The Big Yellow Merville Hall is up and running again with its concert series to help raise awareness of the Stolen Church project.
On Friday, June 26, join Canadian folk music icon, songstress Shari Ulrich, as she delights fans, old and new.
Ulrich is many things: a multi-Juno Award winning artist, teacher, actor, composer, multi-instrumentalist and a prolific songwriter with a wealth of experiences to draw on.
Her first band, Pied Pumpkin (with Rick Scott and Joe Mock), helped to launch the enduring Squash Records label.
She has played her fiddle and sung alongside Barney Bentall and Tom Taylor in BTU; played with a cast of characters, including Valdy, in The Hometown Band; with Bill Henderson and Roy Forbes in UHF; and currently hits the international stage as a solo artist as well as with the bluegrass project, The High Bar Gang.
At the 2014 Canadian Folk Music Awards, The High Bar Gang won Vocal Group of the Year while Ulrich, herself, won the English Songwriter of the Year award for her most recent CD, Everywhere I Go.
The CD was produced by her daughter, Julia Graff, a McGill University graduate, as a project for her Masters in Music in Sound Recording in 2013. Ulrich was challenged to write the album in a month before recording began in Montreal. Fortunately, accepting her daughter’s challenge totally overrode the reality that Ulrich didn’t have any new songs written which triggered a one-month songwriting frenzy.
The CD is a wild success and Ulrich has been touring it to rave reviews ever since.
Her show at the Big Yellow Hall will bring Ulrich together with two other amazing musicians, Trent Freeman (fiddle) and Eric Wright (cello), both of the bands The Fretless and Speaker Face.
Freeman and Wright will open the show and then back up Ulrich on some of her beautiful compositions.
Get ready to hear some smooth, frenetic and innovative string music from these two stellar musicians.
To avoid disappointment, be sure to get your tickets early. The recent Big Yellow Merville Hall bluegrass hootenanny with The Foggy Hogtown Boys was a total sellout.
Tickets for the Friday, June 26 show at the Big Yellow Merville Hall are available at Long & McQuade, Courtenay; The Music Plant, Campbell River; and Blue Heron Books, Comox. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the concert starts at 7:30. Cost is $18 advance – $20 at the door and $15 youth.