Celtic Colours Glow Again

A well-regarded friend once came close to putting me off the road with the astounding disclosure that she doesn’t like CBC Radio – it’s for old people she asserted. My friend – let’s call her Pam to spare her from risk of vigilantism – also prefers rap music to opera and has zero interest in history. Well you know the old cliché: different strokes for different folks.

Wendy Bergfeld, Kyle Mischiek

Around the old Big Bras d’Or cabin CBC Radio enjoys far greater affection than Pam has for our national broadcaster. That regard is burnished bright after a week of Celtic Colours music at Knox church in Baddeck.  Each year during the locally cherished Colours music festival the local CBC program Mainstreet hosts daily sessions in the little church on Grant Street. Jan and are among the loyal coterie who year after year arrive early to grab a front pew and enjoy what unfolds – traditional music from far and wide and Mainstreet’s host Wendy Bergfeldt’s conversations with the artists.

This year’s lineup included musicians from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Scotland and Ireland, North Carolina and Louisiana – and of course a host of Canadians too, many from Cape Breton. We sat close enough to read labels and count whiskers. This year, typically, the music was delivered not just by fiddle, guitar and piano but nyckelharpa, uilleann pipe and banjo too. We marveled at the depth and range of talent on display; I felt freshly unworthy at never having invested effort in learning to play anything, neither harmonica nor tin-whistle.

Tim Edey

There was something to like about all the music we heard; I was particularly drawn to England’s Tim Edey, Irishman John Doyle and South Carolinians Dirk Powell and Riley Baugus. And the young Cape Bretoners Maxim Cormier and Kyle Mischiek, the latter a hip-hop artist of all things who left many in the assembly misty-eyed with his evocation of Kenzie MacNeil’s Cape Breton anthem We Are an Island.

This year’s was gilt-edged because we succeeded in persuading good pals Garth and Carole to come to Cape Breton for their first taste of Celtic Colours. They brought high expectations and weren’t disappointed.  When we weren’t reveling in music we traveled about the Island, savouring the other seasonal colours – the scarlet and gold of Cape Breton’s autumn forests. En route to a Colours concert at St Peters we took back roads to evocatively-named places that were lifers for our friends: Little Narrows, Alba, Marble Mountain, Lime Hill.

There was disappointment at Dundee when we arrived to find that the community fishcakes-and-beans supper was sold out but the next day chef Richard Moore provided abundant consolation at the Lobster Pound in North Sydney, creating something special just for us, stuffed half-lobster that we all agreed was one of the best feeds any of us have enjoyed, ever.

Celtic Colours is a principal reason we stay in Cape Breton till late October. Perhaps it was inevitable: we felt a letdown Friday when Wendy Bergfeldt closed the final Mainstreet session and we bade farewell to Garth and Carole. The festival is done for another year. A senior citizen like myself, Garth is wont to say that our ‘window is closing’ so we’d better fill our remaining days as best we can. I live in hope that a year hence we’ll be enjoying a Colours afterglow like the one we’re savouring now.