Arts & Life

Gord Bamford and Joe Nichols are the juice in the bottle, but tonight's concert at CN Centre has a different kind of cork. You could call them an urban jug band, you could call them slickgrass or Mumford's country cousins.

You don't have to be Atom Egoyan or James Cameron to get called a filmmaker. If you make commercials for local TV or websites, you are a filmmaker. If you make short stories on camera with your buddies, you are a filmmaker.

Gord Bamford is one of Canada's country gentlemen and as a good ambassador he is sharing his limelight with a visitor from America. When Bamford rolls his Certified Country Tour across the nation this spring he will have a co-headliner alongside him.

Being an all-female vocal trio from Winnipeg is staking a bold claim. The city has a history in that department as wide as the prairies and as deep as the Red River in a spring hot flash.

When you get 26 artists together, you inevitably get all kinds of styles and personalities.

Game review

The Awakening Music Festival is holding a wakeup event in Prince George. The annual electronic music extravaganza - the largest of its kind in the northern region - happens July 15-18 in the mountain splendor of the Sukunka Valley near Tumbler Ridge.

Art is communication. Art is expressing one's self. The best artists are the ones who say with their art the things broad groups of us were thinking about, or dreaming about, and, perhaps, didn't even have formal wording for.

With the cast and crew of the current TNW play there to enjoy the moment, Theatre North West unveiled the set of plays they will show the city next season.

Getting in the last word is not the concern of any writer. Getting their first words out to the public is more of a challenge. A lot of first words will be uttered next week by the freshest voices in the local writing world.