Bermuda Music Festival: DAY ONE

The stage is set and the stars have arrived, so welcome to the first official day of the Bermuda Music Festival at the Royal Naval Dockyard. The three-day event kicks off tonight with performances by multi platinum musician Wyclef Jean, neo-soul diva Erykah Badu, and Naturally 7, a groovy accapella-meets-R&B act recently discovered by Quincy Jones himself. Never heard of them? Well you will soon. Check out this YouTube video of the soulful septet beat-boxing Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight on a Paris subway. Amazing stuff. Keep an eye out for the Parisian lady at the four-minute mark. If that’s not genuine love I don’t know what is. Best of all, the concert will be held at Bermuda’s historic Keep Yard for the first time in its fourteen-year history (that’s it in the picture above, on a particularly cloudy day). Concertgoers will enjoy the show from the grass, alongside the limestone structure in the foreground, but that’s just not any ‘ol pile of bricks. Called the Ordnance Building and constructed in 1850, this vaulted-ceiling magazine once stored 4,860 kegs of gunpowder for the British Royal Navy and impressions of the powder keg racks remain on the non-sparking, bitumen floor to this day. If you’re anywhere near Dockyard, it makes for an interesting visit. As does the recently renovated Commissioners House and the rest of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. But I’ll save that for another time. This weekend it’s all about the music.