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” […]
THEATRE: Century old labour dispute more relevant than ever in Strike!
Just to save Ezra Levant the trouble of looking into this, the show Strike! – a musical about the bloody 1919 general strike in Winnipeg – is all union. Equity actor’s union, stage tech union, you name it, no scabs here. The only dodgy bit is the show’s co-creator, producer, promoter, chief cook and bottle […]
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 […]
WAR OF THE WORDS: Controversy at Edmonton Poetry Festival!
Poets, especially Canadian poets, can be a fractious lot. There have been recent public battles between various prominent Canadian poets, mostly notably between Jan Zwicky and Michael Lista on the relevance of criticism. Heated words like “illiterate” and “incompetent” and “stupid” were deployed in a war waged on the pages of the National Post. Veteran […]
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 […]
LEDUC RADIO: New country station declares undeclared war on CISN
There hasn’t been a serious challenger to CISN radio’s hot country hegemony in decades of Edmonton Radio. That’s all about to change with Tuesday’s launch of “93.1 FM The One” in Leduc. This is war – and the funny thing is that neither opponent will ever declare it openly, because that’s just the way radio […]
