If you are going to Bear Creek Music and Art Festival November 10-13, and trust me -- you should not miss this most excellent North Florida funk extravaganza -- you might want to get your ticket this week, because you can save a little.
This Saturday (October 15), the prices increase. This week, you can pick up a 3-day ticket for $165, a 4-day ticket for $235 and a 5-day ticket for $255. All tickets include primitive camping at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. You'll be able to get Friday- and Saturday-only tickets at the gate for $130.
Bear Creek is a mighty musical explosion: There are seven bands scheduled on Wednesday night, four stages and 16 bands Thursday night, six stages running Friday and Saturday, and four stages running Sunday. Plus all the crazy surprises, like pop-up performances throughout the park. Here is the lineup.
Another bargain will be available at Magnolia Fest October 20-23. If you go to Magfest, you'll be able to pick up tickets the Suwanee Springfest bluegrass-newgrass March 24-27 throwdown for just $110. Here's the Springfest lineup.
The folks at Bear Creek Music and Art Festival remind us that today funk great Ivan Neville is celebrating his birthday. festgrrl is so very glad this fine musician was born! Celebrate with this booty-shaking video of Dumpstaphunk's "gasman," and if you don't have Dumpstaphunk's fantastic studio album, Everybody Want Sum, grab it here. You can see Dumpstaphunk get nasty with the funk in November at Bear Creek Nov. 10-13.
A 3-day pass is $135 today, and goes up to $150 tomorrow. A four day pass goes from $175 today to $190 tomorrow, and a five-day pass goes from $195 today to $210 tomorrow. There's even an EZ Payment Plan for your credit card if you need to go that route.
Check out the crazy good lineup here, which includes the Funky Meters, Trey Anastasoio Band, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Lettuce, oh, I could go on....you're going to dance your behind off.They will have about six stages running with funky goodness around every corner.
Also announced: George Porter Jr's & the Runnin Pardners, Russell Batiste Band, Corporal Boil, Honey Island Swamp Band, and artists at large Will Bernard, Johnny Vidocovich, Freekbass, Roosevelt Collier, Jaime McLean, Topaz, Scott Messersmith, Nikki Glaspie and Michelle Sarah.
Tickets include primitive camping, and are -- at the moment, get 'em now, folks -- $135 for three days, $175 for four days and $195 for five days.
One of the best shows at last fall's Bear Creek Music and Art Festival - fabulous funkateers Lettuce at the Spirit of the Suwanee Music Park's ampitheater stage-- is online for streaming or downloading.
Thanks generous tapers, and thanks Internet Archive!
Shakin' my booty to House Party during that awesome show was one of the highlights of my year!
Yes, it may seem like a long way off, but tickets for the full-on funky Bear Creek Music and Art Festival, held Nov. 11-13 at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak., Fl, go on sale today. Early bird tickets will be sold through March 17, then the price starts going up.Buy now and you can save $70 off the price of a 3-day ticket, $85 off the price of the 4-day ticket, and $95 off the price of a 5-day ticket.
And the fest is offering a new EZ Pay Payment Plan that allows folks to spread their ticket payment out over a period of 5 months or 5 equal payments. Here's how they explain it: On the day you purchase your ticket, your credit card will be charged 1/5th of your ticket fee. Every 30 days for the next five months, your card will be charged the same amount. For example, the $115 early-bird three day ticket will be billed at $23.00 a month for 5 months.
Early Bird tickets (which include primitive camping, taxes and fees included) are available in three levels: Wednesday – Sunday ($160), Thursday – Sunday ($150) and Friday – Sunday ($115) If you buy a 3-day ticket and end up deciding you want the extra days, you can call the Spirit of the Suwannee Park and upgrade. Wednesday and Thursday acts have not yet been announced, but last year the pre-shows were outstanding and intimate.
Plus, let's face it, the park is magical and a great place to have a five-day vacation! Time to pre-plan, people!
The soulful one-man band Zach Deputy plays the Engine Room in Tallahassee tonight. Doors open at 9, cover is $14. Zach's a longtime favorite with the crowd at Bear Creek Music and Art Festival In fact, Bear Creekers held a benefit for Zach after all his equipment got stolen when he was out on the road. He's been known to spontaneously pop up and do a show somewhere in the campgrounds late-night. Zach is a groove machine who knows how to keep the dance floor hopping -- with everything from his reggae-tinged originals to Michael Jackson covers. He's got the real-deal soul going on and he is one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet.
The picture's not so great on this video, but the audio is great and it shows you how Zach builds a song from the ground up.
A big thank you to Paul Levine and Lyle Williams, creators of Bear Creek!! (Photo by the wonderful Jeffrey Dupuis.)
The gathering if the funkateers at Bear Creek Music and Art Festival was everything it was cracked up to be -- a glorious assemblage of the finest funk and jam players on the planet. "This," declared trombonist Fred Wesley (an alumni of James Brown's band and George Clinton's Parliament Funkadelic) "is where the funk lives."
And it is -- horns blaring through live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, booties shakin' through the starry night, newcomer funk bands popping up in the campgrounds and drawing an impromptu raging crowd. All of it is rare and special. To have the funk greats come play at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park and to get a chance to really pay them their due is a beautiful thing indeed. People like Wesley, James Brown saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, Maceo Parker, George Porter of the Funky Meters, the Rebirth Brass Band, and Ivan Neville. Seeing a show by any one of these folks is a treat. Six stages for five days is epic!
Mix in the second-generation funk players -- bands like Orgone, the New Mastersounds, Matt Grondin Band, Snarky Puppy, Soulive, and The Amazing JC's, and you've got the tasty musical stew that Levine and Williams are getting known for. Besides the funk, jam band fans had their fill with acts like moe., Umphreys Magee, Toubab Krewe, Cope, The Everyone Orchestra, the Heavy Pets, and Garage Mahal. Again, all these players brought ridiculous talent and energy to the nonstop party. Add to that an audience that manages to rage and be kind at the same time and its a euphoric mix.
Bear Creek festival gets better every year, as the word spreads among musicians that they'll get treated right and fans learn that seeing this explosion of talent in a gorgeous, friendly setting is an experience not to be missed.
Promoters Williams and Levine put so much love into creating the musical mix of this very special festival, and their taste is impeccable. Make your plans to get to Bear Creek for next year, people -- this is one you definitely don't want to miss!
Matt Butler of the excellent Hot Buttered Rum band puts together this ad-hoc group of musicians, and it’s a different mix every time. At Bear Creek, the Everyone Orchestra will include Kai Eckhardt and Fareed Haque from Garaj Mahal, Joel Cummins from Umphrey's McGee, Jeff Mosier of Blueground Undergrass, Jen Hartswick from T.A.B. , Jan's Ingber of the Motet plus Justin Perkins, Luke Quaranta and Teal Brown from Toubab Krewe. During the show they will be taking donations to support the festival’s recycling and new composting program.
THE EVERYONE ORCHESTRA, according to their web site, “is a celebratory, interactive, improvisational experiment orchestrated by a mad scientist conductor!
The list of Everyone Orchestra participants is an increasingly wide and intercontinental group including members of The Grateful Dead, Phish, moe., String Cheese Incident, The Flecktones, Club d'Elf, ALO, Tea Leaf Green and Adrian Belew, Taj Mahal, Maria Muldaur, Tuvan throat singers, live painters, dancers, chanters, choirs, hula hoopers, firespinners, jugglers, stiltwalkers, storytellers, a presidential candidate and hundreds of others among a growing legion of other performers.
Butler’s version of breaking down the barriers between musician and audience derives in part from desert art festival Burning Man’s ‘no spectators, only participants’ ethic and is undoubtedly influenced by his old friend and mentor Ken Kesey, the king of the Merry Pranksters.”
The Everyone Orchestra is dedicated to working for good and has performed numerous concerts for non-profit organizations, coordinated donation drives for the needy, and has brought their brand of participatory performance to student groups, schools, hospitals, an orphanage and more.
In an excellent interview with Jambase, Butler explained his approach to EO:.
"I don’t think about how I want it to sound. I think about who I have as players and that ultimately dictates what happens. I try to be in touch with all the players, just be in communication with them and make sure that everyone’s comfortable on stage, that they can hear well and that they’re fed and happy, so that they’re going to have a clear path to musical discovery.
And then I have this thing of getting everybody to agree to be on the same page of not knowing what’s going to happen and just going for it. And that’s part of my job, different people need different counseling before we get on stage to get into that state of mind in a comfortable way.
…I feel really blessed that for the most part I think the musicians have a fun and interesting time in EO and sometimes they’re very surprised: “That was insane, I loved that.” Sometimes we’ll have that perfect mix of craziness, a perfect moment of almost pop song beauty that we came up with on the spot and some high energy dance music and it’s all just perfect.
...it’s a departure of having expectations either within the band or as an audience member, in that literally anything can happen in EO for better and worse. That’s one thing that Ken Kesey taught me and the Grateful Dead taught me, that the mystery of the unknown is what’s interesting and in those moment of searching musically you won’t always land on the golden nugget but when you do it really really shines.
Like at one point in a song if the chorus is repeating I’ll hold up a sign that says repeat the chorus and I’ll have them keep on repeating it and have the audience singing it. Then I might take the band out so that just the audience is singing and then take it a little bit higher and then throw it back into the song. I’ll do little tiny moves like that and then sit down for 10 minutes. It’s an interesting application of the conductor role. I’m working on a couple pitches for other bands to do this in a larger setting because those are some of the most fun shows I’ve done."
Honey Island Swamp Band is great (check out their streaming music player) and they have a cool back story on their web site:
"The band came together after Aaron Wilkinson (acoustic guitar, mandolin, vocals) and Chris Mulé (electric guitar, vocals) were marooned in San Francisco after the levee breaches following Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and had a chance encounter with fellow New Orleans evacuees Sam Price (bass, vocals) and Garland Paul (drums, vocals). They'd all worked together in New Orleans bands for years, but with no prospects of getting home any time soon, they figured they’d better cook up something new, and quick!
A few days later they had put together a song list, landed a recurring gig at San Francisco’s Boom Boom Room, and settled in to share a little taste of Southern culture with their new West coast neighbors. Their 7-song eponymous EP was recorded in 2006 at famed studio The Plant in Sausalito, CA, and was received so well that they all decided to continue the band upon moving back to New Orleans in early 2007.
Honey Island Swamp Band's sound has been described as "Americana on the Bayou", with timeless songs from Wilkinson & Mulé, highlighted by Mulé's searing guitar, Wilkinson's sure-handed mandolin, and 4-part vocal harmonies, all anchored by the powerful groove of Price & Paul's Louisiana stomp rhythm section.
In April 2009, the band released its first full-length album, Wishing Well, produced by Tom Drummond of Better Than Ezra. Throughout the rest of 2009, the band toured relentlessly in support of Wishing Well, on the strength of such songs as "Natural Born Fool", "Till the Money's Gone", and the album's title track. In January 2010, Wishing Well was named 2009's “Best Blues Album” at OffBeat Magazine's BEST OF THE BEAT Awards, where the band was also honored as “Best Emerging Artist”.
The newest offering from HISB, Good To You, was released in April 2010, and has quickly become a staple of most DJs on the Crescent City's legendary radio station WWOZ, as well as on Sirius/XM satellite radio’s Bluesville and traditional stations from coast-to-coast. Featuring the southern strut of songs such as “Rod n Reel” and the album’s first single “Chocolate Cake”, Good To You illuminates the mix of country-inflected rock and New Orleans funky blues that makes Honey Island Swamp Band's music so familiar and unique at the same time."
They're a Brooklyn-based 8-piece (sometimes more) led by Kalmia Traver (lead vocals, sax) and Alex Toth (trumpet, vocals, hyper-kinetics). The band released their new Triangular Daisies EP on Oct. 19th. The band won last year's Boston Music Award for Live Act of the Year.
Our friends at Jambase write: “Their sound sits along the same horizon line as Yeasayer and Akron/Family… one feels as if they're body surfing the edge of what's possible in melodic yet actively experimental rock.”
Check out Rubblebucket's unusual cover of The Beatles' "Michelle."
This is what I love about Bear Creek promoters Paul Levine and Lyle Williams, they are always finding tasty musical surprises for us!
Super-nice, super-cool and funky Zach Deputy plays the Engine Room in Tallahassee Friday night. Deputy has become a welcome regular at Bear Creek Music and Art Festival, and North Florida fans even chipped in a year or two ago for a special benefit after someone stole all his one-man-band looping equipment.
He's been touring nonstop and has watched his star rise accordingly. Zach's a looper, yes, but he's also a killer guitar player, a great singer, and a good songwriter. His shows are a lot of fun. Friday's show is with the band Wisebird. Tickets are $10 advance and $12 day of show
“Imagine Ray Charles, James Brown and Michael Jackson all having an illegitimate child and it growing up in the Virgin Islands,” Zach Deputy says of his sound. And it’s precisely this sound of new-age soul that’s garnering national attention for the South Carolinian. His debut album, Out of the Water (2008), utilized the talents of bassist Sam Sims (Michael Jackson) and drummer Sonny Emory (Earth, Wind & Fire); and more recently, the calypso-kissed funk and beatboxing improv of 2009’s Sunshine won him the Home Grown Music Network’s Studio Album of the Year award. But its Deputy’s live performances that truly earn the 27-year-old his keep. Accompanied only by percussionist and life-long friend Paul Kearns, Deputy charms audiences with the soulful dexterity of an R&B crooner while live-looping his acrobatic rhythms and fiery guitar leads to deliver full, band-like sounds. Even with 300 yearly performances, the aspirations remain simple: “I just hope the music helps restore balance in people’s lives.” He quietly adds, “That’s why I do it, to hopefully change people’s lives for the better.”
The magnificent cornucopia of funk and jam that is Bear Creek Music & Art Festival has extended early bird pricing and released its daily schedule. Look at that sked and you'll agree that you better get the time off now and go Thursday to Sunday, y'all. No foolin. This is gonna be a big time at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Fl.
Early-bird ticket prices will stay at $125 until 11:59PM on Tuesday, September 14. They go to $145 after that, and $175 at the gate.
IMPORTANT: There are pre-fest shows on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and these require additional tickets -- Wednesday is $20 (includes camping) and Thursday (includes camping) is $40. This is on top of your regular ticket. Your regular ticket covers camping Thurs-Sun., but you can't see the Thursday show unless you buy the $40 ticket.
Today's the last day for Early Bird tickets for Magnolia Fest at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park October 21 to 24 -- That's $125 ($147 with fees included) -- through September 1. Here is my earlier post about the lineup. Since then, they've added the phenomenal Sam Bush Band.
And tickets for Bear Creek Music and Art Festival Nov. 12-14, also at Suwannee Music Park, They are $125 now -- they go up 10 $140 on Sept. 8, y'all.
It's a good idea to buy early, and I'll let you know the dates so keep on checking festgrrl.
The first-ever Blackwater festival was an intimate treat for those of us who braved August weather to jam at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. And get this --- it wasn’t all that hot after all. Overcast skies and a light sprinkle off and on for most of the weekend kept things cool. The small crowd made getting around and getting close to the stage easy, and with the river and the pool close by, it was paradise.
Kudos to the schedulers for keeping music on the shady stage for most of the day and moving to the meadow at night. Electronica masters STS9 headlined Thursday night with a booming bass and light show that rocked to the early morning.
Most people I talked to thought Michael Franti and Spearhead put on the standout show of the weekend, taking it from folk to funk to reggae to rock and back again. Franti always wows everyone by coming off the stage and performing in the middle of the crowd. He also won us all over when he asked little kids to join him on stage for “Hello Bonjour” and they all rocked out adorably.
Galactic with Cyrus Neville laid down some hard New Orleans funk Saturday night that simpluy can't be beat. Particle with Michael Kang had folks braving a steady downpour in the Meadow field. JJ Grey did an acoustic set in the ampitheatre and a second set in the Meadow with Mofro. Unfortunately, he did mostly the same songs, which was a disappointment, since the crowd is pretty much the same at each show.
The Disco Biscuits had a uber-sweaty danceathon set with a killer laser light show Saturday night in the ampitheatre stage – and all the oaks in there amplified it beautifully.
Here’s the Band to Watch: Snarky Puppy They had a daytime set on the too-sunny porch stage which hardly anyone showed up for -- and it was fantastic driving, jazzy, jammy magic. You'll be able to see them play again at Bear Creek Music and Art Festival Nov. 12-14, also held at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak., Fl.
Hopefully this fest will return next year. My advice is: Go!
Bear Creek is a great festival -- the weather's fine, the park is gorgeous, the crowd isn't too huge, and the promoters know how to pick bands. There are always surprise sit-ins around very corner. In the four years I've attended, I've been turned onto somethng new and exciting every time. You can't ask for much more than that.
It's a good idea to snag those tickets now -- don't dally!! -- the Early Bird price of just $125 is in effect through Sept. 8. It goes up in increments from then on through November, with a $175 price at the gate. No matter what you pay, you'll get your money's worth - trust me on this.
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