heather O'Neill's habitual mastery loiters. She is marvelously writes in a manner that briskly moves all things well along while peppering in, again and aptly again, turns of phrase that catch your breath and even command an immediate re-reading. Oddly, it is not so much the subtle, lurking metaphors as the more direct, almost-preening similes that achieve this: O'Neill is writing about and revelling in writing as she writes. 'Think about how I am telling this story as I tell it,' she seems to whisper. It could not be more enchanting. Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St. Paul's High School in Winnipeg.


Winnipeg Free Press
10 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
As Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter tour draws to a close, Blue Ivy emerges as a star
'Who they came to see?' Beyoncé asks as she performs her 2023 single 'My House' during the Cowboy Carter tour. For many, the answer has been Blue Ivy. Blue Ivy Carter, the Grammy-winning artist's 13-year-old daughter, is more present than ever on stage, and fans are impressed by the growth from her first performance years ago to now. Isabella Kerr, 15, has admired Beyoncé for years, but said she attended the Cowboy Carter tour specifically to experience Blue Ivy's moves in person. 'People are saying, 'Oh, she's a mini Beyoncé,' but no, I think she's the first Blue. Everything about her when she's on stage is electrifying,' said Kerr. The Cowboy Carter tour concludes Saturday in Las Vegas. The tour's 30 previously stops have fans buzzing that Blue Ivy is well on her way to being a next generation powerhouse. Blue Ivy's stage presence grows on Cowboy Carter tour Blue first graced the stage at 11 years old during her mother's 2023 Renaissance tour, appearing during the legacy-celebrating anthems 'My Power' and 'Black Parade.' Supporters anticipated her performance at each stop. She performed again during 'Beyoncé Bowl,' the NFL Christmas Day Halftime Show that was just nominated for four Emmy Awards. She danced alongside the icon as she performed songs from the 'Cowboy Carter' album for the first time. 'Even the difference between the Renaissance Tour and now, you can tell she's really grown in her confidence,' said fan and artist Olivia Ellis. 'You can tell she has a different vibe about her.' On the Cowboy Carter tour, she can almost be mistaken for one of Beyoncé's professional dancers. She is on stage for nearly every song and has a solo recreating her mother's choreography from her 2006 'Déjà-vu' music video, a nod to the undeniable similarities between the two. An inherited professionalism Online videos of Blue display professionalism comparable to her mother's during the Cowboy Carter tour. During a rainy New Jersey stop, she brought out towels to dry her area of the stage before nailing her 'America Has a Problem' choreography. In another unexpected moment during a Chicago show, her earring got caught on Beyoncé's hair. Blue remained calm, removed the jewelry and motioned to the singer that it was safe in her hand as they both seamlessly continued. 'It's the family business,' said Kinitra D. Brooks, an academic and author of 'The Lemonade Reader,' a collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé's 2016 visual album, 'Lemonade.' 'She is literally studying under the best person doing it out there today. Why wouldn't she take advantage of that opportunity?' Blue Ivy's fans dub themselves as the 'Ivy League' In 'Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,' fans were given a behind-the-scenes look at the decision-making process the first time Blue was allowed to perform. Beyoncé expressed how nervous she was about her child being in front of thousands of people made her, revealing she initially said no. 'I did not think it was an appropriate place for an 11-year-old on a stadium stage,' she said in the documentary. 'I made a deal with her, and I said, 'If you practice and you show your commitment, I'll let you do one show.'' Blue Ivy fulfilled her end of the deal, and a fan base was formed: the 'Ivy League.' Kerr says Blue's accomplishments inspire her to work harder to achieve her own dreams. 'She worked to be on stage, and look at her now. If I work to what I want to be, I can be killing it like her.' At last month's Cowboy Carter Paris stop, members of the Beyhive and Ivy League finally got what they had been asking for — Blue Ivy merchandise. Shirts with the teen's face and the phrase 'Déjà Blue' plastered on the front were available for purchase. Prior to that, fans were creating their own custom pieces that highlighted Blue and Beyoncé's connection. At the MetLife Stadium show, Ellis wore a custom corset top she painted, showcasing Blue Ivy and her 8-year-old sister, Rumi Carter, on stage with Beyoncé during 'Protector,' a track from the 'Cowboy Carter' album that Rumi is featured on. 'I thought that would just be a really fun moment to highlight on a corset,' she said. 'It's just really cool to see her as a mom because we've all grown up with Beyoncé, and now it's like her show is kind of like a family affair.' Mother-daughter duos resonate with Beyoncé and Blue Ivy's bond Blue Ivy's confidence and professionalism are not only a testament to her hard work, but Beyoncé's motherhood. Mother-daughter duos around the globe filled stadium seats, excited to watch Beyoncé and her daughter display their strong bond for the world to see. In many cases, the mothers have been Beyoncé fans for years and are excited for their daughters to grow up with Blue Ivy, a high-flyer for their generation. Tanazha Baylis took her now 11-year-old daughter, Aria Brown, to the Renaissance tour, where she did not miss a beat dancing along to Blue Ivy's 'My Power' choreography. Brown was so determined to attend the Cowboy Carter Tour that she started selling popular toys, such as slime and Squishmallows, and saving her money. Wednesdays What's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'She literally was like, 'Mom, I don't know what you're going to do, but I have to go to this concert,'' said Baylis. 'I just had to make it happen after that.' Brown became a Beyoncé fan after participating in a dance recital with a theme centered around the superstar's career throughout the years. Baylis, who says she has always been a big fan, is happy to share these experiences with her daughter. 'It just showed her a cool mom and daughter, and it's just something that she can do as well. Beyoncé is a little older but, with seeing Blue there, it made it tangible for her.' Although there is no solid answer for what the future holds for Blue Ivy, it is widely recognized that the possibilities are limitless. 'We couldn't imagine that Beyoncé would do all of these things that she could do. All we saw were people trying to put limitations on her,' said Brooks. 'I think one of the things that Beyoncé wants us to do and what she wants for Blue is for us to not put those limitations on Blue.'