If you look on the ‘About Me’ not on the side of this blog, I mention that I produced most of Montreal’s folk-oriented concerts in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a torch that I picked up from people like the late Sam Gesser, the late Gary Eisenkraft, Chuck Baker and a few others who produced concerts and ran folk clubs before me.
In this decade, that torch has been carried by the husband-and-wife team of Matt Large and Rebecca Anderson who founded Hello Darlin’ Productions and the Wintergreen Concert Series about seven or eight years ago. From the time Matt and Rebecca started, I’ve seen them follow the same kind of inspiration and motivation that guided Sam, Gary, Chuck and me back in the day. For all of us, and for Matt and Rebecca now, it was always about the love of the music, about giving the artists that make that music, and the audiences that appreciate it, the respect they deserve.
Matt and Rebecca have done a remarkable job of presenting folk-oriented music in Montreal, probably the hardest – for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into here – big city in North America in which to produce this kind of music. They’ve brought some of the world’s finest folk-oriented artists to Montreal stages and supported our own home-grown artists. I’m really proud of them and the job they’ve done and continue to do.
Matt and Rebecca have announced an incredible line-up of concerts for the coming months. You can see their up-to-date concert listings on the Hello Darlin’ website. I urge you to get out and support as many of those concerts as you can. They’re all worth it and I’ll be blogging more extensively about some of those concerts in the weeks and months to come.
--Mike Regenstreif
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