Wide Cut Weekend set to showcase region’s rich roots music talent in some of Calgary’s best venues | Calgary Herald	
Alberta musician Leeroy Stagger is one of the acts booked for the inaugural Wide Cut Weekend roots music festival set for October. David Guenther / Courtesy	
How do you celebrate the completion of one of the busiest music festival seasons in Calgary history?
On Tuesday morning, organizers announced the inaugural Wide Cut Weekend festival running Oct. 15-17 at various locations around town.
The event, which is the idea of a group of local fans and supporters including longtime broadcaster and current host of CKUA’s Wide Cut Country program Allison Brock, is a homegrown, venue-based roots music festival that will showcase some of the region’s finest artists in some of the city’s finest rooms.
Acts confirmed for the three-day event include some of the area’s biggest names and heavy-hitters such as Cam Penner, Joe Nolan, Jr. Gone Wild, Mariel Buckley, Dave McCann, Tom Phillips, Steve Coffey, Leeroy Stagger, Magnolia Buckskin with Emily Triggs, JR Shore, Lucas Chaisson and Tim Hus.
They’ll be tasked with filling such equally as supportive venues as The Ironwood Stage and Grill, Wine-Ohs Cellar, Mikey’s Juke Joint and Eatery, #1 Royal Canadian Legion Calgary and the Nite Owl.
For Brock, who’s the artistic director of the fest, being able to finally announce the event was something of a relief, and something worth celebrating after just over a year of planning and getting funding and sponsorship together.
It actually grew out of a conversation she and fellow board members Alanna Martineau, Jen Kuhlwein and Gillian Turnbull had in the green room of the 2014 Calgary Folk Music Festival. A smaller-scale, more mobile fest seemed a natural way to further showcase the musicians and extended family that the summer event celebrates.
“We all believe in the roots music community in this province,” Brock said at the launch at Wine-Ohs as festival performer T. Buckley played on the stage in the background.
“And we so wanted to not only celebrate the music that Calgary and Alberta has but the venues here because they support it, 365 days a year.”
She said they actually used the folk fest and Sled Island as “reference points” for the vision of Wide Cut Weekend, albeit with an entirely provincial focus. Well, the first time out, anyway, as they start more localized and build it into something that can maybe bring in “honorary Albertans” from other regions, including B.C., other spots around the country and eventually more international acts.
In that way, she said, they can avoid the danger of merely preaching to the converted — those who are out and filling those clubs regularly during those 365 days a year — and raise the profile of the performers and platforms for them outside of our borders.
“My dream is that it will increase the support, that we can bring in from other areas so we’ll get people who aren’t just from Calgary coming for the weekend,” she said. “And then we can spread it farther and farther. But we can always maintain that Alberta hook.”
Again, as Brock pointed out, this year’s lineup features musicians from not only Calgary, but Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Edmonton, Red Deer and Fort Macleod, to name but a few.
As for the timing of Wide Cut Weekend, she thinks coming a good month after all of the other festivals avoids any sort of summer festival hangover, and hits a time when people are still looking to get out and enjoy.
“That’s what we’re hoping, that the timing is just right that we get in after Thanksgiving but before Christmas kicks in,” she said, before addressing the weather they might have to deal with, even with people making their way between the five indoor venues in a relatively small area of the city.
This time of year can, it was pointed out with this past weekend as a reference point, also be a little, shall we say, unpredictable.
Wide Cut Weekend takes place Oct. 15-17 in Calgary. A limited number of festival passes are on sale now for $49, while Friday and Saturday night wristbands are $25 and $30 respectively from widecutweekend.com and in person from Heritage Posters and Music (1502 11th Ave S.W.).
Although a record 100 million doses of influenza vaccine will be available this flu season, the supply is inadequate to provide inoculations to the 185 million people who CDC recommends receive them, federal officials said at a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Dr. Steven Ostroff of the CDC said, "Additional efforts are needed to ensure that current recommendations for influenza vaccination for all high-risk individuals, those who live in households with high-risk individuals and health care workers that care for these persons are fully implemented." Committee Chair Larry Craig (R-Idaho) said, "With news reports of people standing in line for hours to be immunized, many of us questioned for the first time whether we can assume that everyone who needs a vaccine can obtain one." In an effort to help meet that end, CDC this year will for the first time stockpile 4.5 million doses of influenza vaccine and make them available in December (Maltin, Atlanta Journal-Constitution , 9/28).
“Sabrina’s Man” is written by Gilbert Morris and published by Barbour Publishing. It was published on December 1, 2013. This is the second book in the “Western Justice” series; the first is “Rosa’s Land” and the third, expected release in June 2014, and is “Raina’s Choice.”
“Sabrina’s Man” is set during the Civil War, which drew me because I had just finished “Gone with the Wind”. In hindsight, I should not have expected this to be anything near that classic, but with “Gone with the Wind” fresh it my mind, it made it hard not to compare. The main characters take past over half of the book to be introduced to each other, which made me do a triple-check to make sure that I even had the right book downloaded! This book struck me as childishly written; perhaps it is this author’s first book, but the dialogue, characters, and pace of the plot all seemed much less than professional to me. Everything seemed so rushed in the beginning, yet the book took a long time to come together.
Thank you to Net Galley and Barbour publishing for providing me with a copy of this book to read and review. I was not required to post a positive review. All opinions are my own.