A bit of rain wasn’t enough to keep the masses away from a day of fun, music and delicious food at the Bow Valley’s annual Harvest Festival.
This year’s festival took place on Sunday (Sept. 13) in Banff’s Central Park, offering up local musicians and food vendors the opportunity to show the community their skills behind the grill and on top of the stage.
Some of the local acts who took part in the all day affair included Kill Your Radio, The Satellites, The Eagle Has Landed and Harvest Festival founder and organizer Gary Gonis’s band The Ramblin’ Hey, Ho, Ha’s.
“It’s a great community event with our local and travelling bands playing and we’ve gotten together all of the local vendors here and people and the community coming in to enjoy being a town for awhile as opposed to just catering to the tourists,” Gonis said. The event partnered with The Town of Banff, Banff Farmers’ Market manager Rene Gaber and Bighorn Sounds Association to expand on the growing and popular showcase that has garnered a reputation for providing local musicians a chance to perform full stage sets with high performance production.
“A lot of the bands here have never played a show like this before, with drummers never having the opportunity to play on mic’d drums or people that haven’t played with monitors before so it’s actually a learning process as well as being able to cheer on your up and coming bands and that’s the big thing about it and they’re getting to learnso much,” Gonis said.
The Banff Centre’s asst. head stage carpenter and local musician Bruce McComb was pulling double duty during the festival, providing stage production befre taking the stage himself with The Ramblin’ Hey Ho Ha’s. The new father has been working behind the scenes at The Banff Centre for seven years, and agreed the annual music festival is the perfect opportunity to showcase local talent and production.
“I’ve been working with Gary the last six festivals in Canmore and Banff, and today I’m just handling the staging and keeping the timeline going with stage management and gear management, all the backline, amps ... whatever’s happening on deck,” McComb said.
The musician and stage carpenter found his callings in secondary school through the wood working program and drama classes, which has led to a career spanning three provinces, with a total of 15 years spent in the Bow Valley. “I started out doing whatever I could, building houses and actually architectural carpentry and decided to move indoors and get into staging and scenic carpentry, and from that into staging and running shows,” McComb said.
“It definitely a great place to gain experience. We get a great crowd, and we’ve tied it with the harvest market also being right here and it’s just such a great environment to get people interested and really puts the pressure on putting a whole complete set together and not just a few songs.
“It gives them ownership of the crowd so they can step up their game and they’re all community people, Gary knows everyone from the valley so it’s like a big brotherhood/sisterhood here – a tight family in the valley of musicians.”
