Artists
The Leak of the Week begins! Check back each Monday as we announce 2012 artists one tantalizing name at a time...
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Marco Calliari
Montreal’s Marco Calliari wears his Italian roots on his rolled up sleeves. A founding member of the thrash metal group Anonymus, Calliari has transplanted the pounding energy of metal to the folkloric spirit of Italy. To gather creative inspiration for his newest release, Al Faro Est, Calliari isolated himself in a light keeper's cottage at the far end of the Gaspe Peninsula. The result is an album of spirited original music that speaks to his Italian roots and Québécois upbringing.
Raise a glass of Chianti as you are transported to a crowded café on a cobblestoned street. A Marco Calliari performance is an aural journey back to the old country, replete with rousing horns, jangly guitars and plaintive accordion.
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Lindi Ortega
In an old 1960s Toronto apartment building, a well-worn pair of cherry red cowboy boots sit beside a guitar case, brightly decorated with glittery stars and Frida Kahlo images. Elsewhere, a Johnny Cash record spins. Sitting amongst them is ruby-lipped, Mexican/Irish descendant Lindi Ortega.
Her four song 2009 debut EP and 2011 full-length record Little Red Boots have been met with much critical acclaim. Lindi’s arresting, vibrato vocals and unique brand of alt country songs speak to the desperado in all of us, for a genre she describes as “a roadside motel love affair between old school outlaws and country darlings.”
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The Barr Brothers
It all began with teenage brotherly boxing matches, morphed into messing around with popular hits and old blues songs on cardboard boxes and home-strung imitation guitars and soon evolved into North America tours in the spirited, improv-based rock trio, The Slip, in the mid-‘90s. A chance incident in 2004 moved them to Montreal. There, The Barr Brothers were born, expanding to include an adventurous classically trained harpist and a multi-instrument. Their unique blues-based sound is built on interwoven string arrangements, wide-open spaces and a multitude of musical traditions.
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Sam Baker
This is a return Festival performance from the much-loved Texan Sam Baker. He has turned his own life tragedies into hard-hewn, transcendentally wrought grit-and-grace, reflected through his raspy, spoken word-esque vocal style and literate, poignant songs which grapple with the world’s beauties, complexities and little tragedies. They are compelling, closely observed narratives of eccentric and marginalized people finding meaning in seemingly defeated lives.
