Salluit Music Festival ends on a high note

Kathy Snowball ,with her accordion, gets people dancing at the Salluit Music Festival. (Photo by Clement Fevrier, special to Nunatsiaq News)

The Salluit Music Festival went out with a bang Sunday night, ending with more than 30 minutes of fireworks — a fitting end for the event that was postponed in late June due to a tuberculosis outbreak.

Performers like Northern Haze, David Hart Juurini and Kathy Snowball filled the festival’s five-day schedule.

For musician Johnny Saunders, a singer-songwriter still new to the music scene, “this experience has really been life-altering.”

Saunders, from Kuujjuaq, recently decided to quit his full-time job as an electrician to focus on music. When he saw the Salluit Music Festival was looking for musicians, he threw his name in the hat but didn’t expect much to come of it.

Then the day before the event started on July 26, Saunders was contacted.

“I got a message saying to come to Salluit for a last-minute invitation to the festival,” he says. “I hesitated for a millisecond, and then I said yes.”

Going in, he wasn’t all that sure of himself — “I thought my friends were complimenting me because they are my friends,” he says.

But by performing at the festival and seeing the response from the crowd and from other musicians, it gave Saunders a confidence boost to start performing more.

Johnny Saunders takes a selfie in front of the Salluit crowd while performing at the music festival. (Photo courtesy of Johnny Saunders)

Events like this help musicians throughout Nunavik learn to be comfortable performing in front of a crowd and having a back-and-forth with established musicians.

Before he went on, Saunders was nervous. Then he saw other musicians, who had been performing for years, in the same state of mind as he was.

“It was a relief to find this information, to know that at your 30th show, or at your 50th show, you’re still going to be nervous,” Saunders says.