Tried-and-true Telluride dares to fill the air with new talents
John Lehndorff, Rocky Mountain News
Published June 17, 2006 at midnight
TELLURIDE - Apparently you CAN teach an old critic new music tricks. That's the lesson learned Friday at the 33rd Annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival.
The instructors in residence this day were the Greencards, Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, and The Decemberists.
In a somewhat bold programing move, the festival booked largely new acts and assumed that the well-versed audience would go along with it. Luckily, this is a very open-minded group.
After a set of old-fashioned bluegrass by the Badly Bent, a Durango band, and a stirring set of duets by mandolinist Mike Compton and guitar star David Grier, The Greencards treated the audience to a new sort of tradition.
The Austin, Texas-based ensemble of two Australians and a Brit plays Celtic-influenced, bluegrass-flavored originals. That they sound so quintessentially American speaks to the universality of acoustic music and the band's instrumental prowess. It's a band to reckon with in acoustic circles.
The same can be said in the rock world for Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, Massachusetts- based rockers who reminded us how youthful energy can juice up tried-and-true musical forms.
With rock echoes of Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows and REM, the 20-something Sixers managed to incorporate kazoo solos, stuffed-animal-throwing, and the bassist stripping down to his boxers and racing through the crowd.
Then there's the Decemberists. Imagine, if you can, an American whose singing voice sounds British - think Chad and Jeremy, backed by a slightly left-of-center band involving banjo, accordion, glockenspiel and organ playing original art-folk narratives about Legionnaires dying in the desert and set to hook-ridden pop tunes that bear the mark of Al Stewart and a host of British Invasion bands.
The crowd found more familiar, if still modern, sounds in the sunset set by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones after a one-year sabbatical. Fleck, the artist who happens to play the banjo, and bassist Victor Wooten conversed instrumentally as if no time had passed. Fleck's year-off forays into classical and African music informed his five-string excursions.
Granted, this mainly instrumental virtuosity might not be your cup of tea without a high tolerance for banjo, bass and pennywhistle solos, not to mention spacey noodling and jazz-tinged interludes.
At deadline, the majority of the bundled-up crowd appeared to be remaining for a late-night set by another band making it's Telluride debut, New Southern rockers, the Drive-By Truckers.
Today features guitarists Tony Rice and Bryan Sutton, Boulder's Yonder Mountain String Band, Missy Higgins, and Sam Bush; Sunday concludes with sets by Del -McCoury, Nickel Creek, John Prine, and the Barenaked Ladies.
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