Roots

.moe closes Day 1 at Targhee Music Festival

The first details have come out about the new environmentally themed Gaia Festival, which will debut August 5-7, 2011, at Black Oak Ranch near Laytonville CA in northern Mendocino County. The festival announcement lists world-class music as one of its facets, but it is also about sustainable living, social and environmental activism, alternative energy, healing arts, theater and more.

The event is being organized by Back Roads Productions, the outfit that produces the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival on the same site every June. Another festival with an environmental theme, Earthdance, has also run on the site each September but will be moving after this year's event September 17-19.

It had been said that Earthdance was relocating because it had outgrown the site. However, Gaia has the potential to draw as many or more attendees as Earthdance, especially once it becomes well established after a couple of years.

From the zydeco of the Balfa Brothers to the Dixieland of Dirty Dozen Brass Band, George Wein’s Newport Folk Festival has a history of presenting the sounds of New Orleans at his seminal festival in New England. Of course, Wein also was responsible for the launching of New Orleans’ signature Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Wein’s guide to the music and culture of New Orleans was musicologist Allan Jaffe, and in one of the earliest Newport Folk Festivals, Jaffe’s newly formed ensemble Preservation Hall Jazz Band graced the Newport stage.

This year, Preservation Hall is back in a leading role, holding down a Sunday mid-afternoon slot on the Harbor Stage that is likely to include numerous guest appearances by other festival performers who appeared on the group’s acclaimed collaboration album, Preservation, released earlier this year.

“It’s fantastic to have The Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Newport Folk Festival again,” said Wein. “The band is very much a part of life in New Orleans and it reflects, not only what the city is all about, but what music is all about.”

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For me, Steve Earle provided the anchor for the festival weekend, mixing in new and old songs and connecting with the audience about his personal life and political views.

Unlike at some other festivals where his outspokenness isn’t universally appreciated, he held the generally lefty Kate Wolf crowd in the palm of his hand from his opening nod to left-wing heroes in “Christmas in Washington,” to his anti-war and pro-immigtation songs to his support for the rebirth of New Orleans.

But he was also intensely personal when he speaking of his family life with wife Allison Moorer and their new baby, John Henry Earle. He performed a song from way back, “Goodnight Little Rock and Roller,” written for his first son Justin Townes Earle, now a successful singer-songwriter in his own right. He admitted his failings as a father and husband in his earlier marriages but claims to be a changed man today.

Fifteen years is a long time in festival years. But for the Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival, held the last weekend in June on Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville CA, you get the idea that they are just warming up.

If there was an overall theme to the 2010 Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival, maybe it had to do with gracefully aging. John McCutcheon, known in part for his children’s songs, says he is now writing about grandparenting. Stacey Earle contributed her wistful mother’s perspective. Stevie Coyle summed it up in his song about geezer rock: “The only rockin’ I’m doing is in this here chair,” he sang.

The sentiment applied equally to an audience segment that is graying, but that is also supplemented by a strong youth infusion. That’s why I say gracefully. Old hands continue to turn out in large numbers to camp in the field or along the river. The low chairs are getting harder to get out of, but what the hell? The experience of this festival is so fine that I heard precious little complaining about the heat or any other hardships from the old-timers.

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