Sarah Harmer at Base31

First concert held at the Drill Hall

Juno award winner Sarah Harmer headlines the first music concert at Base31 last Friday night.

Juno award winner Sarah Harmer headlined the first concert to be held at the Drill Hall in Base31 last Friday night. Backed by a three-piece band, she played a selection of her music that spanned over two decades yet still sounded as fresh as ever. The first musician, however, to play on the stage of the Drill Hall was the County’s Annelise Noronha, who opened the evening. Her acoustic guitar set was the ideal appetizer for the music to come later in the evening, and she memorialized the event by taking the first selfie from the stage with a very enthusiastic crowd in the background. The refurbished Drill Hall is one of the first major projects by PEC Community Partners, the owners of Base31. CEO Tim Jones noted that the site was a whole community in itself when it was built in 1940 as a training facility for aircrews in the Second World War. There was a theatre, barracks, administration buildings and a hospital. The Drill Hall sat adjacent to the parade grounds, and it was where personnel practised their drills. Thanks to the effort of former site administrator Jacqui Burley, the building remained structurally sound and Jones said it made an ideal site for a concert venue. “In its day, it played a convening role—it brought people together for different things. When we purchased the site and saw this space, we thought ‘This is an amazing space.’ It’s got great bones. It’s large, but feels somewhat intimate and we saw an opportunity to have a convening space for the County that allows us to do things at a certain scale, including concerts and events,” said Jones. A new stage—complete with sound and light—has been built in the Drill Hall, together with upgrades in electric power and fire protection. There are new doors, and the floors have been repaired. At the present time there are no water or wastewater facilities, but a process is underway with the municipality to reestablish those connections. PEC Community Partners is refurbishing the site under a methodology called creative placemaking, where the community is involved in the revitalization. “We are building a vision in collaboration with the community. Art has a way of helping to re-interpret a site, to bring people together to explore new things. We think that music and comedy and food are natural ways to attract people to come together,” said Jones.

Sarah Harmer was delighted to be part of the first concert in the Drill Hall. She played a set that spanned from folk to rock to blues, and included some of her older songs like Late Bloomer and the upbeat I am Aglow and her environmental signature song Escarpment Blues, as well as selections from her 2020 CD Are You Gone. She released that last CD in February 2020, after a break of almost a decade, and was just starting her promotional tour when everything shut down. “I was just getting ready to come out of my cave, after 10 years, and had a record ready. We got about a week’s worth of touring in, and then it was back home and head back into hibernation for a while,” she said. She had one virtual concert from her kitchen table that thousands of people tuned in to, but like many people through that time she started growing vegetables and reading a ton of books. She also took advantage of the slowdowns to spend a lot of time with her parents. She said that she actually didn’t write much music during that time. However, her environmental activism remained undiminished. She said that her career as a musician gave the time and flexibility to become an active citizen involved in what is going on in the neighbourhood. “There’s continued risk and vulnerabilities to our natural landscape and our biodiversity and our water. When they come to a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, in Burlington on the Niagara escarpment, to get gravel, when they’ve already got licences for 13 times more than what we actually use annually, I get angry. And because I have the privilege of knowing some of these places, these forests and wetlands, there’s no way!” she said, referring to a battle against gravel extraction on Mount Nemo, a battle that was the subject of Escarpment Blues, and one that she had thought won only to have the company reapply for an extraction permit recently. “There’s a lot of BS that’s being passed off as science by transnational companies, and we need to push the government to stand up against corporate interests,” she said, showing that her passion for the environment still burns strongly.

There are a number of upcoming events at the Drill Hall. For more information, please visit base31.ca.