What: Garden City Grooves Festival
Where: Lucky Bar, Upstairs Cabaret and the White Eagle Polish Hall
When: Thursday through Saturday
Tickets: Lyle’s Place, Vinyl Envy, Jupiter and ticketweb.ca
Garden City Grooves producer Nathan Ambrose took stock of his festival after its difficult 2015 edition, hoping to determine whether he should move forward with the funk-and-soul event or cancel it completely. The festival always took a significant toll on Ambrose, who got used to staging the event with the thinnest of budgets and only a modicum of outside assistance. “I had to decide: ‘Do I want to keep doing this?’ ” He ultimately came to a well-thought-out decision: Take a hiatus in 2017 and come back strong in 2018.
The festival enters its fifth year tonight, alebit with several new layers to the operation. For starters, Ambrose moved the event from September — a busy spot on the calendar for music festivals — to the first weekend in May. He also brought the Victoria Ska and Reggae Society on board as collaborators. The non-profit society was already running at a full clip in order to produce its own Victoria Ska and Reggae Festival in June, so the move made perfect sense to both sides, Ambrose said.
“Dane had been a mentor to use in our first few years,” Ambrose, who co-founded Garden Grooves with Reuven Sussman, said of Victoria Ska and Reggae Society artistic director Dane Roberts. “He always helped us out in whatever way he could.”
Roberts and Ambrose came up with scaled-down version of Garden Grooves that will help ease the transition into its new guise. He also shifted his philosophy away from big-name headliners and toward quality up-and-coming acts.
“We wanted to go back to the roots of why Reuven and I created this in the first place — to showcase what we have going on here in Victoria, what we have in B.C., and also to go beyond that into the Pacific Northwest.”
Three peformances at Lucky Bar, Upstairs Cabaret, and the White Eagle Polish Hall are on tap, with headline sets from Australian reggae singer Saritah (who performs on Thursday at Upstairs Cabaret) and Seattle soul-funk trio Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio (Friday at Lucky Bar) leading the way. Lamarr will also give a Hammond B3 organ workshop on Saturday afternoon at the White Eagle Polish Hall.
But as with previous editions of Garden City Grooves, the Vancouver Island contingent is not to be missed. Jonnie 5 Brass Band, Boomshack, Scram and the First Team, Diamond Café, Quarterback, The Phatfunks, and DJ Dundidit are on the festival roster, celebrating what Ambrose calls “groove music in all its flavours.”
“The goal was to expose more people to that kind of music, and to have a platform for these bands.”
