Swim in the fun of Great Big Sea

For the members of Great Big Sea, a concert isn’t about performing for an audience. It’s about performing with an audience.

And the Newfoundland-based band will perform in Olympia on Wednesday night.

“People like the fact that we encourage them to participate and become part of the concert,” said Bob Hallett, a founding member of the band who plays an array of traditional instruments and sings.

“A lot of people these days are afraid to sing in public; they are afraid of the sound of their own voice,” he said. “We just encourage people to sing with us, and after a while they do. They become part of the concert; they’re singing and dancing and clapping, and it becomes as much theirs as it is ours. It’s much more fun to go and do something than it is to go and watch something.”

That kind of do-it-yourself spirit is how the band members learned traditional music to begin with.

“Up until very recently, traditional music was popular music in Newfoundland,” Hallett said. “Up until the ’60s, there was no outside TV or radio. Entertainment was something people did themselves rather than something that came from somewhere else.

“Learning to play music was like learning to throw a ball or make a cup of tea. It wasn’t a really formal process; it was more osmosis.”

Did he ever dream of becoming a professional musician, or did he learn music just as a matter of course?

Both.

“It seemed a bit of an absurd fantasy, like becoming an astronaut or a superhero,” Hallett said. “I played a bit of guitar, but I didn’t have a great electric guitar and big amps. I knew that playing the button accordion and the tin whistle was not going to be the route to rock stardom.

“It turned out it was, but that did not seem plausible when I was 14 years old.”

The band is Newfoundland-based in more ways than one. Growing up, Hallett and fellow band members Alan Doyle and Sean McCann were deeply steeped in the traditional music of their native land.

A reviewer for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review wrote of the band’s 2008 “Fortune’s Favour” that it is “tethered to the band’s musical past” but with “a great big (no pun) rock ’n’ roll feel.”

A Washington Post reviewer wrote: “Great Big Sea makes an explosively joyful noise that is bright and melodic, passionate and heartfelt.”

Hallett put it this way: “We’re trying to make popular music, but rather than building it on blues or jazz or hip-hop or whatever, we’re building it on the traditional music of Newfoundland.”

Great Big Sea

What: The band builds its music on the traditional sounds of its native Newfoundland.

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. S.E., Olympia

Tickets: $25.50-$37.50

Information: 360-753-8586