麻豆视频

National and award winning blues artist Kat Danser will be kicking off her 17 date Canadian blues tour at the Happy Nun Caf茅 in Forget, SK on Feb. 21st.

In a recent interview with the singer, Danser spoke of performing in Saskatchewan and of her love for blues music. Danser has an impressive resume, having performed at the Calgary International Blues Festival, the Winnipeg Folk Festival and much more across the U.S. and Canada. Recently she won the "best blues album award" by the Alberta International Blues Foundation and was also nominated for the Western Canadian music award for blues recording of the year. She collaborated with Juno award winning producer Steve Dawson for her latest album "Baptized in Mud." For those who yearn for local music, Danser qualifies as she was born and raised on a farm north of Hwy 1 and said performing in small town Saskatchewan is like coming home.

"My heart is a heart of a prairie farm girl and my music fits really well into small settings as well as larger ones but in smaller settings it brings a certain ease over me - in my performance I don't have the same kind of nervousness or anything like that," she said.

She performed at the Happy Nun Caf茅 about three years ago and in other areas in southeast Saskatchewan as well, such as Kenosee Lake and Manor.

"They're just so nice to me and in fact that community has been supportive of my career and one of the great Canadian blues players of all time lives in Forget," she said.

The artist she refers to is Ken Hamm, who she said has also been very supportive of her career and added her return to the area will be very exciting.

She moved to Alberta when she was 20 in the late 80's for work and never permanently moved back to the province. But stressed she is still a big Rough Rider fan and affectingly calls her tour of Canada, the Grey Cup tour. Danser writes her songs from her own experiences and described her music as being really straight ahead and said it's not afraid to tackle issues that people face in real life.

"Not everybody just falls in love and that's it, there are all sort of things that happen in life and its usually poor finances, broken relationships, violence, alcoholism, those kinds of things. But it always ends up with 'you know what man, it's just awesome to be living," she said.

"No matter what we are faced with we get to make a decision about how we're going to live our life, if we're going to live it in a positive way or in a negative way. If we are going to be nice to people, how we're going to be, we all get a chance to make those decisions no matter what we've been faced with."

Through the years of performing all over Canada, Danser said her pivotal moment came when she was performing in Toronto at the 25th Anniversary of Canadian Women in Blues at Massy Hall.

"I got a standing ovation after doing my third song, so I felt like I had been, for the first time really seen as person who has something to say about the blues. So that was a pivotal moment for me in terms of my confidence," Danser said. Her Canadian tour ends in Ottawa on Nov. 29 and her next move after that will be trying to break into the European market and trying to keep her performances scattered throughout the US and Canada. "You can balance your career out, at the end of the day when you have a career that's going to be decades long, like mine will be and is - you only have so many high profile places to play in Canada," she said.