Blue Skies Festival tickets now just a click away

Jeff Green | Jul 20, 2016

The Blue Skies Music Festival has been around for 43 years, but for many people it is a phantom event. Day passes have been available at locations in Perth, Kingston and Ottawa, but they can be sold out by mid-July. A schedule of performers is never published until a few days before the festival, and although people who make the trip up to Clarendon always report that the performances are memorable and the vibe is more than friendly, many people feel that the festival is not accessible.

That is all changing, as Blue Skies finally joins the 1990s (it may even make it to the new millennium in a few years).

Not only is the schedule of performers available online at blueskiesmusicfestival.ca, tickets are also available at the same location. Camping passes are still hard to come by, as many of them are reserved for committed volunteers and the rest are allocated by lottery in May of each year, but Friday night, Saturday and Sunday tickets are now readily available. In addition to being available online, they can be purchased at the front gate to the festival, on Clarendon Road off Road 509, on the Saturday and Sunday morning of the festival, which takes place on July 30 and 31 this year.

The festival has a new artistic director this year, Danny Sullivan, who may be familiar to some readers because he has programmed several music series at MERA in McDonalds Corners. Sullivan, who lives with his family off the Bennett Lake Road north of Maberly, served as the artistic director at Blue Skies once before, he recalled when interviewed earlier this week, in the mid-1980s.

At that time the music director at the festival had less authority than they do now. The bands they wanted to hire were vetted by a committee.

“I left the job after one year, even though it is usually a three-year term,” Sullivan said, “because it was hard to program the way I wanted to while pleasing a group like that.”

Since taking on the job after last year's festival, Sullivan has attended different kinds of music conferences and showcases in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere.

“I made sure to see a live performance by every band that I booked this year. You can't tell how a band performs in front of an audience by their recordings and videos,” he said, “and I not only had the job of booking the bands, I also have to put together programs that fit together well.”

He also decided that, for his first year, he would not book any acts that have already played at Blue Skies in the past.

“One of the performers I am most looking forward to seeing, Corin Raymond, was at Blue Skies with the band, the Undesirables, several years ago but he is coming back as a solo act. He always brings something different to the stage,” Sullivan said.

Another act that he mentioned was Akawui, who will be closing the festival on the Sunday night.

“Akawui is a former mixed martial arts fighter of Chilean heritage, who has indigenous roots through his Mapuch grandmother. He performs in a Latino-urban-electro style with a hint of the Chilean star-band Inti Illimani. At the end of his show he is joined by dancers from Akwasasne in full mask. It should be a spectacle that will get people moving.”

The final act dovetails with the opening of the festival on Friday night.

“Blue Skies is one of the only festivals that owns the land where it takes place, and this is the 10th anniversary of the year when the land was purchased. In order to celebrate that, and the 40 years before that when the land was owned by Oskar Graf, as well as the Algonquin stewardship of the land for thousands of years before that, we will be holding a drumming ceremony to start the festival with members of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation.”

Danny Sullivan said he already has plans for next year's festival, but for now he is looking forward to seeing how all the pieces he has assembled will come together in 2016.

And for the first time ever, everything anyone needs to know about attending the festival can be found at their website.