High Notes Music Festival will animate the mountains with the sound of music from March 22nd to 24th. The festival at Panorama Mountain Resort offers a medley of free events mixed with ticketed shows highlighting talented Canadian artists.
Friday’s shows will include a musical feast by Ken Lavigne served with dinner and wine at Restaurant elevenFIFTY, followed by performances from The Frontiers and Derina Harvey Band.
On Saturday evening, guests at the Great Hall will hear from Tiger Moon, Diyet & The Love Soldiers and The Jerry Cans.
For all the details and additional shows, visit www.panoramaresort.com/panorama-today/high-notes/.
Diyet & The Love Soldiers
Diyet, of Diyet & The Love Soldiers, was born in a tent and grew up in the wild expanse of the Yukon, where children are “really treasured and prized.” She was raised not only by her family but by the collective in the indigenous Kluane community.
“You don’t really ever feel lonely,” Diyet said, but in her teens she couldn’t wait to leave the land of her childhood in search of freedom and adventure.
She spent many years in Vancouver and lived in the Netherlands, but was nostalgic for the mountains of her youth.
“The freedom I actually craved was the freedom I had as a child,” she said. “It’s a real pull to come back to my community and to be involved in that lifestyle. The life and the tradition and the culture is so strong. It’s not something that is forgotten, and when you don’t have it you long for it.”
She moved back home to the country’s tallest mountain range and settled on the shores of a glacial lake, where she is immersing her two children in their culture and where she said daily life revolves “around landscape and land.”
It’s no surprise then that nature plays heavily into the music Diyet & The Love Soldiers perform. The theme is so pervasive that one fan told her their show “has many peaks and valleys.”
One of the trio’s songs, Ice, is about the perils of crossing the lake near her home as the ice melts and how it would feel to lose someone to a watery grave.
“You have to be really cautious out there. And there’s stories of people who have fallen through the ice, and especially when they take dog teams out because the dogs are ahead so they can’t really see what’s underneath them,” she said. “No matter how humans try to control everything, we have no control over Mother Nature, absolutely none. And it’s sort of the one thing in our human existence that, try as we might, we can’t defeat that or overcome that or control how it’s going to unfold.”
While their show reflects the Kluane region, she said she expects the music to resonate strongly with their audience at Panorama Mountain Resort as locals will also be intimately familiar with mountain settings and the joys and perils rugged nature has to offer.
“They will understand what it’s like to be sort of in the middle of nowhere and sort of be surrounded by these peaks, be surrounded by snow or, in the summer, be wrapped up in the sort of green velvet that covers everything,” she said, adding that she hopes to “perhaps maybe inspire (Valley residents) to fall in love with where they live again.”
Diyet is eagerly anticipating her first visit to Panorama, going skiing and seeing the other performers at High Notes Music Festival.
“It’s wonderful to get to connect with fellow musicians,” she said.
She toured with Ken Lavigne previously, and called him “quite the showman.”
About her friends in The Gerry Cans, who are also from the North, she said: “Every once in a while you just connect with these bright lights.”
