Blues musician Ken Hamm will play at the Arts Station on Oct. 26.

Blues musician Ken Hamm will play at the Arts Station on Oct. 26.

Folk and blues musician to play at Arts Station

Canadian folk and blues musician Ken Hamm is set to play at the Arts Station as the sixth performance in their Fall Concert Series.

Canadian folk and blues musician Ken Hamm is set to play at the Arts Station as the sixth performance in their Fall Concert Series.

Hamm has been a professional musician since the late 1960s and has been teaching guitar his entire life. He described his music as “very blues-based and folk-based and traditional-based I guess you could say.”

Although he is a solo performer, Hamm plays a plethora of instruments to keep the audience and himself entertained. “I play a variety of instruments, mostly guitar and national metal steel guitar and I play a dojob guitar and a banjo as well, so I have four different instruments with me on stage and that allows me quite a bit of variety to express myself.”

Hamm, who lives in Forget, Sask., has played in Fernie before and is excited to tour again after taking a six-year hiatus to operate a music store.

“I haven’t been touring for five or six years, not extensively anyway, because I’ve had a store in Forget with my wife – a music store – and we’ve decided to close that down and consequently I said, ‘I can go back on the road and do some tours and see my fans again’,” said Hamm. “It was called Village Music and it was a folk music store. It did quite well but we realized that we have too many interests to just do a store – you need a pretty fixed focus for that.”

His performance at the Arts Station is one stop on a three-week tour across B.C.

“I’m working my way right across to Vancouver Island and then I’ve got almost 10 days of work there and then I work my way back home again. It’s a full loop tour,” he said. He will conduct a workshop in Duncan B.C. as part of the tour.

Hamm is set to play on Oct. 26 at 8 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at the Arts Station or at Freshies.

 

The Free Press