Drifting Down Memory Lane at the Calgary Folk Festival

Last year after the Festival, a colleague said to me: "The Calgary Folk Festival changes people." He was commenting on his parents who had been given a free day pass by Charlie Musselwhite and then had not appeared again until midnight Sunday.

I don't think the Festival experience actually changes people. It invites people to be open to something innate in the human spirit and we accept the invitation.

Daniel J. Letivin in "This Is Your Brian On Music: The Science Of A Human Obsession" postulates that each of us is an expert listener. Eventually he presents the actual science that what makes a Mozart, Joni Mitchell, Verdi or J. S. Bach is 10,000 hours devoted to the craft. Almost every human has those 10,000 hours of listening to music (my children excluded, but I am correcting that with my granddaughter).

My theory is that the Calgary Folk Music Festival is a commune built by expert listeners for expert listeners. We each recognize we are "home" as soon as we hear the first chords drift across the field, and each year the connection gets stronger. We know we are there to simply revel in listening to some great music and to discover new paths on the music journey because the artists each have the fruits of their own 10,000 hours to share with us. An example - the year that all the musically literate 20 somethings were out to hear Feist, Broken Social Scene, etc., Jeff Healy appeared with his Jazz Wizards band. They were playing the jazz from the 1920's. All the young crowd were rapidly enticed into dancing and shaking booty. And I chuckled, because their great grandparents would have been jiving to this music, much to the horror of their great-great grandparents!

And while I regret that I will not get to hear Michael Franti and Spearhead perform this year, it is only a regret. I am more than happy to get on with listening to everybody else and discovering some new magic from an unexpected artist.

Let the ceremonies begin!