This is a story of success, which began as a loss, or possibly even with the wedding of Jeff Healey if you want to go back far enough. This is the story of how Stephen Lewis turned one of the smallest stages at Fredericton’s 2019 Harvest Jazz & Blues into the biggest party in town.
Harvest Jazz & Blues is a big festival – certainly big for Atlantic Canada. It packs several tents and venues throughout Fredericton each year, bringing in heavy hitting headliners like this year’s mind blowing inclusion of living rock god Robert Plant on the line-up.
The Barracks Stage has, traditionally, been reserved for the local line-up: up and comers ready to make the big leap, mixed in with a dose of mid-range names. For this reason it has also been, understandably and historically, powered by local enthusiasm and somewhat on the small side with the exception of the headliner shows. It has, however, provided a spectacular platform for blossoming music careers, as they’ve partnered with Stingray Music in recent years for their Rising Star competition.
Stephen Lewis performed in the Rising Star competition five years ago. He’d finally arrived on the stage after years of busking at Harvest, then performing at the festival’s side venues, then the Fredericton’s Own stage. For Lewis it was a dream come true that began with meeting Canadian jazz legend Jeff Healey as a kid.
“My father was the pastor at Jeff Healey’s wedding, so when he was booked for Harvest one year we got backstage passes,” explains Lewis. “I got to hang out with him, hold his guitar, watch him perform, and get inspired! Even though I was just a kid, I knew then that Harvest would play a huge role in my life.”
Lewis lost the Rising Star competition that year – at least in the official sense. Despite what must have been a blow to his ego at the time, it managed to launch Lewis’s music career. Festival organizers and audiences alike were sufficiently impressed with Lewis that he booked to perform the following four years.
In that time, the Barracks Stage has grown, but Lewis’s career has taken off in leaps and bounds. Today he’s known as the Funk Master General of New Brunswick. He and his band, The Big Band of Fun, have an extremely tight set and Lewis’s abilities as a natural showman really shine. They’ve performed at huge festivals like Mountain Jam, Burning Man and Glastonbury. So, it’s not all that surprising that four years after his initial loss, everything has come full circle with Lewis being asked to program the Barrack’s stage himself.
“It’s slowly become a welcome home from all of the crazy international touring,” says Lewis. “Last year, I had a conversation with [Festival Director] Brent Staeben about who would best round out the night we were performing on (which ended up being Joyful Noise and Five Alarm Funk). Little did I know that it was the start of some very BIG FUN for the upcoming year.”
Rechristened the BIG FUN in the Barracks stage, there was a tangible shift in the energy there. It was no longer the place to half-begrudgingly come out to support your friends’ bands, but a hive of excitement. It was the stage that captured the wild exuberance of a much wilder festival. It was its own microcosm within Harvest and a completely different world – the small, misunderstood but powerful Mitochondria of a larger whole.
Lewis flooded the line-up with ridiculous, over the top bands that he’d picked up from his own touring. Using the mighty backing of Harvest and his own clout as a performer, Lewis was able to take a risk with something unlike Harvest had ever seen, and it’ll be paying off for years to come.
Where performances like Robert Plant’s left audiences in a near-solemn awe of simply being in his presence (he could have sang the phone book and the audience would still have eaten it up), or singing along to the top 40 with Jason Isbell, Nathaniel Rateliff, or The TransCanada Highwaymen, the BIG FUN in the Barracks stage put an emphasis on audience engagement. Anything could, and did, happen. Conga lines, crowd surfing, speaker climbing, and singalongs about going off to sell a horse, were all part of the package. Bands like Moon Hooch Andy Frasco & The UN and Lemon Bucket Orkestra proved to be completely unpredictable. At times the audience was worked into such a frenzy that it wasn’t always clear whether the real action was on stage on in the crowd.
“All of the acts this year were found from my travels, mixed in with what I thought were the best local fits for the evenings,” said Lewis. “We are lucky to have such incredible local superstars!
“Andy Frasco & The UN have been a hands down (or hands up) favourite. We opened for them and played together a few times at Mountain Jam. I knew that they would be largely unknown at Harvest, but the best discovery act! Going into Harvest, I knew that I’d be able to set up a bit of a story explaining why they are unmissable!
“My hope was to offer something new, something familiar, something exciting, something different, and something FUN! I can honestly say that not one act throughout the entirety of the barracks programming lives together in the same genre. As a listener, it felt fresh and it was so epic to watch the party grow and then watch each headliner put the cherry on top of every night in a completely unique way.”
Which isn’t to say the rest of Harvest fell flat either. Harvest delivered on a lot of fronts: a charming show from Kathleen Edwards at the Fredericton Playhouse, The TransCanada Highwaymen basically performing half of the MuchMusic Countdown from the 90s, Tom Easley Quartet played two flawless sets and Nathaniel Rateliff, Jason Isbell, and local legend Matt Andersen all drew huge crowds. The festival set record numbers for attendance, and the whole city was practically abuzz with a weeklong game of Where’s Robert? with numerous sightings of Plant and his band throughout the city as they practiced ahead of the North American tour.
But the experience between BIG FUN in the Barracks and the rest of the stages was night and day. Rather than basking in a series of songs that I’d loved as long as I’ve been listening to music, I was being engaged in something – something that didn’t feel so much a performance as an interaction. These silly songs I’d never heard before from silly bands I’d never heard left me giddy in a way that live music rarely accomplishes. It was surreal in a way that simply putting on an album in my living room, or experiencing the same album performed, live and verbatim, could not have accomplished.
There was no special room in my heart where these bands already held a place. They just jumped right in and shook me. It was basically basically the auditory equivalent between a lifelong commitment and a one night stand.
“Of course there were concerns,” admits Lewis. “I mean… you were at the Andy Frasco show, right!?”
Lewis is quick to acknowledge the support of Harvest’s festival organizers, and the risk they were willing to take on such an unconventional line-up.
“As most festivals are, the public only witnessed the end result: in this case the fun! But there were so many challenges under the surface,” says Lewis. “Plus, it was my first year being so involved with any festival in such a big way. It was so important to me that everyone had an amazing experience and I took it on as a bit of personal mission at first, but quickly remembered that the best times always involve a team!
“I was chock full of ideas and, thankfully, the Harvest staff members didn’t get frustrated, instead they helped to ‘bring focus’ to a wildly creative mind, like mine. Yin and Yang, baby!”
Lewis says that with the success they saw this year they’re already looking at something bigger, better, and a lot more fun for Harvest’s 30th anniversary next year. While it’s hard to imagine anything better than the swirling vortex of the barrack’s capacity crowd engaged in an impromptu bar mitzvah, or Andy Frasco’s crowd surfing record attempt, we’re going to look forward to whatever it is.
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