Concert preview
For Labor Day weekend, I went up to the 32nd annual Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle. The show runs for four days, and everything takes place at the Seattle Center. There are music, film, visual and performance arts and food. A succinct way to describe to event would be to call it the Oregon Country Fair on concrete.
I was there on Saturday and Sunday, drawn in largely because of the music. I couldn’t possibly attend every single show I wanted to because there were eight stages, and buying a ticket gives you access to everything.
The first act I saw was “Dave Samson’s Northwest Slide Guitar Showcase,” playing at the Blues Stage. The name makes it sound more interesting than it actually was; I sort of felt tricked. The musicians were mostly guitarists, and really talented ones at that, but their blues sounded redundant and uninspired. I didn’t finish watching the set, but lots of other folks did.
On the Rhythm Stage, I saw Si-Sé. This was a band I was familiar with; they hail from Brooklyn, and they’re on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. The Seattle Weekly gave them a harsh write-up, but on stage they sounded wonderful — once they fixed their sound mix.
The band consisted of prerecorded loops, a viola player, singer, bassist and two drummers. The viola especially struck me; it locked together every tune and sort of sat atop all the music as another kind of singer.
Immediately after Si-Sé ended, I filed into Memorial Stadium — along with hordes of others — to see Ani DiFranco play.
Memorial Stadium is an old football field that’s used as the main stage for the festival. And then there was Ani, the headline act of the day. Watching her performance was somewhat surreal. Picture a 5-foot-2-inch folk singer alone on stage, addressing at least 10,000 mostly silent people eager to just hear.
DiFranco performed some old stuff, a few new songs and some old stuff with new lyrics. Toward the end of the set she performed “Self-Evident,” a poem about Sept. 11, which is on her new album.
The last big performance Saturday night was Lou Reed, again at Memorial Stadium. Reed looks much older than he is, and I didn’t know half of the material he played.
A lot of his songs were angry and very loud, accentuated by a band of jangly guitars, a drummer and a bassist. He played a few Velvet Underground tunes and performed his own, revisionist version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (also the title of his new album due out in January).
The first performance I saw on Sunday was Modest Mouse at Memorial Stadium. Again, this show was very large, but it was also quite underwhelming. Maybe it was because I didn’t sit close enough to the stage, but I had trouble discerning most of lyrics, and the guitars all blended together to create a general sound of indiscernible mush.
And then there were the street performers. Jason Webley played an accordian and belted out songs in a Tom Waits-ish demeanor. He seemed to have this infectious charisma, and crowds around him would suddenly become happy. Strangers surrounded him, their arms locked together, and joined in a boisterous sing-along.
There was a building full of visual arts. I’ll not describe everything I saw, but exhibits consisted of stacked giant vertebrae, Barbie dolls, homespun crafts and “exquisite corpse” surrealist exercises — three-person creations in which each artist is unaware of the work’s outcome until it’s finished.
As I stood in the homespun crafts exhibit watching bemused observers, I asked the artist, Nicola Vruwink, which was more interesting, the process of creating the art or people’s reactions to it. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said it was the people.
The last show I saw was the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, again at the Rhythm Stage. The orchestra is composed of two electric guitars, a percussionist, a drummer, a lead singer, various horns and perhaps a bass player hidden somewhere.
The band’s music reminded me of Fela Kuti’s albums, and the performers were probably aware of this, considering they covered one of his songs. This was the most heartfelt, real performance of the festival. The band got everyone moving and dancing, even me a little bit.
As I walked out of Seattle Center, I heard the sounds of Everclear wafting out of Memorial Stadium. It was the only show I was glad I missed.