‘Mitch would have loved this’

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This article was published 10/07/2022 (899 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An indisputable fact: the Winnipeg Folk Festival would not exist without Mitch Podolak’s contributions.

In 1974, he and a group of likeminded people — ie: socialists, communists and hippies — wanted to start a music and culture festival in a great big field to spread the good word of folk on the strength of taut banjo strings. Quickly, the fledgling organizers ran into an all-too-familiar problem: bureaucratic inertia.

The city wouldn’t say yes to backing the festival unless the province did the same. And when there was some dilly-dallying at the legislature, in Podolak’s son Leonard’s telling, his father did some reconnaissance.

On the desk of the provincial representative with whom the group was meeting, Podolak spotted some blank paper, topped with the ministerial letterhead.

“He took a few sheets of that paper and he wrote a beautiful letter to the City of Winnipeg,” Leonard Podolak said at Birds Hill Park Sunday afternoon, in a story that may be apocryphal.

Apparently, Mitch Podolak had a way with his words, because 48 years later, the Winnipeg Folk Festival has become one of the country’s leading live music festivals, having drawn what’s likely to be a record-setting number of attendees in its first edition since 2019, and the first since the pandemic began.

For Leonard Podolak, his mother/Folk Fest founder Ava Kobrinsky, and a never-ending Folk Fest family tree not defined by biological relations, the 2022 festival was notable not just for marking a return to normalcy: it was the first festival which Mitch Podolak did not live to see or hear about; he died at the age of 72 in August 2019, weeks after the last festival ended.

Three years later, with Leonard acting as de facto emcee, several of Podolak’s apostles took to the microphone Sunday to celebrate their friend and mentor in front of a crowd of hundreds.

“Though I’m not sure he’ll really care, at this point,” joked Al Simmons, a Manitoban entertainment icon who credited Podolak with always challenging him to do more with his work.

At the celebration, less demure than jovial, musicians including Scott Nolan, Rodrigo Munoz, Kate Ferris, Jeremy Penner and Allison DeGroot paid tribute in song and story to Podolak, who tended to give people a chance to shine.

“In 1978 or 1979, I walked into his office,” said Munoz, a local multi-instrumentalist who fronts Papa Mambo. He was a teenager whose family had just fled the Chilean coup, and was looking for a gig at the festival. “(Mitch) knew we were running from someone. And he hired us right away.”

He once spotted Penner carrying his fiddle on the bus and approached him. “Hey,” Penner tells the crowd, mimicking Podolak, wearing a shirt with his friend Mitch’s face on it. “This kid has a fiddle. Let’s invite him over.”

Podolak was a communist, his son tells the crowd. He was not a religious man, except when it came to food, fishing and music, mused clarinettist Myron Schultz.

Throughout the afternoon, each performer seated on stage got up to perform a song that reflected Podolak’s character: there was klezmer music, harking back to his family’s eastern European roots; there was some world music; and there was a lot of banjo.

At one point, six of the instruments and one fiddle were being plucked and strummed simultaneously for a thrilling performance. The players included a lineage of Podolak’s banjo acolytes: his son, Daniel Koulak, and Allison DeGroot. They were not duelling.

“Mitch would have loved this,” said a few people seated in the audience’s first rows.

The people who knew him best all agreed. Ava Kobrinsky, who was married to Podolak for 48 years, said her late husband would have loved seeing all of the people on the festival grounds.

“Oh, it would’ve made him so happy,” she said. “It makes me happy.”

Some people who didn’t know Podolak, who left the festival’s brass in 1986 but remained closely connected to it, were moved to tears by the celebration.

“My dad was the one who brought me here,” said Leanne Canty. “I never met Mitch, but this reminded me of my dad. I couldn’t help crying.”

“I think it went beautifully,” Podolak said backstage after joining with singer Nathan Rogers for an emotional duet about fatherhood, preceded by an impassioned call for increased arts funding.

“Everybody on stage affected my dad and everybody on stage affected him,” he added.

Though the festival changed dramatically in the years since its founding, Leonard Podolak said at its core, it does what it was always meant to do: bringing people together to enjoy music, and the company of others, in a great, big field.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com