The Lethbridge Folk club is in a holding pattern thanks to Covid 19.
 They have had to cancel the remainder of their season which included some excellent blues music  from Carlos Del Junco in March, and Winnipeg bluesman Big Dave McLean in April as well as Colorado bluegrass quartet the Blue Canyon Boys.

“We’ve cancelled the rest of the Spring season. The venues aren’t available, so we aren’t doing open mics, which were at Casa. Basically we haven’t booked anything else because there is too much unknown. And when you book artists, you are paying deposits,” said Lethbridge Folk Cub president Tom Moffatt.
“ It’s disappointing. There are shows I really wanted  to see.

 “Luckily we didn’t lose a lot financially. The artists and venues have been really good about returning deposits,” said Moffatt, noting  he club is waiting to see how things unfold.

“We don’t want to risk the health of our audience by forcing them into a concert situation,” Moffatt continued.

“The artists have expressed interest in returning, but we haven’t booked anything yet,” he said.

Though organizers had high hopes the show would go on, Whoop Up Days is the latest festival to fall to government Covid-19 socially distancing measures.
 “ We thought that because we were the last show of the summer before the midway moved to B.C. for their festival season beginning in Armstrong, that we would be able to continue, but we had a feeling,” said Exhibition Park CEO Rudy Friesen who officially made the announcement on Friday, April 24.

“ We’ve put on a festival every year since 1897, though it started as a fall festival. To my knowledge, the only time it was cancelled was during the First World War when the park was used for infantry training and during the Second World War when the grounds were used as an internment camp of some sort,” he said, adding they started scaling down preparations as soon as Covid 19 hit, while doing their best to remain optimistic.

“It used to be a fall fair in October which celebrated the end of harvest,” he said adding originally Whoop Up Days combined Aggie Days, the home and garden show, the rodeo, farmer’s market and several others which have evolved into very successful individual events.

“The Fair has evolved. And now looking at the vacant grounds, it’s really eerie,” he observed, adding they likely won’t bring back the fall fair.

 Setting aside Whoop Up Days’ massive financial contribution to the community, estimated at $5 million going into the community each summer, Friesen said the most significant loss is the social aspect to the community.

 “Whoop Up Days is a great social gathering and an opportunity for the community to get together. You really miss that social interaction during a pandemic,” he added.

He noted the board and volunteers were just starting the major foot work for the festival. A lot of that was evaluating all of the changes from last year.

“The way the cycle at the beginning of the fair, you start thinking about next year. Our planning for 2020 will carry over to 2021,” he said.

Taylor Ackerman isn’t letting a pandemic stop him from releasing new music.
 The local blues and roots musician just released his first full length CD “Perfect Vision” under the sobriquet “Taylor Ackerman’s Global Acid Reset.”
“I had a couple big shows coming up and I was going to release it anyway,” said Ackerman.

“I was was going to play the Slice with The Perpetrators on May 1, which seemed like a long ways away then, now it’s only four days away. And I was booked to play the South Country Fair, so I was going to release the CD to have them available for them. But the shows got cancelled,” he said.
 “With kids and family and the band’s schedule, I don’t have the capacity to travel a lot,” he continued, noting he played most of the instruments and  sang most of the vocals himself.

‘That’s how I usually work anyway. I make demos and if they are any good, I bring them to the band to work out,” he continued, adding he worked with drummer Devin Gergel on some of the nine songs on “Perfect Vision,” and got him to play on “One Day,” which also features Tyler Bird on bass and extra keyboards from James Phelan.

And the Covid 19 cancellations continue.

The Lethbridge Jazz Festival, originally scheduled for June 12-20 has been cancelled for this year.

“ We’re very disappointed but we’re very cognizant of the safety of our patrons, volunteers and artists,” said Lethbridge Jazz and blues festival president Mike Prociw. This year would have been the tenth anniversary of the festival.

Prociw and the board plan to put all the work they already put into this year into making next year bigger and better.

“It really was the only viable option because we use city venues and artists travel a great distance to perform for us,” he said, emphasizing the health and safety of patrons, volunteers and performers was of utmost importance.