Big Ears 2019: Performances Seen over the Four Days

I finally made it to the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN this year!  Here's a list of every musical performance I saw over the four days.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan - The Standard

Kukangendai - The Mill and Mine

Very Very Hot Evil - The Pilot Light

Altered Statesman - The Pilot Light

Friday, March 22, 2019

Bela Fleck and Edmar Castaneda - St. John's Episcopal Cathedral

Joep Beving - Knoxville Museum of Art

Mary Halvorson's Code Girl - The Mill and Mine

***late afternoon dog-walk break***

Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid and Larry Grenadier - Knoxville Museum of Art (Nate Chinen: Playing Changes)

Spiritualized - The Mill and Mine

Uncle Earl and Friends - Boyd's Jig and Reel

IE - The Pilot Light

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Columbia Icefield - The Standard

Kristin Anna Valtysdottir - St. John's Episcopal Cathedral

Thumbscrew - The Standard

***late afternoon dog-walk break***

International Contemporary Ensemble and Carla Kihlstedt - Bijou Theatre

Makaya McCraven - The Mill and Mine

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn - Tennessee Theatre

Bluegrass Jam - Boyd's Jig and Reel

Hawktail - The Standard

Bill Frisell's Harmony - The Mill and Mine

Brooklyn Rider with Kayhan Kalhor - Bijou Theatre

Uncle Earl - The Mill and Mine

IE at The Pilot Light

Thumbscrew at The Standard

Hawktail at The Standard

Bill Frisell's Harmony at The Mill and Mine

Uncle Earl at The Mill and Mine

Ten Takeaways from the 2016 LOCKN' Festival

Photo by @jtolg

My Morning Jacket Crushed It
The best set of the weekend belonged to My Morning Jacket.  It was all about love, sweet love.  That Steam Engine was maybe the best thing I have ever heard.  All that set was lacking was a cover of "Love TKO" by Teddy Pendergrass.  Next time, Yim Yames, next time.

My Love for Ween was Rekindled!
To the surprise of Ween fans nowhere, Ween's Thursday headlining slot quickly went deep and dark.  The elemental notes coming out of Deaner's guitar that night were the work of a master.  Friday's set contained even more Ween songs.  Behold...the Boognish.

Phish Was Disappointing
The king of jambands was not a personal highlight of the Lockn' festival.  I loved every minute of My Morning Jacket and Ween, but Phish just didn't hit me in the same way.  Phish could have sprinkled their sets with more weird songs like Weigh, Guy Forget, Glide, Manteca, Mock Song, Lengthwise, Fikus, et cetera.  Phish might have also been better off conforming to the standard festival formula of one long set that starts immediately after the previous band.

Is Vulfpeck Some Kind of Joke...Band?
I only saw Vulfpeck's Thursday set but it was awful, right?  Two thumbs down.  I will say, that upon the 10th listen, it does start to be less awful.  Wait, why do I keep listening to their stupid set!!!???

Twiddle Rhymes with Did Ill
OK I get it.  You sound like a jamband heavily influenced by Phish who also likes to throw in the occasional reggae groove into every single one of your songs.  Your lyrics are uplifting in a way that should be more ironic than it is.  You've got a cool looking guitar (not a Languedoc) and a cool hat and Page hangs out in your trailor (note: trailer is spelled trailer).  Mr. Twiddle, you've been around for ten years so none of these observations are new, I'm sure.  Yeah I'd probably go see you guys again if you came through town on tour, but I might also double dip and go see Vulfpeck too.  That's your competition right now.

JRAD is the Best Thing Going in the Grateful Dead World

Aside from whatever Phil Lesh continues to do, which is bound to be good, JRAD is the best thing happening in Grateful Dead music right now.  Maybe Brown-Eyed Women doesn't always need to go Type II, but I'll take that over a manlike sexpot playing generic blues licks in a nostalgia act or a post John K DSO.  The way that JRAD toys with these songs through fearless full band improvisation is what makes it so endlessly entertaining.

Bringing Water, Food and a Pop-Up Shower Saved The Day

Our campsite was literally a mile walk to the stage.  No joke.  It was probably almost a half-mile to the nearest porta-potty and still farther to the closest water spigot.  Not exactly convenient.  Friday was the hottest day I have ever spent entirely outside.  The mission that day was to stay alive.  My drink of choice was a Coors Light - on ice!  Fortunately we had plenty of water and food and I had brought a pop-up shower for, well, showering by virtue of a DIY pump sprayer.  The shower proved to have at least 1 other important use.

Photo by Vickey Higgins Goff

Some People Can Dance For Hours In the Hot Sun and Still Rage Late Night (Not Me)

The intense heat crippled my interest in making more than one trip per day back and forth to the stage.  This meant that I missed a lot of the bands that played before Ween on Friday, including Turkuaz and Charles Bradley, but energy had to be conserved.  On Saturday I finally made it down for the whole day of music and found a shady spot to take it all in.  There, from the comfort of a low-profile chair, I could witness crazies dancing in the mid-day sun for hours on end.  My apologies to those mofos if they were still on their feet for MMJ. I had saved my energy so I could let loose a little bit by the end of the day on Saturday.

How You Feeling Out There?
Thanks for asking Michael Franti, I mean Galactic.  If you really want to know...I feel like I have a dangerously high core body temperature and an altered mental state or behavior.  I've been sweating excessively for days, have flushed skin, a rapid heart rate, a headache, and I feel kind of dizzy, as if I'm car sick but I haven't been in a car for over 48 hours.  It's 3:30 in the afternoon in August in Virginia and the heat index is above one hundred degrees.  If you really want me to get up and dance right now then you don't have my best interest at heart.  I feel bad for you Galactic for even being on that stage.  It's the best I can do to put my hands together.  I suppose I could make some noise.

That's Only Nine
Go listen to 12 Golden Country Greats.  Actually there is a ten.  I made a LOCKN' music mix for listening at the campsite and for some reason it called for vintage rhythm and blues and soul, such as the Staple Singers, Aretha Franklin, Allen Toussaint and more.  So it's had an unexpected impact on my future music listening.  Hitting the record stores tomorrow to search out more of this.

Who Else Can They Get For LOCKN'?

Phish, Ween and My Morning Jacket.  Independently, these are probably my top 3 active, performing rock bands, and they are all playing this August at Lockn', a music festival in Virginia that takes place about 90 minutes from where I live.  I've never been to Lockn' before but I have to go now.  Is Yim Yames going to sit in with Ween on Homo Rainbow?  One can hope.

Even if they don't add any other performers it would be enough for me, but the website says "More Artists To Be Announced".  I wonder who those could be?  What other artists would be a good fit for that festival and also be on the top of my personal list the way those big 3 are?  Since I'm 3 for 3 already, maybe I'm not that far off base, so I might as well think of some more preferable add-ons to the lineup.

I'm not clamoring for Dead and Co., or Ratdog, or Bisco, or Widespread or String Cheese (or any of your token classic rockers that Lockn' alumni might be bummed about missing), and I'm no longer into the bluegrass-tinged acts that show up at places like this.  My tastes run a little different than the typical jamband route, despite the fact that the 3 headliners happen to be tailor made for me.  What I would dig is the inclusion of Camper Van Beethoven or The Meat Puppets...a couple of out there, underground 1980's bands that don't normally play festivals like this but who could sneak in on the Ween vibe.

Someone who would pair well with My Morning Jacket is John Prine.  The singing mailman ain't that jammy, but his songs come from a deceptively counter cultural perspective.  This wrinkly living legend would definitely charm the crowd and be a nice break from your standard everyday funk grooves.

Tortoise could play late night after Phish and melt the faces of anyone brave enough to listen; and Marc Ribot and the Young Philadelphians featuring Mary Halvorson would hoist a heaping helping of noise in the guise of classic soul.  But I doubt either of those are gonna happen.

More within the realm of possibility are modern rockers like Dr. Dog or Dawes.  Even though I like both of these bands, I'm not sure how excited I would be to see them in that setting.  What would get everyone off - and still be a great addition to the lineup - would be a Talking Heads reunion.  Talk about a ground score.  That would really light things up.  Or how about Tom Waits?  He would add a different type of trippyness to the happenings.

Lockn' could go really, really big and court the likes of Springsteen, U2, Pearl Jam and the Stones, but that might be getting too far removed and mainstream.  Let Bonnaroo do stuff like that.  Or they could go more grassroots in the vein of Floyd Fest, Shakori Hills and Red Wing Roots.  No, I happen to like them right where they are this year - with a finger on the pulse of bands with a certain throbbing psychedelic sensibility who still bring the heat rather than a nostalgic shuffle beat.  So hey, what about Prince?!

The Richmond Folk Festival is a Different Kind of Music Festival

If folk music is the classic Greenwich Village image of a guy like Bob Dylan or a gal like Joan Baez singing and strumming an acoustic guitar, then I can’t really think of many Richmond Folk Festival performers over the festival’s 11 year history that meet this description.  Peter Rowan maybe.  No, when this festival says "folk" they mean something more like indigenous traditional world music.  It could be multi-generational bluegrass musicians from up in the mountains or music of the Middle East or Eastern Europe.  The kind of stuff a songcatching ethnomusicologist might bring back as field recordings after journeying to far off regions. 

So many festivals are about headliners and featuring hot new acts.  The Richmond Folk Festival is not another Lockn’ or Bonnaroo or even a Newport.  You won’t find Phil Lesh, My Morning Jacket, Dawes, Grace Potter or Dr. Dog on the bill.  Not yet anyway.  There's always hope!  The biggest name or mainstream performer that the Richmond Folk Festival has ever had, best as I can remember, might be Rosanne Cash, and yet the festival regularly draws between 150,000 to 200,000 curious people over its 3 days.

So why do so many people come to a downtown festival featuring a bunch of obscure artists playing weird traditional music that most of us have never even heard or heard of?  Because that’s a very Richmond thing to do, it turns out. Eleven years ago when the festival started, Richmond was just on the cusp of embracing the arts, food and other things enlightened, but a sense of ennui and procrastination still lingered.  It was a complete surprise that so many people showed up and embraced this event from the very first year and it has stayed that way ever since, although it is no longer a surprise.  It's an annual ritual now.  Yay Richmond!

Myself, like a lot of others it seems, have learned to treat the Richmond Folk Festival with a great deal of respect and gratitude; a mature approach that tries to put the music first, and maybe partying second.  Where else can you stumble upon a tent where thousands of people are silently watching an Indian tabla player with rapt attention?  Or have your choice between seeing Native American Smoke Dancers or DJ Grandmaster Flash?  The cool thing is you can find yourself in any of these situations with a cup of craft beer because it is sold throughout the fest and you can take it to any stage and all over the grounds. That helps.

It's not so easy to pigeon-hole the Richmond Folk Festival crowd.  It's not just progressive white folks.  The festival also attracts many African-Americans as well as people from all sorts of different backgrounds and ethnicities, as it should.  If you want diversity – gender, age, race, families, culture – The Richmond Folk Festival brings it. Being walking distance from the thriving campus of VCU, the festival also pulls in a strong college contingent.  

Yep, I’m pretty psyched that we continue to have this festival and that all kinds of people go and support it.  Where would I like to see it evolve?  If possible, I'd love to see it continue to expand the definition of folk music by featuring more artists on the cutting edge or fringes of "traditions" and/or people who are pushing things farther instead of just those who represent retrogrades.  For example, how come they never got Ornette Coleman before he passed away, or Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin, or the Sahara Desert rock band Tinariwen, or Bela Fleck, or Kind Sunny Ade, or modern acts with folk roots like The Decemberists or Gillian Welch?  In other words, there is room for both Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, but more Miles please.  We shall see.

Guitar Legend Bill Frisell will be at the Richmond Jazz Festival on Sunday August 10, 2014!

Bill Frisell

I'm getting psyched about seeing one of my all-time favorite musicians, Bill Frisell, at the Richmond Jazz Festival at Maymont this weekend!  Bill will be performing with his Beautiful Dreamers trio (Eyvind Kang - viola and Rudy Royston - drums) on the MWV stage at 4:30pm on Sunday 8/10.  Click here for the full Jazz Festival lineup and set times.

Guitarist Bill Frisell's sound has been described by Jazz Times as "instantly identifiable".  Jazz Times goes on to say that his "tone is overwhelmed with reverb and delay, and he's developed the tic of bending the neck after striking a note or chord, in an effort to move those pitches into an unattainable perfect tuning.  Complementing those serene, liquid tone colors is his physical attack, wherein economy is paramount and looping devices are constantly tweaked for purposes of orchestration and atmosphere rather than theatrics."

This one-off performance in Richmond precedes a 5-day stint next week at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in Kilkenny Ireland, where it looks like Bill will sit-in with a wide variety of artists and projects, including a performance of Terry Riley's In C and a set with Irish traditional musicians Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill!  I would love to hear both of those.

Beautiful Dreamers trio

I've only seen Bill once before back in 2008 during his Disfarmer tour, so needless to say I've been geeking out in anticipation by reading interviews and watching videos.  Speaking of interviews, here's a really good interview with Bill Frisell done by his friend, banjoist Danny Barnes, and here's one where Bill interviews one of his own guitar heroes, Jim Hall.

Frisell seems to thrive in unusual, improvisational settings with all sorts of different musicians.  I'm particularly fond of the music made during this February 29th, 2004 performance at the Barbican Theater in London, where he played with Malian musician Djelimady Tounkara.  Here are some videos from that concert:

Bill Frisell seems to be a little outside the smooth jazz and funk that the Richmond Jazz Festival normally features, but then again Bill's going to be a little "outside" of any lineup he is part of.  Perhaps his presence will bring some increased awareness to an already successful and vibrant jazz festival.

Festival Re-Cap: Red Wing Roots II, July 11-13, 2014

This past weekend was the 2^nd Annual Red Wing Roots Music Festival at Natural Chimneys Park in Mount Solon, VA (just over 2 hrs. from Richmond).  It was our first time attending this festival presented by The Steel Wheels, but I’m sure we’ll be back.

Getting into the festival was easy.  No real long lines and the parking arrangement made sense.  For those camping on-site, it was a fairly short walk from where you parked to where the campsites were.  Checking in was pretty much no hassle.  After getting your wristband you were free to make additional trips out to your car to haul in any additional items you might need.  Red Wing Roots is a kid-friendly festival.  Many granola-minded moms and dads had brought their children along, which is a pretty cool culture for the kids to be exposed to in my opinion.

The Chimneys (photo by Vickey Higgins Goff)

The setting for the festival is picturesque and park-like, with the two main stages (Shenandoah Mountain Stage and the South Stage) positioned between the awesome natural chimneys from which the park gets its name.  Sets on these two primary stages were staggered so that as soon as one act was ending a performer on the other one would begin.  The Blue Mountain Brewery beer garden was catty-cornered a hundred yards or so back, so you could watch and hear both the Shenandoah Mountain Stage and the South Stage from the beer garden if you wanted to.

The proliferation of urban food trucks these days means that the munchie options at festivals of this kind are better than ever.  There were several great food vendors, but I especially liked the Goatocado booth.  Very healthy and yummy.  There was a general store set up with ice and other provisions.  The porta-potties, bathrooms and showers were kept clean and there were never any long waits to use them. 

Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three (Six?) (Photo by Vickey Goff)

For our group of friends, a festival such as this is as much an opportunity to hang out and reconnect (and get into all sorts of mischief) as it is a chance to see great music.  I only saw some of the bands that played on Friday and Saturday (and none on Sunday), so I’m not able to give a good overview of the performances other than saying the cool vibe and natural setting certainly helped spark some inspired performances from the assembled bands.

Highlights on Friday for me were the Steel Wheels kids set as we were setting up our camp, and Pokey LaFarge and Trampled By Turtles later that evening on the main stage.  On Saturday my faves were Mandolin Orange, Tim O’Brien’s songwriter showcase as well as his set with Darrell Scott, plus The Steel Wheels 8pm set and The Devil Makes Three at 9:30pm.  Friends who witnessed The Stray Birds, Brothers Comatose and Yarn on Sat. commented on them as being strong also, but our gang unanimously agreed that the Devil Makes Three gave the best set of the weekend.  None of us stuck around for any music on Sunday, having shot our wad after the first two nights.

The Devil Makes Three! (Photo by Vickey Higgins Goff)

Festival hosts The Steel Wheels do a fantastic job putting on Red Wing Roots.  The only thing I can think of that might improve upon it in the future would be to branch out slightly beyond the roots/Americana focus to include a few other acts like a Dawes or Dr. Dog (rock), or maybe an unabashedly jammy jamband/improv-oriented ensemble, or an uptempo reggae/world music performer.  Richmond, VA’s The Hot Seats would be perfect for an 11pm slot, like the one they did at Watermelon Park fest a couple years back.

Despite that small suggestion for a slightly broader lineup, I actually loved Red Wing Roots just the way it was.  However it comes together next year I’m sure it will be worth checking out again!

Summer Music Festival Preview – Red Wing Roots

Spring is almost here, so it’s time to start thinking about summer music festivals.  One festival that looks very promising is the Red Wing Roots Festival July 11, 12 and 13 in Mt. Solon, VA, which is located in the Shenandoah Valley sort of between Harrisonburg and Staunton – a beautiful part of Virginia.  The lineup is pretty stellar and tickets are on sale now.

The Steel Wheels

Now in its 2^nd year, Red Wing Roots Festival was started in 2013 by The Steel Wheels, one of the rising stars of the Americana/Roots Music circuit.  The idea was to create a positive, inclusive, family-friendly environment to celebrate roots music, camping and outdoor activities such as biking, swimming, and hiking.  Natural Chimneys Park and Campground was chosen as the location for the festival.

Some of the artists I’m particularly excited about include Tim O’Brien, Pokey LaFarge, Peter Rowan, Furnace Mountain Band, The Steel Wheels, Mandolin Orange, The Stray Birds, The Devil Makes Three and Yarn.  The full lineup can be seen here. 

Our regional area is chock full of great annual campout festivals, including Shakori Hills, Floyd Fest, Watermelon Park, The Festy and more, but Red Wing Roots looks like a great one to add to that list!