В Калгари пройдет трехдневный фестиваль Eddy Fest в историческом клубе King Eddy

A legacy in the blues: National Music Centre to host three-day Eddy Fest at iconic King Eddy We independently select everything we recommend. Buying through us may earn us a commission, which supports our work. Andrew Mosker’s introduction to the iconic King Eddy in Calgary came at a convenient time. This was in the early 1990s, long before Mosker began planning the National Music Centre (NMC) and before the organization preserved the hotel as a civic treasure and key part of Calgary’s musical landscape. The future president and CEO of the NMC was living and working in Jasper at the time, but would make frequent trips into Calgary because his job with CP Hotels involved shuttling tourists from the city to the national park. He also happened to be going through a specific period in his music appreciation. “I was in this blues phase in my life where I was really into everything and anything to do with old blues: The old stuff, the people who invented it that the Rolling Stones would listen to,” Mosker says. One night, when staying in downtown Calgary, a hotel worker suggested Mosker head down the street to East Village and check out the King Eddy. It was still authentically gritty at the time and had already been Calgary’s home of the blues for more than a decade by that point. On that first night, Mosker saw blues saxophonist A.C. Reed, a mainstay of the Chicago scene who had backed Muddy Waters on some of his Chess recordings, had opened for The Rolling Stones on their first U.S. tour and played with Buddy Guy. It was an eye-opening introduction. “I became a huge fan of the King Eddy, and I would go and see blues there as much as I could throughout the 1990s,” he says. He saw Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Junior Wells and Matt “Guitar” Murphy. Not long before the venue closed in 2004, he caught a performance by trailblazer Buckwheat Zydeco. “These were the real creators of this music and happened to still be touring in those days,” Mosker says. For a few decades, the King Eddy was an obligatory stop on the Western Canada circuit for old-time blues musicians, helping it earn a reputation as one of the best rooms for the genre in Canada and perhaps the world. That heritage will be celebrated this weekend as part of Eddy Fest, three nights of music to mark the venue’s 120th anniversary. The King Eddy may be best remembered for those heady decades, but the hotel had a colourful history long before its arrival as a blues venue. Succinctly outlined in an 18-minute documentary on its website, the hotel opened in 1905, one of many hotels built along the CPR tracks on 9th Avenue, a section of town known as both “Whisky Row” and “Hotel Row.” It was “Calgary’s doorstep” for migrants, travellers and workers looking to build a new life in the city. In the 1950s, it became the first hotel in the city to desegregate and welcome African-Americans and African-Canadians. By the 1970s, it was a live-music venue, although it usually stuck to country, bluegrass and rock acts. That changed when Jack Karp bought it in 1982 and transformed it into a Canadian mecca for the blues. Kevin McAuley was a regular at the King Eddy in the 1980s, catching memorable concerts by now Calgary-based artist Amos Garrett, Buddy Guy, Delta blues pianist Pinetop Perkins and folk-blues singer-songwriter Maria Muldaur. “It was intimidating for some because it was kind of seedy,” McAuley says. “It wasn’t your upscale establishment by any means, but it very nicely represented typical blues bars throughout the U.S. that I had been to, juke joints and places like that. Even though it seemed a little intimidating, the people who frequented it were just amazing.” McAuley would come to provide a bridge connecting the hotel’s past to its present, albeit unintentionally at first. He began making guitars four years ago with a fondness for unusual materials. He wanted to make a guitar out of an old Exit sign and put an ad on Kijiji to find one. When he went to pick it up, the seller informed him that it was actually a relic from The King Eddy. McAuley eventually donated the instrument to the National Music Centre, and Mosker commissioned him to make two more using material from the old hotel. Closed in 2004 and saved from the wrecking ball by some committed supporters, The King Eddy became a foundational part of the National Music Centre. The NMC, which now owns the hotel, opened its doors in 2016. Within two years, the King Eddy became a full-time music venue again. However, construction wasn’t straightforward. The old hotel was in bad shape and needed to be fully dismantled and put back together. Some of the materials from the old building were kept. Mosker asked McAuley to make two more guitars using old floorboards and wooden beams that had been above the stage. “Andrew and I went to the storage lot there with my bucksaw, and we chopped off some pieces of wood, and I brought them home to the shop,” McAuley says. He made one as a Telecaster and one in the style of a Gibson Flying V. The guitars will be used by various artists at Eddy Fest, which will feature 16 acts over three days starting Friday. That includes relative newcomers such as Duke Domino to veterans such as John Rutherford, who learned his craft at the King Eddy in the 1980s. The fest both celebrates the King Eddy’s legacy and shines a spotlight on new artists who play there, helping make it a cornerstone live venue for the modern music scene. That includes Calgary’s Ollee Owens Band, who will play Friday night at Eddy Fest. After discovering the Delta blues as a pre-teen in small-town Manitoba, Ollee Owens returned to music in 2015 after raising her family in Calgary. She has performed there at least a half-dozen times since it reopened. She entered Calgary’s music scene by attending Sunday afternoon jams at the Blues Can, hosted at the time by the late Bill Dowey. Dowey also led the King Eddy house band for years. Since then, Owens has released two albums and established herself as a prominent new voice in Canadian blues and roots. Earlier this year, she won the Canadian Blues Music Award for Emerging Blues Artist and played the Nanaimo Blues Festival last week. “(Bill Dowey) was one of the OG guys who played at the Eddy all the time; the Eddy was their place,” Owens says. “They were there since the 1980s. He played with Long John Baldry and Kathi McDonald. He introduced me to blues artists that I’ve taken inspiration from. Bill was very instrumental and has that connection back to the Eddy.” “It was a special community he had going on. A lot of the musicians I’ve worked with have these stories and the history and all the lore of all these different places. It was so cool to learn about it and learn their experiences.” Eddy Fest runs from Friday, Aug. 14 to Sunday, Aug. 16 at the King Eddy. The Ollee Owens Band plays Friday at 8:30 p.m. Visit kingeddy.ca.