>>PREVIEW
BOOM! CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF MUSIC IN ALBERTA
Cantos Music Foundation
Special Hours in effect until December 31
Where do Diamond Joe White, The Pursuit of Happiness, Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin all come together? Each of these acts, with ties to Alberta, is represented in Cantos Music Museum’s new permanent exhibit Boom! A Century of Music in Alberta.
Andrew Mosker is the manager of programs, administration and communication for Cantos, and in a recent interview he spoke enthusiastically about the new three-part exhibit.
"Diamond Joe (White) is now a plumber with Diamond Joe’s Plumbing about an hour outside of Vancouver, but when we called him up and told him about the exhibit, he agreed to come out and play at the opening," he says. "He’s one of about 30 Alberta stories that are up on the wall."
Mosker’s work for Cantos involves travelling to look at other collections, and he noticed most places had an emphasis on local aspects of their collections.
"I noticed a strong local component in music museums." he says. "It would be great to have some kind of Alberta tribute in our exhibition gallery. Working at Cantos, we are community oriented, so I have developed relationships with many of the local organizations. But this is not a Hall of Fame. That has a whole bunch of other stuff that goes with it politically."
As Alberta’s centennial drew near, Mosker felt that drawing on Cantos’s relationship with the local community made sense.
People like local manager and promoter Neil McGonigal supplied some of the artifacts. McGonigal loaned Cantos a 1983 poster for a gig kd lang played at the Ski Club at the University of Calgary. And although McGonigal has an original Festival Express poster celebrating the time that Janis Joplin rolled into Calgary to play McMahon Stadium, Mosker had to settle for a copy of the poster for the Cantos exhibit.
Other artifacts include a platinum album from the Irish Rovers, who actually formed here and owned The Unicorn and the Banff and Calgary Rose & Crowns until about five years back; a jacket worn by Jann Arden in her 1996 video for "Good Mother," and an early CKUA microphone. Also included in the collection are T-shirts from the first Calgary Folk Music festival and the first Calgary jazz festival.
About 250 images are featured in the exhibit, including an autographed self-portrait by Fort MacLeod native Joni Mitchell. Another component is 80 digitized albums from acts as diverse as The Co-Dependents and The Pursuit of Happiness. There are original albums such as Wilf Carter with the Calgary Stampeders, and the one Procol Harum made with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. A timeline of Alberta music from 1905 to the present also graces the walls.
For this event, museum hours are Wednesday and Thursday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. as well, and Sunday from 10 a.m. until noon. After December, viewing is by appointment only. The exhibit is free to the public. |
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