There’s Something in the Wind

When last I spoke to Shauna Walters in these pages, it was November 2020 and she was coming off a successful series of summer concerts, staged in her own backyard.

I knew (because we’ve talked about it) that her goal was to one day launch a full-fledged spring festival so I was really pleased when I opened my inbox one day last month to an email about the “soft launch” of her Stone & Sand & Sea & Sky Coastal ARTS Festival.

Walters is kicking things off with a single event—a concert at the Savoy Theatre in Glace Bay on June 18 called “There’s Something In the Wind”—but what an event. Hosted by Bette MacDonald, the concert will feature Mary Jane Lamond, Jenn Sheppard, Isabella Samson, Jordan Musycsyn, Emma Stevens, Nicole Deveau, Zion Stephens, Suite 115, Janice Alcorn and Sam Moon, joined by Second Wind Community Concert Band with conductor Laura Mercer and guest musicians Scott Macmillan, Andrew Alcorn, Rowan Fitzgerald, Stephen Muise, Emily Dingwall and Fred Lavery.

I spoke to Walters last week and she told me that she had dusted off her festival idea when COVID hit in 2020 and her work in the music industry, which has been her field since the ’90s, suddenly dried up. She used her downtime to plan various iterations of the festival: “I have a nine-day festival, I have a five-day festival, I have a three-day festival,” she told me, explaining that her initial thought was to “go big or stay home.”

But after “much discussion” with her partners, including Destination Cape Breton, the municipality and the province, she said she realized that, COVID aside, there “wasn’t going to be the will and the money there to start a big festival.” So late last year, she made the decision to “go with one show” to “test the waters” and “get the branding out there.”

 

Walters says her personal interest has always been in the singer/songwriter tradition, which is well represented in the lineup, but she wanted to produce a “really impactful show” for the festival’s debut—something with a bit more “oomph”—and that’s when she thought of the Second Wind Community Concert Band.

She’d first encountered them a couple of years ago, when she was stage-managing a show they were playing at Centre 200 to mark the 150th anniversary of Sydney Academy:

…I was not really very familiar with Second Wind. Like, I knew they existed [but] I can’t honestly say at that point whether I had seen them or not [and] I was just really blown away by them. And not just blown away by their abilities, because they are a very talented group of people, but there’s just so much soul there…It’s a real community of people. It’s such a broad age-range of people, you know, there’s students right up to octogenarians and there’s all levels of musicality there, there’s some people who could probably be playing professionally if they had chosen to do that and there’s other folks who may never have been professional musicians, but they’re so passionate about it and they work so hard and it’s one of those things where, collectively, they’re just so good.

She approached Laura Mercer, the band’s director/conductor, who agreed to take part and as a result, says Walters:

…we have Jenn Sheppard, doing an original song, we have Jordan Musycsyn doing an original song…Sam Moon doing an original song, so there’s still lots of the singer/songwriter tradition in the show as well, there’s some well-loved classics, we’ve got the students from NSCC music arts, that’s Erin O’Brien, Steve MacIntyre and Nik Macdonald, and they are doing the song that they wrote during the pandemic…but all of these are going to be backed by a 40-plus member…”house band” if you will.

Second Wind will be joined by musicians like Stephen Muise on piano, Fred Lavery on acoustic guitar, Emily Dingwall on bass and Scott Macmillan on electric guitar. Macmillan, she says, has also arranged several of the numbers in the show:

[T]hat’s the other really neat part, is all the arranging that had to be done of all this music because it all had to be arranged and scored for a concert band…There was a handful of pieces that the band already had in their repertoire that are going to be worked into the show, but the majority of the show are all new arrangements.

An added bonus, says Walters, is that the Second Wind is all Cape Bretoners and so—with a couple of exceptions—is the lineup for the June 18 show. She says this is partly due to COVID and her reluctance to get involved in the expense and logistics of organizing travel, but it’s also because we have so much talent here, it’s possible to produce a “powerful show” without going off-island:

When I thought about who I wanted in the show I was really just looking back at some of my favorite artists that I’ve worked with over the years and whose music I love and whose voices I love, but as the lineup was starting to come together I’m like, “Oh my god this is so cool,” because it is such a lovely balance between emerging artists who are just really starting their careers and our rock-solid, well established artists.

The show will also feature elements of video and abstract art courtesy of a collaboration with students from NSCC’s Applied Media and Communication Arts program.

 

I asked Walters about the name of the festival and she told me it came from a Rose Vaughan Trio song and then she told me a good story about it:

I think it would have been around 2016, that’s the year that the song, the original Rose Vaughan Trio song, “Stone and Sand” was re-recorded. Cathy Porter, who is a founding member of the Rose Vaughan Trio, brought some artists back into the studio…Rose Cousins, Joel Plaskett and his dad Bill, Dave Gunning, Mary Jane Lammond, …Rose Vaughan herself and Cathy, and they did a new version of “Stone and Sand,” and there was a new refrain added, oh it’s just a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful song…

So, it was so funny because that year…Cathy was at Celtic Colors, and we were chatting one day, and I had no idea that this had just recently happened, that the song had been re-recorded…[and] I said, you know, this idea has been cooking in my head for awhile, I’ve had several festival ideas over the years, but the one that I’m kind of focusing on right now, the title of it is around your song from the ’90s. And her jaw kind of dropped and she said “You’re not going to believe what we did this year.”

Rose Vaughan gave her blessing to the use of the lyric and Porter not only approved, she got involved with the festival. Besides helping Chris Palmer of Symphony Nova Scotia arrange “Stone and Sand,” Walters said Porter has created “a really special number for the show,” one that involves “almost the entire cast” as well as “one more artist” who will be added to the lineup in the coming weeks.

I would tell you more, but that’s all Walters was sharing for now about this mystery act.

There’s Something in the Wind presented by Stone & Sand & Sea & Sky Coastal ARTS Festival takes place Saturday, June 18, 7:30 PM at Glace Bay’s Savoy Theatre. Tickets are $50 (plus box office fees) and may be purchased at the Savoy Theatre Box Office or via the festival website at stonesandseasky.com.

And Wendy Bergfeldt of CBC’s Mainstreet Cape Breton attended a rehearsal and you can listen to her report here.