Date/Time:
Friday, November 8, 2019
8:00 pm - 10:30 pm
Location:
St. John’s United Church
Barry Luft and Tim Rogers began performing a potpourri of Canadian music back in 1974. In 1983 they released an LP entitled “Songs of the Iron Trail: The Canadian Railroad Experience in Song” which was a pioneer album in the Canadian heritage music movement. This album of Canadian railway songs has won multiple awards including, in 2008, the Porcupine Award for best Classic Canadian Album. Since the LP’s re-release as a CD in 2007, Barry and Tim have been performing in numerous outlets throughout Alberta and British Columbia.
Barry is a multi-instrumental performer (banjo, guitar, autoharp, harmonica), currently working as a full time singer and musician. He has released two solo CDs and a banjo instruction book. Tim is a writer and researcher in Canadian musical traditions who also plays guitar and sings.
Together, Barry and Tim offer a range of material. Humourous tales, songs drawn from Canadian prairie traditions. tunes about building the railway, historical events, nostalgic pinings for the “old days”, all combine to paint a vibrant portrait of the central place of music in the Canadian imagination.
The predominant mood of their songs is sardonic (very Canadian) sympathetic or mournful—not boastful, worshipful, muscle-bound, or grandiose. The songs are calm, measured … appealing to a sense of decency and sympathy in our fellows, not prevailing in epic struggles.
In a sense, Barry and Tim’s music is a throwback to the old days (“we’re old fashioned and proud of it,” they’ve been heard to say). But in these tunes, that work so hard to preserve the local and the Canadian, there is something that transcends current trends and dips into that great font of shared experience.
This is the old Canadian folk music revival at its best, and isn’t it worth listening to! (both quotes from Shelley Posen in Canadian Folk Music, 42.1, 2008)