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Love of Courtenay's Vancouver Island Music Festival is in the blood

IN CONCERT What: Vancouver Island Music Festival, featuring Emmylou Harris, Bruce Cockburn, Barenaked Ladies, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and others When: Friday through Sunday Where: Comox Valley Exhibition Grounds, 4839 Headquarters Rd.
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Emmylou Harris is among another impressive lineup at the weekendÕs Vancouver Island Music Festival.

IN CONCERT

What: Vancouver Island Music Festival, featuring Emmylou Harris, Bruce Cockburn, Barenaked Ladies, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and others

When: Friday through Sunday

Where: Comox Valley Exhibition Grounds, 4839 Headquarters Rd., Courtenay

Tickets: $99 (Friday) and $109 (Saturday and Sunday), $199 for weekend pass; children 12 and under admitted free

Information: islandmusicfest.com

 

 

In years past, children from the Comox Valley took part in Courtenay’s Vancouver Island Music Festival as fans. But as the event grew, and those children got older, a special dynamic materialized.

“We’ve had an interesting year, because we lost a couple of our key volunteers who passed away,” said artistic producer Doug Cox. “But as we start to lose people, [we] see amazing young people get involved. It’s a changing of the guard, basically. That’s where the real heart of the thing is. That’s really what we’re all about.”

The non-profit festival, known to locals as Musicfest, operates with a skeleton staff, but has a core group of more than 1,000 volunteers.

That family feel has made Musicfest, now in its 23rd year, one of the best-all-round festivals in the province, with no sign of slowing down. Cox said the crew of young volunteers, many of whom have grown up with the festival, will keep Musicfest in good stead. “Some were even conceived at the festival,” he joked.

“As you do this more and more through the years, it really becomes about the health of the festival, not about the particular year’s lineup.”

Headliners this year include Emmylou Harris, Bruce Cockburn, Barenaked Ladies, and Robert Randolph and the Family Band. Quality programming has become Musicfest’s calling card during the past two decades, as the 2017 lineup indicates.

Camping sites have already sold out and weekend passes are becoming scarce.

“We may sell out through the weekend,” Cox said. “But we’ve got enough people. We’ve hit our target already, so we’ve paid for this year’s festival.”

With a fixed capacity of 10,000 people, growing the festival is not a priority. “Some years we sell out, some years we don’t, but we come close every year.

“We’re not going to let it go bigger than that because that would ruin the experience for everybody.”

Fans will have plenty of opportunity to experience the magic of Musicfest this weekend, with six stages and nearly 60 acts on the schedule. Cox has planned two tributes through the weekend — one to Sam Cooke and one to Chuck Berry — in addition to scores of workshops. He has also put together Canada Revisited, a special collaboration concert that will pay tribute to Canada’s musical past and present.

“The only direction that we gave them was to not make it all Neil Young and Joni Mitchell songs,” he said with a laugh. “No offence to Neil or Joni, but we wanted them to dig a little bit deeper.”

Cox is especially excited about the chamber ensemble led by Lucia Micarelli, the Juilliard-trained violinist who also starred in the HBO series Treme. “We’ve never had a chamber ensemble at the festival before, and she’s an amazing violinist.

“I’m excited to see how that goes over with the audience, because we haven’t ever done anything like that before.”

Risk-taking decisions are only possible because of the community that supports Musicfest. It’s a tight-knit affair, from the volunteers to the audience.

“That is why festivals like Pemberton fail, because they don’t have that heart,” Cox said of the now-defunct festival near Whistler, which declared bankruptcy amid scandal this year. “I don’t mean that to slam them, but they don’t get that part of it.”

mdevlin@timescolonist.com