It has been four or five years since Calgary klezmaniacs the  Plaid Tongued Devils came to town, so it might not have been  too much of a surprise that very few people were hear them wind of the SOAR Emerging Artists festival at CASA.

 CASA was hot in more ways then one, which is why most of the well dressed audience hung out in the lobby or outside the building. 

But the Plaid Tongued Devils kept the ones dancing inside the CASA community room which sounded great.

By the second set a lot of the people had wandered home or  elsewhere to one of the many other gigs happening in town.

The band featured one fiddle player ( I remember them having two hot fiddle players one of the last times they were in Lethbridge), an eight string acoustic guitarist, bass, drums and charismatic Taber raised frontman Ty Semaka who had boundless energy and a weird sense of humour.

Belly dancers weaved seductively in front of the stage  during the Plaid Tongued Devil’s electric fiddle klezmer powered  version of surf classic “Mirsirlou,” which started of slow and built up to a frenetic pace.

The belly dancers kept time in time with all.
 “Bag of Snakes,” was one of many highlights.

Unfortunately Winnipeg musician  Lindsey White didn’t have a great turnout for her first Lethbridge performance at the Owl Acoustic Lounge, June 6.

 there was a lot going on in the downtown  core, bust she had about a dozen people, in the room, most of them not paying attention.

 I arrived in the middle of a solo electric guitar version of a Foo Fighters song. But she switched to  keyboards for the last couple songs of her set.

Several from her new CD ‘ Renegade. She had a smooth, smoky, jazzy voice.

 Some of the highlights were “ Heart Strike” and Stronger.”

 I unfortunately only caught the last of the three big cabaret nights at CASA marking The SOAR Emerging Artists Festival, June 5.

I arrived in time to catch Jesse Plessis playing a complicated  piano piece which featured dissonant chord sand jarring moments of silence.

 After that was a short play by Cassandra Watson about two room mates. 

One loses it and gets fired from his job so he tries to figure out what to do with his life with the help of his bad influence friend who convinces him to go into the drug distribution business.

 The CASA  community room has a pretty high ceiling, which leads to a lot of echoes which made it difficult to understand some of the dialogue.

 There was some nice spoken word from Raine Sillito backed by Neil Fox playing pretty arpeggios on guitar.

 After that, crazy clowns Aimieé McGurk and Meredith Pritchard had some high energy  child like  fun making  a mess as consumers with band aids,  Kentucky Fried chicken, a slinky and a whole lot of mess on the floor.

 Commercials for popular products like a Slinky and Kentucky Fried chicken played din the background as the duo raced around the stage. They ended their show by “making dinner” for the audience out of candies, raw eggs, watermelon, band aids and  whatever else they could find.

Lethbridge outlaw country band the Coal Creek Boys  don’t play Lethbridge  much anymore, so I had to catch at least one of their shows at Casino Lethbridge over the past weekend.

 I caught the second set of  the touring band’s June 5 show.

Instead of playing their usual hits, they were in a jamming kind of mood John Paul Smith played subtle and tasteful guitar playing on several new songs including a blues infused jam and a longer song about bootlegging in the Crowsnest Pass.

John Paul Smith, bassist Jesse Roads and drummer Sam Paul played a loose, yet tight set up up tempo country and folk music.

They didn’t have a lot of people there for their second set, but most of the people there were two stepping.

 They ended their second set with a  jam on the Steve Miller Band’s song “ The Joker”  sung by Jesse Roads.