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I was surprised recently to come across a glossy printed schedule for the 2014 Ottawa Folk Festival. I was surprised mostly because my ticket book doesn’t list me as attending this festival at all, but also because in discovering this pamphlet I have come to realize how shockingly haphazard I have been in holding on to these treasures. In fact I am in possession of schedules for less than half of the festivals I’ve attend, which is odd for an obsessive collector/cataloguer like myself.
But like m’lady always reminds me, I’m “odd” with a capital “T”.
Something else she reminded me of was that 2014 was the year the Folk Festival had donated a booth to our Instruments For Africa, a booth that m’lady and I staffed for every minute of every day of the five-day event, though we occasionally took turns leaving the vendor village to catch a bit of one act or another.
I know I’ve made reference to IFA or “the organization I run” in these logs before but I don’t know how much detail I’ve gone into, so here ‘goes:
In the Spring of 2012 m’lady and I were on vacation in Namibia and on her insistence…er, I mean “suggestion” we hopped a bus to Zambia where we had several fun adventures, one of which saw me donating my travel guitar to a local high school that was sorely lacking equipment for their music program. When I got back to Canada I decided to start an instrument drive to benefit that particular school, an instrument drive that proved so successful that m’lady and I were able to return to Zambia in 2013 with enough instruments to outfit a dozen schools. Thus Instruments For Africa was born.
We’ve kept the organization small but busy – it’s still just the two of us – and as of 2020 we have donated instruments to dozens of schools and organizations in four African countries. In the spring of 2014 we made a donation of electric guitars, amps, drums, etcetera to a community group in Lusaka on behalf of the Ottawa Bluesfest’s Blues In The Schools program, one of the festival’s educational programs that I had been a part of for several years by that time, and that was our foot in the door to get this booth at the folk fest, which Bluesfest had recently taken over.
We used our booth to educate people on what we were doing and how they could help us do it, but mostly we used it to sell these wonderful gemtrees (or so we call them) that I had purchased en masse from a family in Zambia who hand-makes them. The father and three sons wrap copper wire – which is very cheap and abundant in Zambia – such that they mimic tree trunks and branches and to the tips of these branches they glue fragments of semi-precious stones like quartz and amethyst so they look like leaves. The end result is quite stunning and I bought hundreds of them; I got my importer license and everything.
Anywho, in addition to selling almost two grand worth of those gemtrees over the course of the festival we both managed to see snippets of several concerts over on the main stage taboot. Only snippets, mind you, and very few at that. Such that I think it would be remiss of me to attempt to write up individual reports about each day, and since I saw my most anticipated act on the first day of the Ottawa Folk Festival I will heap all of these words upon it – September 10th, 2014 (the festival actually ran from the 10th to the 14th, inclusive) – the day I watched about about one beer’s worth of Blues Traveler, which I nursed long enough to last about two songs. And of course they were great…how could they not be? Though John Popper has proved to be a bit of an internet-stalking weirdo he is still one of the most blatantly skilled harmonica players in the land, and he’s got a heck of a voice to back it up. The rest of the band are all skilled players too, and to a man they have always been able to stand toe-to-toe with their overtly talented frontman.
So yeah, nice couple of songs.
Throughout the week I saw bits of sets by Fred Penner (who was never on my radar either as a kid or as an adult) and Matt “Guitar” Murphy (who has been on my radar ever since I first saw the film The Blues Brothers). I had seen Matt decades before at an Ottawa bar called The Penguin (which was run by the very same person who was now running the Folk Festival) and only as a sideman since (once with Booker T & the MG’s and couple or three times with The Blues Brothers), so it was nice to musically bookend all those years. Same with Blues Traveler; I think it had been probably fifteen years or so since I had seen them last, though I’m probably wrong about that.
In the end it’s rather ironic that we spent more time onsite during this folk fest than any other but saw the least actual music of any folk fest by far, but I would be quick to add that we had a great time at our little booth meeting people and raising money for our little not-for-profit.
And now I can put this pamphlet away where I found it.
Todd Man Out 