Friday marks the first of the full-day experiences, opening up all the other stages than the Main Stage. Unfortunately, due to an emergency, I couldn’t get down to the festival until about three p.m. so I missed Dawes’ concert, but there was still plenty of shows that I was pumped to see. I arrived late to a workshop with Chuck Prophet, Mountain Man, M. Ward, and a member of Dawes (so pretty much every folky artist I wanted to see) and I got to see M. Ward play one song before he left in the middle of the workshop to catch a plane elsewhere. I didn’t notice much, but apparently the ladies of Mountain Man were really drowsy from arriving in the middle of the night. They still sounded rather charming.
Polaris-nominee Dan Mangan, pictured above, kicked off the Main Stage for the night rather explosively, with what I think has been the loudest Main Stage show this year so far. Mangan and his band must have consciously cranked their amps up, because before their last song, Mangan said that he had heard complaints of the sound not being loud enough. He yelled out to the crowd if they could hear him, and then he tore through the security gate with a microphone and his guitar in tow, and started singing in the midst of the tarps.
Earlier on, at Little Stage on the Prairie, Transistor 66’s Scott Nolan was playing a rather awesome and laid-back set, chock full of stories between songs. I previously hadn’t given his bourbon-fuelled songs about heartbreak and highways a chance, but the festival was definitely a good time to check him out. He apparently played an amazing workshop with Dan Mangan earlier on that afternoon, which I kept hearing about into the evening.
But the surprise of the night was certainly Omar Souleyman. He’s Syria’s dance maestro, and he got the crowd going insane. Odd, considering his stage presence consisted of three moves; singing, clapping, and slowly reaching out to the crowd as if to say, “More!” His beats are an adaptation of dabke dance music, but they sound like an MC-505 set to explode, with arpeggiated bass lines and synthesized ouds. Considering that I saw both the Balanced Records crew and Chris Jaax from Prairie Fire Tapes, this guy was bringing something pretty fresh to the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
