Great Big Sea of folk arrives soon By Ken Barr For the Daily What did you do for New Year's? Did you reunite with your high school friends back home? Did you drive down to Florida for the Orange Bowl? Did you watch fireworks over the Thames or from the Champs Elysses? No matter how you celebrated the Millennium, it is pretty tough to compete with a New Year's party at which 90,000 men, women and children have gathered to appreciate, applaud and adore you. Yet, the Canadian band Great Big Sea enjoyed just that - returning to their native St. John's, Newfoundland after a extensive tour to perform in concert and welcome the New Year. Surprisingly, Great Big Sea was quite worried their homecoming would be completely lost in the Millennium shuffle - worried that revelers would be more concerned with the countdown and the champagne toasts to even notice four men and their traditional (yet modernized) Celtic-inspired music. These fears were quickly allayed when Great Big Sea's entrance on stage met with the applause and devotion of tens of thousands of devoted fans, fans more excited to cheer on their countrymen than to worry about the trivialities of the New Year. Ann Arbor residents will have a chance to experience the power of Great Big Sea at Hill Auditorium this Saturday as part of the 23rd Annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival. The folk festival is a major national music event: Besides Great Big Sea, it features Shawn Colvin (of "Sunny Came Home" fame), Arlo Guthrie (legendary son of the even more legendary Woody Guthrie), Beth Nielson Chapman, The Hot Club of Cowtown, Anne Hills, Fred Eaglesmith, and David Barrett. Masters of ceremonies Matt Watroba and Robert Jones will appear on behalf of Detroit's WDET Radio (101.9 FM). The concert, which usually lasts between five and six exciting hours, benefits Ann Arbor's bastion of quality folk, bluegrass and world music: the Ark. The Ark, now located on Main Street at Liberty, has been a bulwark of local music and the arts for more than 30 years. Fans of folk music already know that there will be no better single display of talent on one stage than the upcoming annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival, but even folk neophytes should make it a point to attend. Not only will they recognize Grammy Award-winning headliner Shawn Colvin, but The Ark predicts that Fred Eaglesmith's gritty, passionate songs about Everyman's struggle will appeal to students. Eaglesmith has worked with such class acts as the Cowboy Junkies and been compared to Neil Young, Lyle Lovett and Tom Waits. The music of Beth Nielson Chapman runs the gamut from pop to country, while Anne Hills possesses a voice desribed as pure, luminous, crystalline and irresistible. Millions have unkowingly heard David Barrett's compositions at both the Seoul Olympics and the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and who wouldn't get a kick out of a band called The Hot Club of Cowtown (a swingin', singin' string trio with a country flair? On second thought, don't answer that). Matt Watroba has been Detroit's voice of folk music for over a decade via his acclaimed "Folks Like Us" radio show (Saturdays, 12-3 p.m. on 101.9 FM). Watroba points out that folk music is inherently hard to define, but might be classified as predominantly acoustic "songs of the human heart, songs that celebrate the wonderfully ordinary things about extraordinary human beings." Watroba often performs at the Ark and will be intermittently performing while hosting the folk festival along with his colleague Robert Jones, a blues DJ for WDET. Great Big Sea has a habit of utterly astonishing those who do not know what to expect. Most have never heard four men with acoustic instruments produce such a powerful sound, and never before has traditional folk and Celtic music sounded so "cool." Yet this band, whose records go instantly platinum in Canada, is relatively unheard of in the United States. Those who did know what to expect were shattered two years ago when the band was tied up at the U.S. border in a Customs bureaucracy and unable to make it to Ann Arbor as scheduled. Now, with all their papers in order, Great Big Sea is eager to be part of the folk festival. The band performs a mix of originals and modernized folk songs and with more than 1000 folk songs in the Newfoundland cannon, they will have little trouble finding new material to record and to serve as inspiration. Their second U.S. release, "Turn," is due out on March 7 and the band is poring over the tapes from 41 live shows to compile a live album for release towards the end of the year. The Hill Auditorium crowd this Saturday will experience their sound firsthand and be introduced to the music of their storied peers. The Ann Arbor Folk Festival is at 6 p.m. on Saturday. Call 764-TKTS for tickets or more information. Courtesy of Sire Records Great Big Sea joins FM radio darling Shawn Colvin for this weekend's Folk Festival. Originally on page 5B in the 1-27-2000 issue of the Daily.