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Images from the third and final day of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival on Sunday, July 17.
The 2011 Vancouver Folk Music Festival came and went this past weekend.
Here are some photo highlights.
B.C. musician C.R. Avery's beat box and harmonica sounds and the hip hop lyrics of Sudanese singer Emmanuel Jal brought the Vancouver Folk Music Festival to a close Sunday.
Avery's lively set at Stage 3, which took place just before Jal's festival finale, drew a large crowd as he capped off an evening of impressive performances on the side stage.
Backed by a band including three vocalists and two violin players, Avery offered up a medley of sounds as he switched being spoken word, beat boxing, harmonica playing and singing.
Avery's performance came after a crowd-rousing set by Oakland duo Beats Antique, who had the whole audience up and dancing.
San Francisco duo Beats Antique took over Stage 3 this evening as the whole audience erupted into dance.
Using samples, drums, fiddle and other instruments, the two musicians hit the crowd with a powerful wave of dubstep/gypsy/world music sound that had most crowd members on their feet and jumping.
Some prepared folk festers wore rain boots, and others danced barefoot, as the ground turned into a muddy skating rink.
As the crowd cheered, the duo donned zebra and bear masks for their final number, and invited several crowd members up on stage to dance, wearing penguin, zebra and other animal masks.
The band seemed genuinely surprised when the audience roared so loudly with approval that they came back for an encore.
Rain didn't keep Folk Fest fans away today as Kathryn Calder took to Stage 3 in the early evening.
Calder, who has sung in groups including the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine, sang songs from her 2010 record "Are you my Mother?." Switching between guitar and keyboards, Calder was backed on vocals by three other band members, making for a full harmony sound reminiscent of Vancouver's the New Pornographers.
Calder, dressed in polka dots, exclaimed "oh no!" in the middle of a song as the rain began to pick up and people covered up in ponchos. But the weather didn't thin out the packed audience at Stage 3.
Mayor Gregor Robertson said he was there for the Jayhawks when the Straight ran into him earlier in the day. He was probably wetting his pants like any other fan over something close enough to a dream set when the reformed band finally hit the main stage at the end of VFMF's day two.
People were inexplicably sitting down for Buck 65's set on Stage 5 this afternoon. Lots and lots of very enthusiastic people, mind you. Mr. Rich Terfry was as solidly entertaining as he ever is, and offered up an intriguing version of Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire" after bringing on his friend Marnie Herald to help with "Gee Wiz".
James Cotton's Superharp didn't disappoint, but then, the approximately 200 year old bluesman is a bit of a legend. He played with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters if you need some bona fides, and his band cooked through numbers like "Midnight Caught Me Cryin'" and "Rocket 88". Ninety percent of the turkeys out there playing blues music get it wrong. The other 10 percent sound like this.
Let's get this out of the way: the weather sucks here at day two of the Vancouver Folk Fest (although there appears to be a warm sunny glow all of a sudden outside the media tent. Nope, it's gone). James Cotton Superharp is about to kick off the evening's ministrations on the main stage pictured above, with its sea of drenched tarps in front.
Relentless fucking radioactive rain or not, the numbers look pretty good for the venerable festival, and so far, Saturday has been stuffed with highlights like CR Avery and Kelly Joe Phelps heading up A Touch of the Blues, and Mary Gauthier and Rosanne Cash leading the charge at Sisters In Song.
But the main course has just started over in tarp world and I'm outta here.
Performers at the first day of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival on Friday, July 15 included Justin Townes Earle, Gillian Welch and Joel Plaskett.
