Laila has won National Jazz Awards as SOCAN Composer of the Year and Keyboardist of the Year. Tracing Light, received a JUNO nomination for Best Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. She has played some of the world’s most prestigious venues like Tokyo’s Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall. She’s toured with Grammy award winners Paula Cole and Suzanne Vega and recorded with Sting. Laila Biali is an eclectic-but-focused album. Choice covers include Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going to Rain Today, Coldplay’s Yellow and the album closer, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. It’s catchy and sophisticated, where melodies take thrilling left turns and pre-choruses give way to instrumental interludes. One minute Biali is soaring over a bluesy storm of handclaps and hard-charging keyboard riffs, the next she is pouring out her soul on an impassioned, slow-burning plea for empathy. It’s pop music, but the experimental, distinctly human variety. She’ll be accompanied by Jon May on drums and Kodi Hutchinson on bass.

Andrea Nixon

Lennie Gallant has recorded eleven albums which have won him a host of awards and nominations from the JUNOs, East Coast Music Awards, and Les Prix Eloizes. He was recently honored with the Canadian Folk Music Award for Artist of the Year. He is the 2017 East Coast Music Awards Entertainer of the Year and also won the 2017 ECMA Folk Recording of the Year for his live album, Searching For Abegweit. His album, When We Get There was nominated for a Juno Award and went up to the International Space Station with Canadian astronaut Julie Payette. Inducted into the Order of Canada it was said: “Songs like Peter’s Dream, Island Clay, Man of Steel and The Hope for Next Year, articulate the feelings of many caught up in desperate situations beyond their control, and at the same time celebrate the beauty of lifestyle and landscape with their strong poetry and stirring narratives.”

Robbie Bankes

After taking nearly a decade off, to live off-grid, grow her own food, and raise her daughter, Laura exploded back onto the 2017 festival scene. With her stellar guitarist, Terry Hunt, she showcased a whole new batch of songs that left audiences leaping to their feet, mid-set. She has expanded her story-rich, socially conscious repertoire to include field hollers, civil rights era songs and gospel music into her deep catalogue of original songs. Media have struggled to define this inimitable musician’s colorful style, which embraces bits of the blues, bluegrass, jazz, folk, gospel, reggae, and country. Laura has sometimes called her music “folk-funk,” “Afro-celtic,” or “hip-alachian.” Regardless of how she is described, Laura has an indisputable and uncanny knack for enthralling audiences from all walks of life, from octogenarians who line up to hear straight-ahead bluegrass to the pierced-and-tattooed set to their middle-aged parents.

Shaye Zadravec

Siblings Qristina & Quinn Bachand have won Irish Music Awards for Top Traditional Group
and Top Duo. They’ve received sixteen nominations for Canadian Folk Music Awards, Western Canadian Music Awards and Vancouver Island Music Awards. Multi-instrumentalist Quinn is a Slaight Scholar at Berklee College of Music in Boston, while fiddler Qristina has an MA in Irish Traditional Music Performance from the University of Limerick. Qristina & Quinn have developed their own ‘voice’, fusing styles such as Old-Time, Celtic, Folk and Jazz. Their new CD, Little Hinges, features a hint of grunge, a dash of noir, a healthy sprinkling of Celtic and a dollop of rootsy goodness, engaging contemporary listeners with jaw-dropping effect. While their performances speak to the heart of traditional roots music, they introduce their own new approach. They artfully meld heart-swelling, stomp and clap Celtic Roots with progressive Indie Folk, with results that are provocative, stimulating and thoroughly intoxicating.

Their CDs have received three JUNO nominations and three Canadian Folk Music Awards. Violinist Chris McKhool and guitarist Kevin Laliberté earned this year’s Ontario Songs From the Heart Instrumental Award for Road to Kfarmishki. McKhool and Richard Bona also won the Folk Music From Around the World award for the song Sing for Kwanzaa. With their CD, Subcontinental Drift, they serve up a blend of ragas, reels and rumbas with special guest, sitar master Anwar Khurshid who will perform with them at the Nick. Thrilling their audiences with their genre-hopping passport of Celtic reels, flamenco, Gypsy-jazz, Arabic, Cuban, and South Asian rhythms, Sultans of String celebrate musical fusion and human creativity with warmth and virtuosity. Fiery violin dances with rumba-flamenco guitar, while bass and percussion lay down unstoppable grooves. Acoustic strings meet with electronic wizardry to create layers and depth of sound, while world rhythms excite audiences to their feet with the irresistible need to dance.

Benjamin Dakota Rogers

His introductory album, Wayfarer, and sophomore album, Strong Man’s Address to the Circus Crowd, each earned Canadian Folk Music Award nominations for Young Performer of the Year. This fall, Benjamin received the Folk Music Ontario Songs From the Heart, Roots and Blues Award for The Soldier Song. With strong influences stemming from traditional music and the east coast, Benjamin’s hard-driving fiddle technique is transformed into his own contemporary style. With his unique voice, Benjamin’s third album, Whisky & Pine, delivers reflective emotion and warm harmonies. His poetic ballads blend flawlessly with his rousing guitar and fiddle compositions for an engaging live performance.

Tickets for the following 2018 concerts are on sale now at Brown Paper Tickets.    

Mar 24:     Qristina and Quinn Bachand with opener Amelie Patterson

Apr 7:       Jack Semple with opener Maddie Storvold