The Joe Val Bluegrass Festival
- Details
- Published on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 13:54
- Written by Rae Porter
The Joe Val Bluegrass Festival Arrives in Framingham this Presidents Day Weekend
Hosted by the Boston Bluegrass Union (BBU), the festival is now in its 27th year.
“We expect about 2,500 [people] over the run of the festival,” said Executive Director, Gerry Katz. A potpourri of headliners (many of whom record on the Rounder Record label) will appear on the festival Main stage, including Blue Highway, The Claire Lynch Band, Steep Canyon Rangers, and former Berklee College of Music students Sierra Hull (the 20-year-old wunderkind who fronts Sierra Hull and Highway 111), and the all-female band, Della Mae.
The festival also boasts dozens of instrumental and vocal workshops, free Kids Academy programs (for ages 5-17), performances by local and regional bands on the Showcase Stage, and the opportunity for non-stop picking. “I think this all speaks to the vitality of BBU in helping to train the next generation of picker and the vibrancy of the local bluegrass scene for fans of all ages,” said Katz.
The festival is abuzz with constant activity. Jam sessions spontaneously erupt in every corner of the hotel – lobby, elevator bays, guest rooms, stairwells, hallways, lounges. Folks, young and old band together in small and large groups to sing and play a variety of instruments including the banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and standup bass. The allure of the festival is so great that even musicians playing instruments not associated with the genre - viola da gamba (a gut-stringed, Baroque precursor to the modern cello), ukulele, accordion – show up and are readily embraced and integrated into the Bluegrass experience.
So, why is Bluegrass music so compelling? Though the music has a deceptively simple chord structure, (which is a good fit for beginning musicians), the improvisational aspect of the genre, where each musician takes a solo (called a break) leaves room for masterful musicianship and different styles of music to creep into the playing. “You don’t have to be a virtuoso in order to contribute…but, you can be as good as you care to get,” said Frank Drake, who runs a weekly Bluegrass jam at the Burren in Somerville and plays with the band Flatt Rabbit, featured on the festival Showcase Stage on Sunday.
“In a lot of ways, it is similar to jazz…it’s a shared vocabulary,” Drake said. “You have this body of music that everyone knows, [tunes by] Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs…Which means that you get to play with a lot of different people,” who become an “instant community.”
Brookline native Etienne Cremieux, is currently the fiddler in the Los Angeles-based band, The Get Down Boys. They’re performing on Friday night’s festival Showcase Stage, and can also be heard on 2/21 in a 6 pm set at Sally O’Brien’s and at Cantab Lounge in Cambridge at 11 pm. Though Cremieux initially gravitated to Bluegrass as the result of his preteen “experience of playing with people close to my age,” at twentyone, he finds Bluegrass music to be “more organic than anything that our generation has access to,” and has an appreciation for the strong “sense of connection to the music and the community,” within the genre.
For more information about the festival go to www.bbu.org
