This year’s Indian Summer Festival is offering a welcome alternative for those who like listening to music in a gentle atmosphere. In partnership with Granville Island, festival organizers will present a talented group of performers in the Public Market Courtyard all afternoon on Sunday (July 14). Moreover, they’re billing SOUNDsystem as “your ultimate, free outdoor music oasis”.
“Like an artfully arranged ‘thali’, our lineup offers an eclectic mix of sounds from the familiar to the unexpected,” the festival promises.
It’s BYOB. Organizers also encourage guests to enjoy their favourite beverages responsibly in a designated area.
SOUNDsystem opens at noon with something truly original for Vancouver. Boundary-breaking East Vancouver musician and songwriter Ruby Singh will perform with Memphis-born novelist and performance poet Arthur “Rickydoc” Flowers. It’s tempting to suggest that seeing them share a stage would be worth the price of admission. However, this is actually free for anyone of any age.
Regular readers of Pancouver are likely aware of the imaginative Singh in one of his guises. In 2022, Ruby Singh and The Future Ancestors recorded an album of Delta blues music. He and his musician friends performed it the following year at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.
More recently, Singh and several other musicians premiered Vox.Infold II at the MOTHER Cloud Spatial Sound Festival. This was a follow-up to his Juno-nominated disc, Vox.Infold.
In the past, Singh collaborated on the pioneering Sufi hip-hop Jhalaak project with Manganiar musicians. They recorded their album in clay huts in Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.
Lyrical prose at SOUNDsystem
It’s in keeping with Singh’s eclectic career that he would perform at SOUNDsystem with Flowers, former executive director of the Harlem Writers Guild. Flowers’s 1993 novel, Another Good Loving Blues, received high praise in many publications, including African American Review. There, scholar Patricia R. Schroeder noted that Flowers is part of a “Literary Hoodoo” tradition.
Schroeder pointed out that the plot in Another Good Loving Blues “is elevated to an almost mythic status by Flowers’ lyrical prose, which often mimics the blues riffs and rhythms performed by the blues musicians about whom he writes”.
Flowers, an English professor emeritus at Syracuse University, has a connection to India. Therefore, it makes sense for him to appear at the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver.
In 2017, he recorded Brer Rabbit Retold in Chennai with three Indian musicians: London-based percussionist and composer Sarathy Korwar, India-based guitarist and composer Vinay Kaushal, and Pune-born composer and flute player Gandhaar Amin in 2017.
The Singh-Flowers collaboration is one of several appealing performances on Sunday in the Public Market Courtyard.
Meanwhile, at 1 p.m., the courtyard with be filled with the sounds of Indian classical music. This will be supplied by a trio who all hail from Punjab: Surrey-based Dilruba performer and teacher Baljit Singh, tabla maestro and Naad Arts Centre founder Amarjeet Singh, and Dr. Richi Ranjan, a disciple of Grammy-nominated sarode legend Ustad Aashish Khan.
They’ll be followed at 2 p.m. by the Shan-E-Punjab Arts Club, which has been promoting bhangra and giddha for the past 16 years. Along the way, the club has mentored and coached more than 20,000 students and participated in more than 150 competitions.
Ladyjams advances interculturalism
At 3 p.m., there will be a second opportunity to hear another intercultural collaboration. Vancouver’s Missy D is a well-known, Rwanda-born and Abidjan- and Harare-raised hip-hop and soul artist who sings in French and English. Sejal Lal is a Surrey-based singer, songwriter, and violinist who’s inspired by western classical and Hindustani music, among other genres. Together, they make up Laydy Jams, which integrates hip-hop, vocal harmonies, violin, and popular music from the past.
“They write their life experiences into music, knowing that they provide a kind of comfort, familiarity, and radical joy for other people of colour and marginalized communities,” the Indian Summer website states. “They bring the sound of their lives to audiences through the roots of R&B, hip-hop, soul, classical, jazz, and funk.”
Closing out SOUNDscape is one of Vancouver’s most inspiring Indigenous hip-hop bands. Curtis Clear Sky and the Constellationz infused Latin-funk, soul, ska, reggae, and blues into its lyrically uplifting songs. For an example, check out the video for “Our Home”.
Watch the official video for “Our Home”.
Indian Summer Festival and Granville Island will present SOUNDsystem in the Public Market Courtyard at noon on Sunday (July 14). For more information, visit the festival website. Follow Pancouver on Twitter @PancouverMedia and on Instagram @PancouverMedia.
