Vancouver Folk Music Festival: concerts and kitchen

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Vancouver Folk Music Festival - 2008

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Maeve McKinnon

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July 21 | -I walked into the Folk Fest on Sunday morning as The Sojourners wrapped up their set with “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” a gospel standard about sending kids to Bethlehem in various denominations: two-by-two, three-by-three, vocal harmonies steadily thickening, until shiploads of young’uns were being packed off to the holy city and the whole audience was grooving to the happiest music alive.

Back in the kitchen, I spent an hour chopping up a crate of okra for a stew being prepared nearby in a person-sized pot by a cook wearing welding gloves. I still can’t get over how big everything was in that kitchen. Unlike its stew-mates, the green pepper and tomato, the okra is a joy to chop. Lopping off its knobby head with a quick downward stroke, you spin the okra around like a car doing a donut and thwack of its tail. You struggle to avoid looking like too pleased with yourself during this maneuver, but give up soon when you realize that arrogance actually increases your cooking productivity.    

When Michael Franti and Spearhead came on later that night, a crowd rushed up to the front of the stage; I was on hand for the turf war that ensued between the winner of this year’s “blanket” contest (the Folk Fest raffles away choice seating space in front of the main stage) and a crowd of excited youth who’d colonized the area. Michael Franti and Spearhead sound more sugary than they did four years ago, when they last played at the Folk Fest, but they put on a good show. Bass-lines punctured the air as an older man wearing earplugs body-surfed his way into the arms of Franti himself. I thought that a women dancing beside me was telling me to get off her blanket, but after the show I learned that she was encouraging me to “shake it.” Nice. When I came home I made an omelet the size of a car.

July 19 | - Day 1; big kitchen

Friday was Day 1 of the 31st annual Vancouver Folk Music Festival at Jericho Beach. I'm volunteering this year in the festival kitchen -- a massive tent with green plywood floorboards, a jumble of freestanding ovens and barbecues, and the three biggest sinks in the world. The kitchen provides free meals for 1, 200 musicians and volunteers over the weekend, so the cooking happens on a scale massive enough to be both surreal and newsworthy. People cart around wheelbarrows of soup. Salads are made in garbage bins, and I hurt my back carrying a table-sized tray of apple crumble across the floor to the oven.

Music-wise, I was impressed by a LAU, a Scottish accordion, fiddle, guitar trio. Especially cool was when the fiddle player used an effect peddle to drop his fiddle into cello-range, producing a thick, creamy harmony with the other instruments. From the kitchen I heard a bit of Aimee Mann’s set. Now I’m about to head off to hear a Vancouver-based hip hop group called DNA6.