Suwannee Hulaween Delivers Killer Tunes, Art and Spectacle

Spirit Lake 

Leaving the Suwannee Hulaween festival at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Fla., festgrrl’s main take-away is that The String Cheese Incident is a collection of amazingly talented musicians.

The Colorado jam band dazzled with the breadth of it's musical material – from jam to jazz to pop to funk to bluegrass to funk and electronica. All that with lightning fast stops. Oh, and a super-slick nightly light show too.

Michael Kang and Bill Nershi lay down some Cheese

Michael Kang of The String Cheese Incident

Bill Nershi of String Cheese Incident

Thousands showed up sporting outrageous Halloween costumes for the band’s first night, which featured three balls-to-the-wall String Cheese sets.

Spot-on Napoleon Dynamite costume

An "illusion" costume -- homemade!

Indie-rockers  Van Ghost and souped-up bluegrass pickers  Larry and Jenny Keel owned the Thursday late night stages which kept everyone up and grooving until the wee hours, where we prowled the psychedelic Spirit Lake art and light installation – wow!

There were 30-foot-tall metal sculptures – one a three-faced bull and one phoenix -- which breathed fire. A giant geodesic dome was made up to look like a jellyfish and was filled with jellyfish swings for anyone to use. Artists painted a beautiful mural which came alive under black lights. Hammocks hung beneath black-light string sculptures suspended from the trees. There was an infinity mirror installation and giant, glowing Alice in Wonderland mushrooms. The cypress lake at the park is always gorgeous – for the Spirit Lake installation it was ringed with lights and the center fountain had a color-changing light show. Add a Spirit Lake performance stage with bands, fire dancers, hoopers and a burlesque show -- seriously the most amazing lake area ever at Spirit of the Suwannee.

The Spirit Lake bull sculpture

Spirit Lake stage

Spirit Lake dancer

Black light string sculpture

Spirit Lake phoenix

Spirit Lake dancer

Friday featured sets by Tallahassee's fun  hip-hop rockers Catfish Alliance (featuring Big E the Sexual Manatee,) jam band Comeback Alice and Van Ghost. Steve Kimock and Friends took the stage at 4 p.m. Friday for an excellent show that showcased Kimock’s killer guitar skills.

Catfish Alliance

 At Friday’s evening two-set String Cheese show, lightning flashed in the distance and it started raining. The rain held off for the most part during the String Cheese show but let loose afterward, as the funky Main Squeeze band from Chicago was killin’ it in the ampitheater.

And wow, it rained hard. Sadly, flooding ended up cancelling the much-anticipated performances by Big Gigantic and Conspirator..

Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon

Thankfully, the rain was gone by Saturday, and everybody’s soaked stuff was able to dry out. Fans had a full slate of daytime music featuring Brock Butler (formerly of Perpetual Groove), Latin-funk-reggae-jam Savi Fernandez Band out of Orlando, The Heard (BLISTERING full-on funk band from Chicago,) a high-energy show by Colorado’s Leftover Salmon, and in the early evening, an excellent psychedelic-jam-kickass-bluegrass “Leftover Cheese” -- collaboration between String Cheese and Leftover Salmon.

Trumpeter Jennifer Hartswick  and Trombonist Natalie Cressman
sit in with The Heard for a killer set

Live electronica band Sound Tribe Sector 9 hit the stage at 10:45 p.m. to a colorful, packed-out crowd, followed by trip-hop DJ Emancipator. Tampa Bluegrass-funk-jam band Applebutter Express hosted a late night jam with lots of sit-ins by festival musicians  at the Spirit Lake campground stage and then the silent disco raged until dawn.

Overall, Suwannee Hulaween had a nice mix of bluegrass, funk, jam and live electronic. Having a ferris wheel and Gravitron in the field by the main stage was a new twist for Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park and it was great.

Aside from the rain event, the sets all ran on time, and it was nice that no sets overlapped so everybody had a chance to see everything at the same time. The crowd was just great, with the exception of people lighting fireworks Saturday night in the middle of the dancing audience (Seriously people?)

On Saturday night, multi-instrumentalist Michael Kang of String Cheese announced from the stage that this inaugural Suwannee Hulaween is going to become a recurring event. And THAT was great to hear.