Glenna McConnell's Reviews
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McGill Daily February 20 - March 5, 1997
Northern Winds Begin to Blow
Folkus uses sign language and folk music to get its soul across
by Chris Scott
For today's aspiring song artists, the chances of ever reaching that first , name-breaking success can seem treacherously remote. The multinational music industry , with its smug standards of 'sophistication', its obsession with contemporary 'relevance', its head offices often thousands of miles away and its reliance on flashy jet tours for a performer's promotion; all this can make it almost impossible for a new singer to get recognition without a combination of psychotic endurance, near-stellar talent, sex appeal and, most importantly, money, money and more money.
Against this backdrop, it is a real relief to encounter Folkus, a Chateauguay-based folk trio that played on Valentine's Day at McGill's Yellow Door. Clear -voiced and multi-talented (the show relied mainly on guitars, but switched emphasis to mandolins or drumming at special moments), the three performers exude none of the pretension associated with 'professional' musician hood. All are parents (Cari Jones and Goran Petrovic are married) in their mid-thirties. Cari and Goran have a modest background in performance, but for lead singer Glenna McConnell, involvement with Folkus has offered the first chance of a wide audience for the songs and poems she has been creating enthusiastically since childhood.Folkus has now been together for two years. Playing its own compositions at community coffee houses, it has kept an insouciance towards mega-success or the opinions of big-city managers. "We can afford not to be as aloof and as angst-ridden," Goran relates, referring to the fact that the group deals with intimate, familiar themes such as changes in nature, or devotion the the family .
Another benefit of this autonomy is Folkus' willingness to break convention, not just in the content, but in the medium of its presentation. Glenna learned sign language at a very young age to communicate with her deaf grandmother, and began to interpret her own songs for her at family gatherings. So it was natural that when she started performing publicly she kept this up, first to reach out to any deaf people who might be in the audience, but also to enrich hearing members' experience by illustrating " just how beautiful and expressive the language (sign) really is."
Fridays's event was hosted in the delightful atmosphere of the Yellow Door basement amidst candlelight, low ceilings and tight , ir-regular rows of stacking chairs. Spectators waved and called out as late-coming friends trooped in, the performers were perched on a low stage barely a guitar's length from the knees of the front row of the audience.
The evening was led off with a short appearance by local guitarist Emile Goyette and Shawn Eliovitz, a McGlll music student, on the conga. When Folkus came on they drew quick attention through a particularly apt symbiosis of sound and words. To be sure, there were cases where the tune seemed more a repetition of generic country than something original, or where the lyrics became redundant in an effort to fit the scansion of the line (e.g. " calm and serene")
But these weaknesses were offset by several gifted renditions, such as Northern Winds (written by Glenna), whose swaying, rising melody, punctuated by Cari's staccato drum-beat, perfectly expressed the mixture of desolation and hope of approaching winter: "Just as the leaves warm the Earth below/As Northern winds begin to blow/We hold tight till a fire grows/ Warm enough to melt the coming snow." The best songs were those arranging different instruments in harmony or counterpoint instead of using three guitars to play the same notes. Hopefully this will be more frequent in subsequent performances.
While Glenna's signing had a lovely, slow almost origamic quality which was partly understandable even for a non-signer, it unfortunately was used only in a few songs, and only in those written by Glenna herself. Several of Goran's creations featured brilliant one-liners which would surely have make pithy translation: "The smallest smashing atoms make the brightest burning suns," (from "Give them Something"), or "Let's get real stupid, and spend the night in jail," (from a zippy piece called "Coulter, " about a small town in the U.S.)
Folkus will be releasing its first CD this coming May, and starting a low-key tour through Ontario, Quebec and Vermont in June or July. I wish them luck. For despite the occasional stylistic imperfection, Folkus has a definite anarchic flair, a forthright, participatory art that is all too lacking in today's sanitized commercial music environment.
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