The coffee house season is winding down. The last LOCALS coffee house is next Saturday, April 17th, 2010 and the last Home Grown will be Friday May 14th, 2010. In the meantime local performers shone at the Home Grown last Saturday evening. In the first half of the show the younger generation was booked ended by the older performers. Barry Garland and his crew opened the show and 11TH AVENUE STOP OVER closed the first half in time for intermission snack time. Some younger performers were sandwiched in between.

Barry Garland (guitar and vocals), Rick Sum (fiddle and mandolin) and Larry Tuck (bass) opened the show with a distinctly country flavoured collection of fiddle tunes (“Golden Slippers” & “Redwings”) before finishing up with the Grateful Dead song “The Ripple”. It is not often that rock and roll and country music can be mentioned in the same breath. But then again rock and roll has been around for over 50 years now so I guess in a sense it is getting to be pretty well old time music now.

A group of young ladies, Kaia Barth-Lessard, Gemma Remple and Devin Fikis, graced the stage with some pretty sweet voices for a couple of solo and duet performances. The songs included “What Do You Say”, “Birds and Boats” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry”. The great thing about young performers is the freshness they bring to stage in both their demeanor and their choice of material. These were all new performers and new songs to me.

The young Blaine Betts is a new performer on the Home Grown stage. Now most of us can play a guitar and if pressured can sing a song but Blaine took it to another level by playing an instrumental. Now instrumental music is not very forgiving and the performer has to nail it convincingly to reach the audience. On the Chet Atkins / Tommy Emmanuel arrangement of “Snowy Mountain Lullaby” Blaine nailed it with a vengeance with his nice clean finger picking and ringing harmonics. This was stellar guitar music.

11th AVENUE STOP OVER is a collection of old musical friends who have never managed to all get together is the same room at the same time to play music. Their get together in the green room just prior to the stage performance was their first and only rehearsal as a coherent group. Beth Crawley on guitar and vocals, Sarah Marriott on harmony vocals, Wally Smith on button accordion and low whistle and Rod Wilson on mandolin took the audience down east to Ontario (“Log Driver’s Waltz”), Newfoundland (“Maid on the Shore”) and Scotland (“The Shearing’s not for you”).

The very young Nick Rodrigues open the second half with some “Idol” styled renditions of “Are you going to be my girl”, “Beautiful Today” (an original piece) and the Beatles cover of “Oh Darling”. Also still a youth, Reese Lesbeck did his piano teacher, Tim Plait, proud with a nicely paced selection of piano pieces that included “Home Would Bound” and “He’s a Pirate”.

The final two acts of the show went to the adults. Long time local area performer Jon Bissett shared the stage with Sarah Marriot to perform a couple of songs that included his original tribute to the late Doug Erickson, “The Man with the Endless Smile”. Allison Blake on fiddle (all the way from Ireland) and Leslie Pink took the show out after a brief Celtic intro followed by some pretty intense blues flavoured jamming before the final Celtic ride out that closed the show.