Sainte-Marie to play Summerfolk

Article originally published at  http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com
Canadian music legend Buffy Sainte-Marie will headline this year's Summerfolk.

Artistic director James Keelaghan has been rolling out the lineup of more than 40 acts throughout the month of March, capped by the announcement Tuesday that Sainte-Marie would be headlining the 39th annual Summerfolk Music and Crafts Festival which runs August 15 to 17 at Kelso Beach Park.

"When you think of Buffy's career there are the hits she had herself and then the hits she has written for other people," said Keelaghan. "She is just an incredibly focused and generous performer."

Sainte-Marie is best known for her 1970s hits such as I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again, Mister Can't You See and He's An Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo. She is well-known for her regular appearances on Sesame Street in the 1970s and early 1980s. Sainte-Marie is also an accomplished songwriter. The song Up Where We Belong, which Saint-Marie co-wrote, won an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award.

"I think having somebody with the stature of Buffy Sainte-Marie as the anchor of this, I think for the performers backstage, you know you are some place solid when there is a 73-year-old living legend on that stage and you are going to be on that stage at some point yourself," said Keelaghan.

Sainte-Marie was born on the Piapot Cree First Nation in Saskatchewan and raised in Massachusetts by adoptive parents. Much of her music, both as a songwriter and musician, has focused on the First Nations peoples of North America. She has also taken on the subjects of peace, war and religion in her music and has been involved in social activism throughout her career.

Keelaghan said he had tried to bring Sainte-Marie to Summerfolk last year, but was unable to get her booked for the festival.

"Everything sort of lined up this year that she was going to be in the area and was quite happy to do it," said Keelaghan.

In 2009, Sainte-Marie released her 18th album, Running for the Drum, which earned her her third Juno Award. Today, Sainte-Marie plays with a three-member band, including Jesse Green on guitar, Michel Bruyere on drums and Leroy Constant on bass.

"She has an amazing touring schedule and is just finishing a new album," said Keelaghan. "She is working with this trio of aboriginal musicians out of Winnipeg. They are the most rock solid band you have ever seen in your life."

Among the other popular acts at Summerfolk this year will be Toronto singer-songwriter Danny Michel, Yves Lambert, who for 25 years was the front-runner for Quebec band La Bottine Souriante, local favourites and Maple Blues Award nominees, the 24th Street Wailers and popular pop and folk musician Valdy.

"This is what our audience likes. Our audience likes a wide mix of people," said Keelaghan. "They like to have a few familiar faces to make sure everything is fine, but other than that they like to be surprised. There are some groups here that are just going to surprise the hell out of people."

One of those surprises is Laura Cortese and The Dance Cards out of the Boston area.

"It is really rare to see a singer-songwriter whose instrument is the voilin," said Keelaghan. "It is this beautiful string trio with violin, viola and cello and brilliant songwriting that goes over top of it."

Also on the tap this year are Oh Susanna, The Walkervilles, Alysha Brilla, Bruce Molsky, Comas, Jez Lowe, Quique Escamilla, Rachelle Van Zanten and The Fugitives.

Now in his third year as artistic director, Keelaghan said there is fair amount of juggling to bring all the acts together for the event, with some surprising twists and turns along the way.

"The whole thing starts in October and we have like 400 submissions for the festival," said Keelaghan. "There is so much great music out there I just wish we had 365 days to program it."

All of the acts taking part in this year's event are being added to summerfolk.org with about a dozen more to be included on the site this week.

The lineup will be finalized with the addition of four or five acts from the finals of the Youth Discovery event to be held at the Harmony Centre in Owen Sound on Sunday at 1 p.m.

"Basically the Youth Discovery completes the roster," said Keelaghan. "If people want to know what the entire roster is going to look like they are going to have to be there for the Youth Discovery on Sunday."

March 31 marks the end of the early bird weekend pass price of $92. From April 1 to June 30 a weekend pass will cost $102. After June 30, regular prices kick in, which are $112 for an adult, $99 for seniors and students, $72 for youths age 13 to 18, $14 for children age 5-12 and free for children four and under. Individual day passes are also available with prices at summerfolk.org.(Article Source)

Protesting and playing: For Buffy Sainte- Marie, there's room for both focus and fun

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press

For more than four decades, legendary Canadian-American Cree singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has been blazing trails.

When she first hit the road in the 1960s as a solo performer, touring North America's colleges, reservations and concert halls, she flipped audiences and record companies' expectations -- "Pocahontas in fringes" -- on their ears.

The multi-hyphenate performer -- she's a musician, composer, visual artist, educator and activist -- went on to pen well-covered classics such as Until It's Time For You To Go, Co'dine and Universal Soldier. She's worked tirelessly to put indigenous issues at the fore, through both her music and her activism. She has fistfuls of degrees from universities across Canada. She has 17 albums to her credit. She's an electronic music pioneer -- one of the first to use computers for home recording. She won an Oscar for the An Officer and a Gentleman theme Up Where We Belong. And, in a badass act of feminism, she had middle America clutching its pearls by breastfeeding her son on an episode of Sesame Street in the 1970s. (That's just a slight highlight reel of her illustrious career.)

At 73, Sainte-Marie is still working. Her latest album, 2008's Juno-winning Running for the Drum, continues to have legs, taking her all over the world. Buffy and her all-aboriginal, all-Manitoban backing band -- bassist Leroy Constant, guitarist Jesse Green and drummer Mike Bruyere -- will perform at the West End Cultural Centre tonight as part of a western Canadian tour, but she's also turning her eye to recording. She's famously judicious about making albums; she only does so when she has the time to dedicate to a project.

"I'm actually working on a new album right now," she says on the line from her idyllic home in Hawaii. "I was just in Nashville and Toronto and L.A., where I was interviewing producers to co-produce with."

A forthcoming Buffy Sainte-Marie album will be a lot like the ones that came before it -- genre-spanning, subject-spanning and completely unpredictable. She never writes with a record in mind.

"That might be what people might think -- the company says, 'Oh, it's time to make a record,'" she says, dropping her voice several octaves to imitate an label exec. "But if you're a real writer, you're working all the time. I come from the '60s, when it was OK to be diverse. Record companies got very concerned about genres, and I think the public started thinking that way, too. The Internet has made it a lot more like how it was in the '60s."

Then again, Buffy's always had a healthy disregard for genre boxes and an expansive palette of influences to draw from, whether its music or visual art. She says that one discipline doesn't really inform the other, at least not in a conscious way.

"Same brain, different tools," she says, simply. "I got a lot of college degrees but it's not that high-falutin'. It's just about splashing paint, or words. Painting, music, dancing -- it's all play. What I like, I keep; what I don't, I forget. If we're made in the image of the Creator, then we're meant to be creative. I can bake a cake or learn a dance and be just as happy." (She's dancing a lot lately, taking private ballet lessons. "I've always dreamed of dancing. It's so beautiful to be involved with.")

Her playful approach means her work rarely feels like work. "Work is packing and getting in the airplane. Writing songs -- that's the fun part."

Though she ranks among the greatest protest singers of the 1960s, Sainte-Marie rarely sits down with a fully sketched-out idea. Songs come to her like dreams, ephemeral and fluid.

"Some of my songs are like Universal Soldier or any of the other songs people might call protest songs, others are just songs to dance to. Some are love songs."

When it comes to activism, however, she does have causes that are close to her heart. She says she's proud of Neil Young for sparking vital conversation about the environmental effect of Alberta's oilsands during January's contentious Honor The Treaties tour.

"I'm happy people are getting on board," she says. "You couldn't get people talking about it. Now, I want people to talk louder. It's a total disaster and (the boreal forest) is not coming back."

It's not lost on her that so many of her 1960s-era protest songs still resonate today.

"It's interesting, huh? To me, what that means, the world itself, people's ears, their knowledge base -- it's larger now. The demise of the music biz has helped a lot. I think people are connecting like they did in the '60s again. It was repressed for so long."

Indeed, Sainte-Marie knows what it's like to be censored; she was blacklisted in the U.S. by the administrations of presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, which sought to keep her music off the radio. She warns that we shouldn't take our right to free speech for granted.

"It can be gagged again," she says. "It's important people keep their eyes and ears open. That's what movements like Idle No More are all about."

To that end, Sainte-Marie has some advice for her fellow activists.

"First of all, don't burn out. You have to have the courage to say, 'I need sleep, I'm going home,'" she says. "And I think everyone needs to be aware we're still the same ol' human race and power struggles can establish themselves in even the best-intended circles. Take your voice to where it'll be most effective."
SOURCE

Buffy Sainte-Marie

March 4, 8 p.m.

West End Cultural Centre

Tickets $40 at Ticketmaster, Winnipeg Folk Festival Music Store and WECC