Edmonton Festival cut down to one day
Last year at this time I returned to Edmonton to attend a music festival. At the time I wasn’t sure what to expect, but after a weekend of attending shows and listening to music I realized I had attended another of Edmonton’s great summer festivals.
This year sees a couple significant changes in the operation of the festival. Last year’s creator and organizer Kaley Bird has parted ways with the festival, she says they parted on amicable terms, but I have some doubts. The second change, which may have something to do with the first, is the shrinking of the festival from three days to just one. This has impacted the number of performers attending this years event, dropping from over a hundred, to just nine, with just four of them being Edmonton locals, the rest coming from as far away as Vancouver and Toronto.
The festival website offers no explanation as to why the festival has been cut so short, they simply state that “The Sunday Street Fest last year was really the exclamation mark of the weekend, so it was obvious this tradition should hold forth. So, The SOS Fest was condensed to the Sunday for this year.” To me its a punctuation without a sentence, or the icing without the cake, or some other metaphor for a distinct lacking of substance.
I wrote last year that many artists who call Edmonton home saw SOSfest not as simply the Sounds of Old Strathcona, but a means to revive some of the feel and the soul that the neighborhood has lost over the last decade. The festival was a showcase for the local music scene, and in my estimates fifty to sixty percent of the acts called Edmonton home, and another twenty to thirty percent calling Alberta home. The decision to keep it local was important, it was the kind of musical showcase every city needs. My feeling was that they had a great deal of success in their freshman year, and while I am certain this year’s concert will provide a great deal of entertainment, and fun for everyone participating, in comparison to the first year it remains a failure.
I find the changes made over the last year to be disappointing, and what was lost was a cultural festival that was able to compete with any of Edmonton’s great summer festivals, to be replaced by nothing more than an average street concert. I hope the organizers can find it within themselves to bring back the festival I fell in love with last year, because if they don’t I fear 2011 will go down as the second annual and last SOSfest.
Originally appeared on Vanmusic.ca