Saturday, July 5, 2008

Blues Festival looks to the future

By Dan Hilborn
Published Aug. 10 2005


When Burnaby city councillor Nick Volkow was just a kid growing up in East Vancouver, he loved nothing more than going to concerts to watch his favourite blues musicians play.

He remembers riding three buses just to watch Smokey Robinson and the Miracles play at Kerrisdale Arena in the 1960s. He also remembers when James Brown played at the PNE Gardens and when such musical luminaries as Sonny Terry and John Lee Hooker made their annual pilgrimages to The Cave or Oil Can Harry's nightclubs.

So, after Volkow was elected to city council and was invited on an official visit to the hot air balloon festival in Burnaby's sister city of Gatineau, Que., the Burnaby councillor was far more impressed by the music that accompanied the balloons than the hot air contraptions themselves.

As 17-year-old, left-handed guitar player Jonny Lang entertained the mostly French-Canadian crowd, Volkow turned to his colleague, then-mayor Doug Drummond, and declared that Deer Lake needed its own blues festival.

Drummond, another former East Vancouver kid, quickly agreed, and when they got home, the pair enlisted the help of another longtime East Van acquaintance, John Orysik, a founding director of the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society.

While Drummond has since stepped away from politics - he's been successfully fighting cancer ever since that summer in Gatineau - the former mayor is still a huge supporter of the the city's six- year-old blues festival.

So on Monday afternoon, as the sun blazed down over Drummond's flower-filled backyard in the scenic Westridge neighbourhood, the two longtime friends sat down with a reporter to talk about their love for blues music and why they believe the city should continue to host the annual event.

"If you live life, you're going to experience a few hurts, and good blues music is a way to define that," Drummond said as he flipped through some of the estimated 200 blues CDs in his music collection.

"I just think it's the kind of music more people need to experience," Drummond said. "Too much of the music today has to do with money. But blues can help you express, feel and evaluate what's going on in your life. A lot of the time, I turn it on and it allows me to think in different ways. Good music affects your brain."

Volkow believes the blues carries more relevance than much of the rock music that dominates the modern world, simply because of where it comes from.

"For me, it's working- class music," said Volkow, who drives a semi-trailer for his day job. "Right now there's a big debate in the trade publications whether this is in fact a lost art form."

While Drummond and Volkow were able to convince their council colleagues that the blues festival has a lot of potential - they note that city hall veteran Celeste Redman once owned and operated Heart and Soul Records on Commercial Drive - they are also worried that their original idea of a traditional blues festival could be lost in the push for bigger audiences.

While pre-sale tickets for the 2005 Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival have already surpassed the numbers from previous years - almost 1,200 tickets were sold by last weekend - Volkow said the festival still needs time and support to grow.

"It's sort of like the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in the park," Volkow said. "The first year there were only 900 people in the park but, 17 years later, we now get 11,000 people out. It's taken that long to for people to put that event on their calendar.

"We know the blues festival is going to take time to grow, but I think it's becoming a signature event. We've made a lot of improvements to the site, and I think Deer Lake Park is becoming the premier outdoor venue in the region.

"Rock and roll, you can get that anywhere, but if you want the blues, you'll have to come to Burnaby," he said.

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