Live Music Weekend
It looks like a dandy weekend for live music in Edmonton, so let’s start there.
Tonight you’ve got a Christan Hansen & The Autistics all ages show at The ARTery with Paperplanes and Dragonboats, so that’ll be good. The Blame-Its, The Afterbeat, and Wildrose Orchestra, are at New City Legion…Over at Wunderbar you can hear Teen Daze with Oh No Yoko and Sugarglider…Craig Cardiff is at the Haven Social Club with David Blair and Erica Viegas… The Open Sky Music Festival isn’t until the end of August, but Souljah Fyah and Jeff Morris are getting things going this weekend
Saturday night is no less good, with The Weber Brothers, Chris Carmichael, and Lyra Brown at the Haven Social Club…Xplosionation, The Party Martyrs, and All The King’s Men, at Brixx… The Weekend Kids, Old Wives, and Freshman Years at Wunderbar…and The Consonance, Noisy Colours, whiskey wagon, all over at New City Legion.
Sunday (yeah, we’re still going on just music) there’s the Whyte Avenue Street Sale (which means the street will be closed to traffic between 105 and 103 Streets) and SOS Fest playing music on two stages all day long…Sunday night ends the weekend with a giant kick to the face of awesome with The Joe and Doug Hoyer kicking off their national tour at Wunderbar, with Mikey Maybe.
Whew.
We also have a bunch of festivals and the such.
Down in Hawrelak Park you can catch two of Shakespeare’s finest plays during the Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Heading into the Indy we’ve got Race Week Edmonton (which lasts longer than a week). The Edmonton International Street Performers Festival is on at Churchill Square. The Edmonton & Northern Alberta Historic Festival also begins this weekend (which can get you into some cool old buildings).
For the dogs, and dog lovers, you can head up to 118 Avenue on Sunday for Avenue Goes to the Dogs, put on by the Eastwood Community League.
If all of that great Edmonton music and festivals isn’t enough…
Cirque du Soleil’s “Dralion” is at Rexall Place. There’s a Campus Community Garden Open House, Saturday 11-2, at the U of A’s campus community garden. The Edmonton Eskimos will fight, fight, fight on at home to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats
Oh, and if you’re not doing anything at about 9pm on Sunday you can watch the last episode of our ShawTV series, the edmontonian presents, on Shaw cable channel 10. (It’ll be on YoutTube, Livestream, and iTunes shortly after.)
SOS Fest returns
Edmonton’s three four day music festival is back in Old Strathcona this summer, and they’ve begun looking for musicians.
If you’re a singer, or in a band you can apply to play SOS Fest right at their website.
I’m pretty excited that Old Strathcona will again be full of live music. Last summer’s festival was a blast and I can only hope this year is even better.
I guess it’s time to dust off the edmontonian’s SOS Fest Tumblr and get it ready for another weekend of live, (mostly) local music. Beware the Tumbeasts!
Snowbound Events
Sure, that snow is flying and it’s supposed to get cold. But you follow the Long John Index and are prepared.
The music is IN the piano?
And, this being Edmonton and all, I know you’re ready to head out into winter and have some fun. This weekend you could go up to Alberta Avenue and kick off Edmonton’s Winter Light Festival with the Deep Freeze Byzantine Winter Festival. They’ve also got some indoor events when you need to warm up.
If you’re not all that concerned with warming up, how about you take your pants off and ride the LRT. Yeah, that’s right.
The Oil Kings are home to the Regina Pats on Saturday.
In music…MacEwan is showing off its musical student talent…95.7 The Sound (Edmonton’s newest radio station, and fast-becoming a favourite of mine) begins an Edmonton series at The Haven Social Club…The Haven’s got a good show Saturday too, with Daniel Moir, Trevor Tchir, and Greg Amundsen. BTW, Haven is now serving up Pharo’s pizza. Samantha and Emily Schultz play the Blue Chair Cafe (we saw Samantha last summer at SOS Fest, she’s really good on the guitar)…One Way State is at the Pawn Shop…and on Sunday, Jenie Thai brings a jazzier style to Blues on White.
They will not be undersold
Ah, Teddy's. It's like it's still 30 years ago.
I have an apology for you, Edmonton.
Falklands is so much better than my shrimp boat-filled story lead you to believe.
I knew they were good. I’ve been listening to their album non-stop since Mark Budd handed it over.
But after seeing them live at Teddy’s on the weekend…wow.
I undersold this great Edmonton band, and for that I am sorry. That was a show, Saturday!
After the jump…some images of the evening. (more…)
Troubadour Tuesday
After a night of good times and good cake, I’m looking for something a little more low-key this evening.
Sounds like Brixx has just the thing.
They call it Troubadour Tuesdays, and tonight’s guitar-wielding singer is our old SOSFest friend Kaley Bird.
Alright, we don’t actually know Kaley that well. But she was one of the organizers of Edmonton’s newest music festival, and we like her. So there.
Ooh, and tacos are on special tonight too.
p.s. Speaking of SOSFest, the 2011 version is set, so mark you calendars and update your borkberries.
We heard your SOS
(Update: I’ve added a video story, and slightly altered the wording of this post from it’s first version Monday.)
We’re glad we did hear that SOS.
SOS Fest rocked Whyte Avenue this weekend. 150+ bands and musicians…20+ venues…wow.
We were talking about it for three days at a special “on assignment” blog.
I really enjoyed Dead Ghosts, out of Vancouver. They were probably my favourite band of the festival. The Joe tried to tear Wunderbar apart with his set, as part of an Old Ugly showcase. Cadence Weapon blew the roof off the Pawn Shop. And The Sherry-Lee Wisor trio kicked things off for me, setting the bar quite high.
I also uploaded a lot of my photos to my Flickr account, and added them to the edmontonian Flickr pool.
Plus, a few of my interviews from the weekend are now playing at our YouTube channel. (The story on the festival – embedded above – is also at our YouTube now.)
There are more photos, videos, links, reviews, and thoughts at our SOS Fest blog.
We’ll always take your own stories, experiences, photos and videos.
Check Twitter for more comments and updates from people who went to the shows, and played, this weekend.
That's Gregg Beever buying a CD from SOS performer Carrie Hryniw. At Funky Pickle, of all places.
Photos! Video! Words! Music!
We are having a great time at SOS Fest.
That's Forestry rocking the Black Dog right there.
Hold onto your potatoes
We’re right into the heart of Edmonton summer now, jam-packed with festivals. This is our time to shine, our time to live it up.
This weekend’s choices are plentiful. (And I realized, after I started linking, that events from ShareEdmonton and YegLive.ca are integrated today. Just mixing it up.)
Tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday there’s the SOS Fest, all over Old Strathcona.
We think it’s going to be so much fun, so many bands and musicians in lots of venues, that we’ve set up a separate blog just for the SOS. We’ll post through the weekend (which is not something we ever do) over there and wrap it all up here, Monday. Let us know who we should check out, which venues we should experience, and show us where the most fun is happening. We’ll see you on the street.
Oh, and Sunday also sees Whyte Avenue shut down for its annual street sale, plus two stages of live music for the SOS Fest. (I told you it was the place to be this weekend.)
Still in the neighbourhood, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is playing at the Walterdale.
In sports, there’s the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands, Sunday. Bars will be busy, I’m sure. The Capitals and Prospects are on the ball diamonds, and the Eskimos are home to the Montreal Alouettes.
The Edmonton International Street Performers Festival is back at Churchill Square.
Doors Open Edmonton and the Edmonton & Northern Alberta Historic Festival are going to take you into buildings you don’t normally get to explore, places sometimes unseen, and historic spots worth visiting. Including CKUA and Alley Kat brewery in Edmonton. Plus, there’s a walking tour of the Highlands neighbourhood.
That’s not to be confused with the Highland Gathering, at Fort Edmonton Park.
If you’re swinging by the Downtown Farmers’ Market you’re probably going to see the All Ford Classic Show.
Down in Hawrelak Park, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival continues with their runs of MacBeth and Much ado about nothing.
In music not related to the SOS Fest, OK GO is at the Starlite tonight. Raygun Cowboys play New City. And Streetheart, yes Streetheart, will be rocking the Century Casino.
The Art Gallery of Alberta is going late-night with another Refinery party. The Valley Zoo is also going for something with an after-hours feel, hosting ZooFest. The Bissell Centre is holding a Block Party of the Century too.
Transcend Coffee is putting their baristas to the test, Sunday, to see who deserves to compete in the Prairie Regional Baristas Championship. The latte foam will be flying.
If you’re heading toward Victoria Hill, just off 116 Street, Sunday, I hope you’re driving a soapbox racer.
And you can always see a movie.
LYVE on Whyte
In case you missed out the first floppity jillion times we brought it up, this weekend is Edmonton’s first ever SOS Fest (we are very excited)!
But! that is not the only exciting news in Old Strathcona. This is also the inaugural weekend for a spanking new music venue on Whyte Avenue. (Did you see what I did there, with the linking and the segues and the seamlessness?)
Yup, LYVE on Whyte is the latest bar to launch in the Whyte Avenue area (8111 105 Street NW). Their grand opening was this past Wednesday, and according to LYVE on Whyte’s Rob Ferguson, the launch event, featuring Jay Sparrow and the Wheat Pool, “was awesome. It couldn’t have been any better.”
He adds that folks were lined up outside for good chunk of the night, which bodes well for business.
You guys may remember some of the former bars that graced this same spot, like the Urban Lounge, or more recently, Dirty Pretty (Let’s just add those to the list of now-defunct bars I can reference to make me sound old. Remember when Lucky 13 was Rebar? Remember when the Starlite Room was the Bronx? ).
I ask Ferguson why the location is being changed from a nightclub to a live music venue.
“The way that nightclubs go, they’re hot when they’re new, and then they cool down,” he says. “We actually wanted to be a venue right from the get-go.”
You might remember the Urban Lounge’s roof collapse back in 2007. After that, the bar moved to its new, but sadly short-lived location down to 105 St and Whyte.
Ferguson explains it seemed like the wrong time to launch another live music venue.
“We didn’t really think it was right,” he says.
But things have changed! LYVE on Whyte is now open for business, and patrons can expect to find live original music on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and cover bands on Fridays and Saturdays. You can also expect to see an original traveling act about once a month.
You can catch popular local cover band Mustard Smile playing this Friday and Saturday as part of SOS Fest.
Battlefield Headlines
Good morning, Edmonton.
I watched Battlefield Earth last night.
Ugh.
from the Edmonton Journal:
Region unites against bitumen exports
Winter takes toll on pine beetle
Swann’s trumpet call for foes to join forces falls flat (Sharing is for suckers.)
from the Edmonton Sun:
Edmonton Indy on Octane? (Do we have a new race promoter? Could taxpayers be off the hook, next year?)
from Metro Edmonton:
Province launches grant for organ donors (Will some cash help you donate?)
from The Canadian Press:
Province to cover teachers’ pay hike
Prentice says there is support for Alberta/Texas pipeline (The Premier is asking for a little Clinton help.)
from 630CHED/iNews880:
Albertans pay HST (You thought you’d get away without paying.)
AEG feels disrespect from mayors comments
Mandel returns from Shanghai (And he’s got a little buddy he’s only calling “Short Round.”
from CTV Edmonton:
New arena downtown, major reno to Rexall — is there a third option? (As we heard yesterday, there could even be a fourth option.)
And we got our new Governor General!
from Vue Weekly:
That’s the way the city crumbles (Protecting our older buildings. Or not.)
from SEE Magazine:
Stabbing was a shock – But sadly common (Can this weekend’s SOS Fest help give Whyte Avenue a clean start from the drink and fight, drink and drink and fight crowd?)
You know, speaking of SOS Fest, we’re going to be all over that. Like, really all over it. So, let us know who we should check out. If you’re going to be around help us out with some photos and band recommendations/reviews.
