Block Heater – Central United Church

Presented by Folk Festival Society of Calgary

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When

Friday February 14, 2025
Time: 7:00 PM - 12:00 AM

Where

Central United Church
131 7 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2P 0W5, Calgary

About

Light up your life with the Calgary Folk Music Festival’s Block Heater from February 14-15, 2025, powered by ATB. 🌙🌃

Picture this: two star-studded evenings brimming with music and dance, dazzling downtown lights, and the warmth of love in the air. Set your soul aflame this winter with 18 artists across three Calgary venues and get electrified with performances by Kathleen Edwards, Jeremy Dutcher, Black Mountain, Basia Bulat, SUUNS, TEKE::TEKE, Begonia and many more. 

Fill your heart with our Block Heater festival pass on sale now for $99 + fees. Groove down the block between cozy venues just around the corner from one another. Limited wristbands while supplies last!

Tickets are flying like cupid’s arrows! 💘 Block Heater is the family-friendly winter escape that’ll get your heart pumping!

Sammy Volkov & Dana Wylie

performances

February 14, 2025, 7:30 pm - 8:15 pm

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Bio

Edmonton, AB

Some things are meant to be. When Portland/Edmonton songwriter Sammy Volkov released his first album Be Alright! in 2022, Edmontonian Dana Wylie sang backup vocals and the two quickly realized they needed to continue their luscious musical conversation. Following her early experience in theatre, Wylie’s musical path led through Taiwan, where she played jazz, bluegrass, blues and in jug bands before moving to the UK in 2005 and touring steadily for half a decade, releasing three albums before returning to Canada.

While she brought deep musical experience to the duo’s 2024 album, The Day Had to Come, Volkov, too, had been honing his songs in New York at Brooklyn open mics while working in television after living in Los Angeles. Their enthralling, cloudless voices are as clear, true and soaring as a May prairie sky, though their songs’ themes of love gone awry might help you release a little rain of your own. These are stamped by deft lyrical strokes, not a wasted moment, not a wasted movement, completing uncluttered, exquisite songs that are simply beautiful.

MLW

Hubby Jenkins

performances

February 14, 2025, 8:35 pm - 9:25 pm

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Bio

Brooklyn, NY

 

Multi-instrumentalist Hubby Jenkins has spent his career delving deeply into the blues, going way back to the pre-war acoustic era of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Despite being born into the concrete jungle of Brooklyn he’s made his musical home among the old-time spirituals, Black Appalachian music, North Carolina banjo and country blues of the deep south that first emerged into mainstream society’s consciousness through field recordings by dedicated early 20th Century musicologists.

Jenkins played saxophone, cello and viola in high school but found his way to country blues through his late teen obsession with Bob Dylan. He cut his teeth busking in New York, now playing banjo and guitar, leading to an invitation to join the Carolina Chocolate Drops ahead of their final album Leaving Eden contributing guitar, banjo, mandolin, bones and vocals to the Grammy award-winning old-time string band. He later joined founding member Rhiannon Giddens’ band before releasing his debut self-titled album in 2016 and later a four-song EP of spirituals The Fourth Day (2020). These lovingly crafted collections form a pastiche of a bygone era played by a virtuoso player with rich tenor voice who sounds like he might have been transported 100 years into the future from where he was (musically) born.

 

Sean Myers

Basia Bulat

performances

February 14, 2025, 9:45 pm - 11:00 pm

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Bio

Montreal, QC

 

These days, the release of a new Basia Bulat record is something of an event. Her seventh record, Basia’s Palace, will be released later in February after she kicks off her North American tour at Block Heater, giving local audiences an early opportunity to hear some of new songs live. She says writing this album has been different than in the past owing to her family life. She took up Leonard Cohen’s famous habit of writing in the wee early morning hours before the kids woke up, using the quiet and the darkness to reflect and understand the journey of her life so far.

That journey has led an autoharp playing folk singer born in Etobicoke, ON to become one Canada’s most beloved indie pop artists. She’s always written personal songs full of big emotions delivered by her soulful vibrato voice. Always interested in experimenting and pushing for something different (in 2022 she showed up at the Calgary Folk Fest with a string quartet), her first single “Baby” from the new album provides a moment of personal self-doubt delivered with a delicious pop hook, sounding at once like yet another new direction, which is at the same time, vintage Bulat.

 

Sean Myers

Accessibility
  • Wheelchair accessible
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