Bloom 2019

#Bloom2019 is a new, multi-venue music festival taking place in downtown Sudbury. It is dedicated to presenting many styles of exciting music, with roots all over the world – it’s a musical world party!

Bombino • Shad • Kobo Town • Pierre Kwenders • The Battle of Santiago • Mehdi Cayenne • Greyson Gritt • The Young Novelists • Marc Nadjiwan • Chippy Nonstop • Gurpreet Chana :: The Tabla Guy • LAL • JUMPLE • Oonga • Catherine Taddo • Marc Meriläinen • + a few surprise artists & pop-up shows

• FULL SCHEDULE: nlfb.ca/bloom/schedule
• PASSES: nlfb.ca/bloom
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SUDBURY, ON, January 16:

BLOOM 2019 ANNOUNCES ITS FULL LINE-UP

Northern Lights Festival Boréal has already announced West African guitar hero Bombino as a headliner. Since the last announcement, he has become the first Nigerien artist to be Grammy nominated. Just another of many reasons to check out his infectious Tuareg desert blues-rock-groove. Juno nominated hip-hop innovator Shad was also announced as a co-headliner. Both will play The Grand on March 8th, along with The Battle of Santiago. Concert tickets are now available.

2018 Juno winners Kobo Town will join the lineup. They create an infectious blend of witty social commentary, calypso, dancehall reggae and trombone-heavy brass. Fronted by émigré Trinidadian songwriter Drew Gonsalves, Kobo Town have been a repeat favourite at NLFB’s summer festival.

Ottawa’s Mehdi Cayenne has an impressive repertoire of post-punk songs that blend world, pop, folk rock and funk in his very particular way. His lyrical (and often theatrical) brand of francophone rock has already blown away Sudbury crowds, and Bloom 2019 is thrilled to welcome him back to the Nickel City.

Award winning First Nations rock band NADJIWAN will also perform, celebrating 25 years together. One of Canada’s most sought after tabla players, Gurpreet Chana, blends the time honoured sound of the tabla drum, with the infinite possibilities of modern electronic music. Greyson Gritt, subarctic folk-blues musician and member of Juno Award winning group Quantum Tangle, joins the line-up from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Marie’s Catherine Taddo will bring her distinct take on the blues. Toronto collective LAL blends South-Asian roots, West Indian fruits, melancholic vocals and downtempo electro grooves. LAL was a crowd favourite at Sudbury’s Up Here festival in recent years.

Bloom 2019 also has a couple of the country’s most progressive DJs, spinning music from around the world. Toronto’s Chippy Nonstop and Montreal’s Oonga will light up the dancefloor with beats drawing from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, India, and beyond.

A schedule of show times has now been released, and a few more artists will be announced in the coming weeks.

Bloom 2019 is thrilled to integrate itself into the downtown core. In the spirit of discovery and diversity, Bloom will take place in multiple Sudbury venues including The Grand, The Townehouse Tavern, little Montreal Bar & Deli, Zig’s, The Parkside Older Adult Centre,and other surprise venues to be announced. Keeping with NLFB’s theme of including something for everyone, Bloom 2019 has scheduled a full weekend of afternoon, evening and late-night programming.

New ticket prices

Advanced Full Weekend Passes and Headline Show Tickets are available online (www.nlfb.ca/bloom) or at local ticket outlets: A & J Home Hardware (469 Bouchard St), Old Rock Coffee (212 Minto St), and Jett Landry Music (1119 Lasalle Blvd). Full Weekend Passes are $60 and Headliner Show tickets featuring Shad, Bombino and Battle of Santiago are $35 adv.

Meltdown Competition

The NLFB Meltdown Competition 2019 is an event where emerging artists from Northern Ontario compete for their chance to play a paid gig at Northern Lights Festival Boréal 2019 (Jul. 4-7). Each artist will have 15 minutes to impress the judges. This is an open audition with a Band and Solo categories. The public is encouraged to drop by and watch. This event is scheduled as part of our new festival, Bloom 2019! This is an excellent opportunity for emerging Northern Ontario artists to gain valuable exposure, and perform their best music in a fun environment! Past winners have included Hello Holiday, Spencer Jose, The Keyframes, and Patricia Cano. Applications are now open.

Bloom Dining Club

NLFB will be partnering with downtown restaurants to participate in the “Bloom Dining Club.” Restaurants will provide Bloom Weekend Pass holders with a dine-in discount for the weekend of March 8-10. If restaurants are interested in participating, please contact Izzy at marketing@nlfb.ca.
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Sudbury, Dec. 3rd, 2018:

BLOOM 2019 releases exciting lineup teaser

New March festival to feature West African guitar legend, Canadian hip-hop icon + more

The team that annually presents the iconic Northern Lights Festival Boréal brings you Bloom 2019, March 8-10, in downtown Sudbury, ON. This will be a brand-new, multi-venue festival, dedicated to presenting a diversity of music with roots all around the world. World, folk, indie, rock, pop, hip-hop – anything is possible. What ties it all together is a positive vibe, and a search for the coolest music from all around the world!

TICKETS:

Festival Passes are currently available online only, at www.nlfb.ca/bloom. Earlybird Full Festival Passes for Bloom 2019 are currently available for $50 each. Due to venue capacity, tickets at all levels will be in very limited quantities. Individual concert tickets are not yet available.

THE MUSIC:

Anchoring the festival lineup, will be desert-blues-rock guitar sensation Bombino, who has been called ‘the world’s best guitarist’ by Noisey and ‘the Sultan of Shred’ by The New York Times. All over the world, the grainy hypnosis of his horizontal grooves, the virtuosity of his guitar style and aerobic explosiveness of his stage shows have hooked a broad gamut of fans, ranging from grey-bearded rock and blues habitués, to world-music devotees to young hirsute hipsters -broad enough to include The Rolling Stones, Arcade Fire, and Queens of the Stone Age. The Black Keys and Dirty Projectors are also known Bombino enthusiasts, with members of both groups taking on production duties for two different, acclaimed records.

Omara “Bombino” Moctar was born in Tidene, Niger, an encampment of nomadic Tuaregs near the city of Agadez. The Tuareg have long been recognized as warriors, traders and travellers of the Sahara Desert – a nomadic people descended from the Berbers of North Africa and for centuries have fought against colonialism and the imposition of strict Islamic rule. Bombino has endured wars, droughts, multiple exiles, and rebellions – even losing two band members to the armed conflict in 2007.

In 1990, Bombino picked up his first guitar, and never looked back. At the end of the 2nd Tuareg rebel-lion in 2010, the sultan of Agadez permitted Bombino to perform in a first-ever concert for peace at the base of the Grand Mosque. Not long after, Bombino launched his first international album and world tour. Music enthusiasts around the world quickly began to take notice.

In November 2017, Bombino and his group traveled to Morocco to record his latest album, Deran. Bombino wished to return to Africa to record and to step out of the shadow of celebrity producers to create the most authentic expression of his music possible. Deran quickly hit #1 on the iTunes World Charts, hailed by critics around the world as an instant classic. Bombino will co-headline Friday, March 8th at The Grand in Sudbury.

Co-headlining the festival’s feature concert is multi Juno winning hip-hop artist Shad. If you boil down Shad’s trajectory as a hip-hop artist up to this point, it all comes down to love. At a show, his people stare up at him with unconditional amounts of the stuff and he has used his platform as a rapper, a musician, and a writer, to search for and highlight all the love this hard world has to offer.

Shad’s family settled in London, Ontario after fleeing the Rwandan genocide. He came up like a lot of first-generation Canadian kids, with this cultural duality and the sense that this good country had some baggage that he’d have to unpack someday. He has a Master’s degree, which he earned living in Vancouver for a few years but has since settled in Toronto.

He has released five dynamic solo albums. Three were nominated for Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize and 2010’s TSOL won at The JUNO Awards in 2010. In the past five years, Shad has elevated his profile and practice by emerging as a vital broadcaster: after departing his hosting gig on CBC Radio’s q, he went on to host the Hip-Hop Evolution docu-series (available on Netflix, whose 2016 season was re-leased by HBO Canada and earned both a prestigious Peabody Award and an International Emmy Award. Shad will co-headline Friday, March 8th at The Grand in Sudbury.

Toronto-based group The Battle of Santiago will also appear Bloom 2019’s feature concert, combining classic Afro-Cuban rhythms and vocals with a distinctly Canadian post-rock spirit and sensibility. The result is a wholly unique sound that tells a universal 21st Century story, transcending borders while staying rooted in one city’s immigrant experience. The band’s Juno-nominated album La Migra mixes Afro-Cuban Yoruba chants with subtle electronica and rumbas, and post-rock experimentalism. Their multi-media live show integrates digital visual art, live musical performance and audience interaction.

Also joining the Bloom 2019 roster will be Toronto’s JUMPLE, a band of crazed musical gypsies that are simply impossible to beat. With all members of the band hailing from different parts of the former USSR, there is a distinct cultural and musical influence that clearly sets this band apart. It’s very rare to see a live band that can coax a crowd into dancing the way the Jumple can – they get people out of their seats and on their feet. Rocking flamboyant costumes, synchronized dance moves and an anything-goes attitude, they put on one of the zaniest and most compelling performances around.

These exciting artists are just the first round of lineup to be announced for Bloom 2019, with more de-tails to be announced in the coming months. Plans for the celebration also include: a pay-what-you-can concert for all ages on March 9th; internationally flavoured DJ dance parties; and surprise pop-up performances. Current festival venues are The Grand, The Townhouse Tavern & little Montreal Bar & Deli, all on Elgin St. in downtown Sudbury. Several more venues are TBA.

Music lovers are invited to enjoy the hottest party of the spring, all while learning a bit more about each other and the world we live in through music. For more information visit nlfb.ca/bloom.
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