The Small Glories touch down at the Rogue Folk Club next month (in person and online!)
Roots powerhouse duo the Small Glories is Cara Luft and JD Edwards, a musical partnership planted on the Canadian Prairies. Thrown together purely by accident for an anniversary show at Winnipeg’s venerable West End Cultural Centre, the Small Glories could almost make you believe in fate.
They will perform at the Rogue Folk Club June 10 at Mel Lehan Hall as part of a tour of British Columbia. Tickets and information are available at roguefolk.bc.ca.
With a stage banter striking a unique balance between slapstick and sermon, these veteran singer-songwriters have a way of making time disappear, rooms shrink and audiences feel as though they are right there on the stage with the band. It’s not uncommon for listeners to find themselves laughing, dancing, crying, or caught up in a good ol’ fashioned sing-along. Their material is welcoming in terms of subject, folk-pop melody and instrumentation — songs of love, loss, and environment, delivered with soaring, interwoven vocals on various combinations of stomping clawhammer banjo, guitar and harmonica. However, a Small Glories performance is really about what happens in-between the songs.
“The feedback we get from a lot of audiences is that it’s not just about the music for them,” Cara said. “It’s the whole package.”
On record, Cara and JD take the musical synergy honed from hundreds of shows together, and expand it into a new soundscape amplified by pounding drums and other textural embellishments, which only reinforce the magic of their innate chemistry — a chemistry labeled the “Lennon-McCartney syndrome,” by Americana UK, which wrote, “Some things just work together… to witness a performance by the Small Glories is a rare opportunity to experience that indefinable quality that creates perfection.”
Cara, one of the original members of the folk trio the Wailin’ Jennys, and JD duplicate and reinforce each others’ many strengths and yet allow their distinct personalities to shine through, resulting in a live show that is as heartwarming as it is hilarious, as finger-pickingly proficient as it is relatable, and as Canadian as, well… it’s very Canadian. But that hasn’t stopped them from winning over audiences from Nashville to the Australian outback.
Their highly anticipated sophomore album Assiniboine & The Red came out June 2019 on Compass /Red House records and earned both a Juno nod and three Canadian Folk Music Awards.
