The 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival, a four-day foray into the world’s best music, took place during the last week of July 2007 at Prince’s Island Park, and the resulting noises and sounds made me wonder what on earth I’ve been doing with my ears my whole life. For posterity and for your perusal, I present to you, The 10 Most Amazing Performances of the 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival.

(All photos taken by Kevan Gilbert, unless otherwise noted)

10. Final Fantasy

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Gunn]

Owen Pallet (who performs as Final Fantasy) is not a solo violinist, he’s a one-man orchestra with shirt-tails and foot-pedals. The virtuosic kid has so much talent and innovation that it makes me want to scream, but that would interrupt his music – and that would be blasphemous.

I don’t know how long he’s been playing the violin, but it’s as if he reached the limit of training and theory and started thinking, “In what other ways can I use this violin? Can I pluck its strings? Can I play it lying flat, like I’m sawing a two-by-four? Can I yell at it? Can I sing while I play it? Can I use guitar looping pedals to make a symphony?”

The answer to all these questions was yes, and Pallet’s innovation was transcendent. He used dissonance only as necessary, careful to employ nausea and noise only to make the beautiful passages even prettier. His lush loops let him accompany himself, sometimes stepping up to his keyboard to introduce new layers, and regularly offering his voice as an additional instrument, his unassuming tenor giving way to a heavenly falsetto. Owen Pallet’s performances this weekend were groundbreaking tutorials on how to subvert the cold rules of reality to instead fulfill a fantasy.

9. Nathan

“Trans Am, take me away,” she sings, a careful, child’s voice from a mouth on a face that belongs on a living room figurine. Her name is Keri Latimer, and her two pom-poms of hair atop her head only add to the precocious music that sounds much, much too mature to belong to her. Evoking Eisley and the Innocence Mission from verse to bridge to chorus, the dark folk songs of Nathan disarm, unhand and enchant with startling force.

Harmonizing from stage-right with line-for-line precision is Shelley Marshall, whose black Johnny Greenwood locks obscure her face as she pumps a purple accordion in time to a shuffling beat. The beatkeeping is done by an aggressively talented percussionist who somehow manages to balance and play his guitar atop his drums while keeping rhythm with his feet, occasionally switching it up to blow breezy solos into a mounted harmonica. Meanwhile, the ironclad bassist keeps the band rocksteady with his grounded fretwork. This band, hailing from Winnipeg, is a lighthouse on the plains; they’re a unique prairie beacon that gave us some beautifully unified performances, and managed to upend all our best guesses as to who this mysterious “Nathan” really is.

8. Six String Nation

The arbitrarily chosen assortment of musicians that filled the side stage on Saturday morning were not what you’d call a natural fit. The ensemble was made up of four members from Lubo Alexendrov’s Bulgarian gypsy group, two Americana country-styled bluesmen on lap and pedal steels, an unseen bass player, very Canadian songster Hawksley Workman and his everpresent sidekick, Mr. Lonely (aka, Todd Lumley).

While many of the mixed-musician sessions that took place this weekend found the performers taking turns to perform their own songs, Six String Nation was an hour-long jam session. Each musician would get the chance to set the pace with a rhythm, a chord or a riff, and the other players would weave in and out with surprising dexterity. You’d be amazed, as we were, how well the pedal steel can get along with gypsy folk, or how a disco beat set by Hawksley on the drums can accompany a country dirge. This was beautiful improvisation, on-the-fly inspiration that came to define what it means to be folk.

7. Bettye Lavette

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jenniedo]

Since when do legendary soul divas from Detroit stop by to pander to placid white audiences on the Canadian prairies? The Calgary crowd was preoccupied with emitting friendly vibes and folksy expectations, and suddenly Bettye Lavette brought the funk. Her very serious, very incredible backing band set up an infectious groove, and with a Jackson-esque yelp into a wireless mic from backstage, Lavette strutted out in an all-white outfit to begin breaking our hearts en masse.

Out here in the Canadian west, the closest we come to funk and soul is odor and theology. I’d wager that after her show concluded and Lavette swaggered backstage again, at least half the audience pulled out their “to do” lists and wrote down, “Get some funk.” The Bettye Lavette concert was an astonishing explosion of Motown energy that made all of us wish we had even 10% of the rhythm, soul and sexuality that was bring broadcast from the stage. But in true soul form, the sensation was not called inadequacy, it was empowerment. Soul powah.

6. Sarah Slean

“I wore pink for you, Calgary,” teased Ms. Slean, striking a pose at the lone grand piano at the centre of the mainstage. Slean is both cute enough to get away with that, and talented enough to still be taken seriously playing the piano in a pink dress with pink heels. She’s got arms and legs as thin as two pairs of chopsticks, which is half sexy and half hellish, her shrunken frame making us all think about metabolism, anorexia, drugs and other things that make people skinny. Whatever experiences Slean has struggled through, they inform a dark, deep and soaring collection of melodies and words which must be some of the must beautiful songs ever written.

Sarah Slean’s rich, angelic alto never once missed her intended note. Her classically-trained fingers seemed to know the piano’s needs and wants, with five microphones dipped into the open grand’s torso to pick up and transmit every key played. Slean’s performance was transcendent and charming, intimate and explosive. With no accompanying band and no backup vocalists, Sarah Slean sat alone at the piano and provided one of the most pitch-perfect solo performances of the festival.

5. Rufus Wainwright

Surrounded by nine talented men in stripes, and himself decked out in an absurd costume of brown lederhosen, Rufus Wainwright was clearly in his element. Bursts of cinematic jazz from a brass section of three, caterwauling piano rhythms from Rufus himself when he wasn’t busy gesturing grandly at the mic, and surround-sound choir backup from all nine of his band members made for a lush, well-orchestrated sound. There was nothing but bliss and revelry from Rufus, whose little boy smile never left his face during the whole performance.

Rufus had the privilege of being Thursday’s closing act, and his Broadway-style performance sent people home to bed with a pleasant buzz of satisfaction. His decision to conclude the concert with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was brilliant; he had the whole crowd in a swaying singalong. While the Folk Fest was just another tour stop for Rufus, his presence was meaningful, and gave attendees a hopeful pride in the future of Canadian music, as well as for the rest of the Fest.

4. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings

Funk is hard work. Demonstration: the Dap Kings, possibly the hardest working band at the Festival. Their extremely tight dress code supplied an extremely tight sound, but their formal suits didn’t stop them from sweating the night away. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings poured their hearts into their soul — they did it with brass, they did it with class, and they did it with pure, unstoppable funk.

Sharon Jones herself is from the hometown of James Brown, and it seems like soul runs freely in that city. “Lock up your sons!” the guitarist (moonlighting as MC) declared, before Jones overtook the stage like freshly freed prisoner, wild eyes ready to woo you, voice ready to vindicate you for the sin of being a boring-ass white person. During the performance, she taught the crowd how to dance (instructions, demo AND danceable music included), and her capable MC/guitarist did a phenomenally classy job making us all feel good. Besides Bettye Lavette and the New Orleans Social Club, no other show came close to showing off the sheer muscle and discipline of the fabulous Sharon Jones and her Dap Kings.

3. New Orleans Social Club

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Digg Doug]

The very existence of the New Orleans Social Club makes me want to permanently disown irony. While many bands (let’s say, Tokyo Police Club, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and other similarly-named groups) choose names that “ironically” have nothing to do with their group affiliation or place of origin, the New Orleans Social Club is overwhelmingly, breathtakingly, unapologetically legitimate.

Consisting of some of New Orlean’s most accomplished, elite instrumentalists, these five black musicians got together after Hurricane Katrina claimed their equipment, their homes, and some of the city’s best music venues. The NOSC play a devastatingly cool blend of funk, jazz and blues that is so gritty, it exfoliates your heels. Check it: piano man Henry Butler is blind, and lead guitarist Leo Nocentelli unleashes blistering solos upon your head while staring you down from behind his foreboding shades. The performance by the New Orleans Social Club was probably the most unexpectedly awesome showdown of the whole weekend.

2. Hawksley Workman

Mr. Workman dispensed three eclectic performances this weekend, and none of them ended with the audience still sitting down. From Hawksley’s warbling “Oooo”s to the listeners’ adoring “ahhh”s and the eventual standing Os, these performances featured Hawksley’s expert manipulation of vowels and consonants into blistering, poetic rock and roll.

On Friday night’s mainstage, Hawklsey’s brisk performance mingled with purple stage lights, blue twilight and his delicious backing band The Wolves, and steadily coerced the frightened crowd into believing that his brazen songs really were as colourful and tasty as they claimed to be. Tracks from his latest album (a sedate, folksy affair called “Treeful of Starling”) blossomed from bleak saplings into living, breathing, walking forests, and songs from his older albums found themselves injected with unexpected interludes, alternate words and surprise endings that demonstrated Hawksley’s restless, experimental spirit.

1. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Digg Doug]

Let me set the scene for you: On the far right, we have a black man with natty dreads in a pirate hat, holding a beastly-looking guitar with yellow and red buttons, held together with electrical tape. His name is Futureman, and the device he is clutching is an electronic drum kit that he invented himself. He plays it with one hand while holding a drumstick in the other to play the kit, standing up.

To his left is the saxophonist, a bald man with a pointed goatee who managed to play two saxophones at the same time, different notes harmonizing with each other, his glowing red head about to explode.

On the far left, we have a man named Victor Wooten, who has been called the world’s bass player. The concert ended with a solo from Wooten that spanned over five minutes, involved his hands warping into impossibly twisted configurations, moving so rapidly over the fretboard they were virtually invisible (all the while expelling notes in a sequence that was still completely awesome to listen to), and then concluded with Wooten spinning his guitar in a circle around his neck while continuing to play.

And in the centre, holding it all together, alternating between a regular banjo and a purple MIDI banjo with horns, was Bela Fleck himself, the most normal looking man onstage. Dressed in jeans and a red New York t-shirt, Fleck defines “unassuming,” and yet was likely the most prodigious player of the performance. His lightning-quick picking joined with the over-the-top eccentricity exuded by his bandmates, creating a show so terrifyingly wonderful that the standing ovation would not go silent for a full five minutes after the lights went out.

My wife Kendra and I have been married since August 2006. In the process of combining our respective incomes, bank accounts and shopping priorities, it quickly became clear that if we didn’t develop a system for managing our money, we would very quickly not have any. So after some brainstorming, some inspiration, and a whole lot of trial and error, we finally put together a budget system that has saved us (literally) thousands of dollars. Since it’s worked so well for us, and a few of our friends have asked for the details, I decided to write this up so we could share it with other people needing new tips for managing money.

Whether you’re single or married, this budget thing is ridiculously useful. It has helped us pay back our debts, stay out of debt, put aside serious savings, and it helps us manage our money without accidentally overspending. And even though we called it the “newlyweds” budget, it will work just as well if you’re single, or have been married for years.

Brief Overview:

1. Figure out how much you make each month, in total.
2. Define your Obligations, Needs and Wants.
3. Assign limits that match your income and lifestyle.
4. Keep your receipts, and add them up each week.
5. Review once a month.

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1. Figure out how much you make each month, in total.

Keep your pay stubs for a month, and add up how much your and your spouse/partner pull in by the end of the month, after tax and deductions. If either of your paycheques vary because of shiftwork or overtime, an average will be fine.

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2. Define your Obligations, Needs and Wants.

The reason budgeting exists is to help you spend money on purpose. Part of that is knowing what you need and want to spend your money on in the first place. The best way to start is by separating your payments into three categories: Obligations, Needs and Wants. Don’t worry about filling in the numbers yet, just figure out what payments you make in the course of a month.

Obligations include bills you can’t stop paying. These include:

• Rent or mortgage payments
• Utilities bills, condo fees
• Car payments
• Debts, student loans repayments, etc.
• Savings, RRSP contributions, mutual funds, etc.
• Charitable giving

One of the most important things to consider for this category is Savings. Most people only put aside savings if they’ve got some cash leftover at the end of the month, but putting it aside as an obligation – that is, skimming it right off the top of your paycheque before you even get the chance to spend it - is extremely helpful. In fact, we’d say it’s necessary.

Needs include stuff you pretty much need in order to get by. These include:

• Groceries
• Gas
• Household goods like soap, toilet paper, etc.
• Dates

Yes, as cheesy as it is, my wife and I include “dates” under this category, since we figure spending time together each week is more than just a “want,” it’s a priority. (This is the intermission, where you can vomit if you wish.)

Wants are the things you can do without, but help make life a little funner. Talk with your spouse about what kind of items you want to include in this area of your budget. For us, it includes entertainment, clothing and spending cash. Of course, as newlyweds who probably aren’t making a ton of money, this is the area where a little bit of sacrifice is important. For instance, you might need to cut back on how often you eat at restaurants or go for drinks with friends.

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3. Assign limits that match your income and lifestyle.

Once you’ve clarified your Obligations, Needs and Wants, you get to decide how much money you’ll be spending on each category. It’s important to customize it with two things in mind: how much money is available, and what kind of things are important to you. You might need a few drafts to get it right, and it will definitely require a little guesswork the first time you create this. Don’t worry, we always end up modifying this a little each month, as gas prices change, holidays come around, and so forth. Just grab a piece of paper, write down each item in your O-N-W list, and starting putting down numbers.

The important thing is that by the end of it all, it all ends up being equal to (or more ideally, less than) the amount you earn each month.

Here is a fictional example of what a completed Obligations, Needs and Wants list might look like:

As you can see, there’s a “leftover buffer” of $556. This is extremely useful, and you and your spouse should decide what to do with it. You can readjust your numbers so it’s all worked into your budget. Or, you can do what we do: use it as an emergency fund for when unexpected and bad things happen – say, your dishwasher breaks, or your blinds need replacing. Every couple months or so, once the buffer has accumulated in the bottom of our bank account, we scoop up a thousand dollars or so, and invest it in savings again.

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4. Keep your receipts, and add them up each week.

A budget is useless if you spend outside of it. You need to have a way to make sure your spending is on track – besides seeing the credit card bill at the end of the month, that is.

You’ll need a chart to help you track your spending. If you hate details and administrative work, this might be kind of annoying, but it’s still important. We’ve created one that you are welcome to download and fill in your own numbers with, or you can create your own. Here’s what to do with it:

• Customize the chart for your budget. *
• Print it off and put it somewhere in your house that’s private but accessible.
• Keep your receipts.
• At the end of each week, spend 15 minutes with your spouse, and add up all the receipts from that week for each category. Make a note of how much you overspent or underspent.
• Throw out your receipts after each budget session (no reason to keep them, unless you’re returning something or submitting it for tax purposes.)

Doing that every week, and adjusting your spending accordingly, ensures that you will always have money in the bank.

* More on customizing the chart for your budget.

Once you download the Excel file, you’ll need to make it fit your budget.

• Make sure the number of days on the left hand side reflects the current month. Grab your Obligations, Needs & Wants list. What categories will you be tracking? Type in their names at the top of each section. You only need to track categories where purchase amounts fluctuate with each transaction (groceries, gas, etc,). No need to track rent, as it’s a flat amount each month.
• Grab a calculator, and figure out how much you can spend each week. You can do this by dividing the month total in each category by the number of days in the month. Multiply by seven - that’s your number for each week. For the last week, the one containing an irregular number of days – you do the month.

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5. Review once a month.

At the end of the month, evaluate how the month went. How much did you over or under-spend? In what categories do the limits need to be raised or lowered? Were you able to live and eat comfortably? Are there any specific goals you’re saving for? (A new car, a bedroom suite, a new TV, etc.)

Following these tips have helped us SO much. Each month, we’ve come in around $20 - $40 over or under our budget, meaning that our spending is almost exactly on target. We don’t have any credit card debt, we’re steadily paying back a lingering student loan, and we’re investing and saving plenty of money each month. It’s awesome. It takes a bit of discipline, but it’s definitely worth it.

This absurdly academic essay spends ten pages answering the question we’ve all been dying to know: who would win in a fight between a penguin and a lemur? By analyzing fighting styles, weaponry, environmental and behavioural differences, I suggest the likely combat outcome between a prosimian and a sphenisciforme. Please enjoy consuming this essay with your eyes & brain. (more…)