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Arts
Blackberry Wood shakes them up at Cafe Deux Soleils
By Kevin Potvin
It’s a good old fashioned hoedown right in the inner city
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Despite the whole front of the triple-wide place being a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, Cafe Deux Soleils, even on a sunny day, has a strangely dark cavernous ambiance to it. After the sun sets, the Commercial & Sixth bistro takes on the feel of a genuine underground bohemian hang out. The torn bench seats, chipped and gouged tables of varying provenance, the variety of alley-abandoned chairs and the unfinished stained concrete floor offers the ultimate in total comfort: there’s nothing you can do to damage anything that’s going to cost you.
I was dragging my heels up the street Saturday night and was drawn to the open doors on the hot summer night by the excited smokers pelicanning on the sidewalk and the high energy music floating out the whole opened-up front.
I stepped inside and found a full room in rapt attention, everyone smiling, nodding, tapping and shaking, and a pretty good number actually up and dancing on the floor—a remarkable sight in wallflower-city Vancouver.
On stage halfway through an extraordinarily long set was Blackberry Wood. This large band—there were at least eight packed onto the small riser—plays Cafe Deux Soleils the first Saturday of each month. To see a band genuinely having fun is itself worth the price of admission. It doesn’t hurt that six of the eight members are women; live music is almost as bad as theoretical physics for being highly gender exclusionary. The knowledge and service at Bone Rattle Music, 2012 Commercial Drive, makes you feel right at home whether you’re a beginner nothing but questions or a seasoned pro looking to upgrade.
The large number of band members and the apparent equality they practice—which is evident just in the way the energy on the stage moves around—is maybe what accounts for the wide range of musical styles constrained within one (albeit long) set. Yet each song stuck to the principle of all good live musical performance: you could move to it.
This kind of music in this kind of place gave me the impression of a big modern inner-city version of the traditional hoedown in the neighbour’s barn kind of night. I felt something like what I imagine farmers felt when they hung up their overalls for the week and hustled down to the crossroads for a little long-awaited good ol’ jumping around to shake out all the kinks of field work.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
for no cause, represents no group, serves no master, and considers
problems with no preconceived notions. We hope to afflict the comfortable,
both materially and intellectually, and comfort the afflicted—of
both kinds as well, and we are trying to do both things at the same
time.
Publisher, Editor
Kevin Potvin
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Potvin
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