Nelsonville Art & Music Festival

Jul 14 2007

Photo Credit: Jason Meyer

Tickets	Presale	At The Door
Jul. 14, 2007
At the gate	$20.00	$20.00
Showtimes: Jul. 14, 2007: 4:00pm

Join us for the 3rd Annual Nelsonville Art & Music Festival, featuring THE SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS, BRAVE COMBO, ERIN McKEOWN, HILLBILLY IDOL and BAKELITE 78!

Tickets are $20 and will be available at the gate (plenty of tickets are still available). 12 and under are free. It is sunny and beautiful in Nelsonville today!

THIS IS AN OUTDOOR EVENT THAT WILL TAKE PLACE RAIN OR SHINE. Bring blankets and chairs to sit on, as seating in the field will NOT be provided. Please no coolers or dogs.

Map to Festival

Help us celebrate Summer at the 3rd Annual Art & Music Festival in Nelsonville. Live music, art vendors, good food, family & friends come together for a summer evening along the Hocking River. Featuring the great neo-swing-jazz band The Squirrel Nut Zippers; America's best party band, Brave Combo; Erin McKeown; Bakelite 78; and Hillbilly Idol. The festival will take place in a field adjacent to the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway Depot (see map above).

4:00 - Hillbilly Idol
5:30 - Bakelite 78
7:00 - Erin McKeown
8:30 - Squirrel Nut Zippers
10:00 - Brave Combo

Please consider making a donation with your ticket purchase. These funds go directly to the festival and help keep prices down. Thank you.

*VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITES*
Please call our office, 740-753-1924, if you are interested in volunteering. Help us out and see the show for FREE! Three-hour shifts are available in the beer garden, at the front gate, and at the merchandise tent.

Directions

From the North: 33 East to Nelsonville. Right at second light (Hocking Parkway), cross the train tracks. Festival on left, parking on right.

From the South: 33 West to Nelsonville. Pass Rocky Boots, left at next light (Hocking Parkway), cross the train tracks. Festival on left, parking on right.

SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS

"One day early last year I was just looking out the window when it hit me," says Chris Phillips, of the Squirrel Nut Zippers. "I thought, I miss those guys, let's do some shows."

And just like that, the band that brought the world Perennial Favorites, Hot, Bedlam Ballroom, and The Inevitable are back to play their first four shows since touring behind Bedlam Ballroom in 2000. Featuring the same line up that last recorded and toured together, the Squirrel Nut Zippers – with original and founding members Katherine Whalen, Jimbo Mathus, Chris Phillips, Je Widenhouse and Stuart Cole – will be performing four shows this February.

"It feels more positive now than ever," Phillips says, as the group prepares for their East Coast dates.

Performing songs from the entire catalogue, the band still rejoices at the difficulty people have in pigeonholing their unmistakable sound. A perpetually evolving, hybrid-stew of Southern roots traditions, the Zippers were aptly tagged "'30s punk" by one critic, and have always flirted with a muse most concerned with ghosts, love gone wrong, fever-dreams, and the razor's edge of sexual desire. Centered around the beguiling vocals of Katherine Whalen and the anachronistic windup toy that is Jimbo Mathus, the Zippers promise to both charm and confound. "I always felt like we were making short movies rather than songs," Phillips says.

Since last performing together, the members have kept themselves more than busy. Katherine Whalen has released several solo albums, most recently the critical favorite Dirty Little Secret. Jimbo Mathus has also released several acclaimed solo records, all while working as musical director for legendary blues musician and Grammy winner Buddy Guy. Not to be outdone, Phillips and Cole have co-written Dancing to Morocco, a travel guide for Northern Africa based on their recent touring in the region with the Amazing Dancer Dance Troupe, while Widenhouse has performed throughout the country with numerous jazz groups.

Life is mysterious. You never know when something might appear or disappear. Take it while you can get it, because for now, it's the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

BRAVE COMBO

Rarely, if ever, has a band name been more apropos, not only at the group's inception, but even more so more than 27 years after the fact. At first glance, back in 1979, the Denton, Texas, based outfit was, in shorthand, pegged as a New Wave polka band, a courageous if not almost oxymoronic endeavor during that particular rebirth of the cool. Yet it clicked and launched a stunning run that has now catapulted it into the new century. Over the last 27 years, Brave Combo has collected a dizzying array of descriptive musical pegs, boldly going where few bands have gone before, and even fewer could (or would) dare to venture. Succeeding in its first mission, Brave Combo is America's premier contemporary polka band, and a Grammy winning one at that. In the same breath, to name some but hardly all of the colors found on Brave Combo's musical palette, one can describe them as a groundbreaking world music act, a hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock'n'roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America's dance bands par excellence. It's all in a night's music for Brave Combo, often in a synergistic fashion that includes everything from klezmer surf rock to rocking cha cha to what The Washington Post calls "mosh pit polka," as well as to the hokey pokey and the chicken dance. And zyedeco, acid rock, Muzak, bubblegum, cumbia, classical, and the twist, to still not exhaust the list. This plethoric multitude of musical styles and flavors is frequently mixed, matched, and melded, into delicious, new concoctions by an imaginative team of musical gourmet master chefs.

"We're just trying to be a brave combo," is how bandleader Carl Finch explains what Billboard calls the band's "world-wise, unclassifiable music." The prime directive is to "break down people's perceptions about what's cool to like in music. Our deal is to shake up people's ideas about what they label hip, or right or wrong." In the process Brave Combo also shakes listeners' hips and tail feathers, sparks delight, provokes imaginations, rocks all night long, and elicits more than a few chuckles.

Brave Combo launched its 25th Anniversary year with the ultimate cultural sanctification by making one of its most prestigious appearances, of many, to date. On March 21, 2004, they played Oktoberfest in the beloved American burg of Springfield on an episode of "The Simpsons." As followers of both Brave Combo and the long running animated hit should not find surprising, "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening is a devoted Brave Combo fan. "They prove you can be hip and still be happy," says Groening. "Really, Brave Combo should have their own cartoon."

After all, Brave Combo's quarter century of music certainly displays a fascinating yin and yang mix of the utterly and delightfully surreal, juxtaposed with perfect sense and wisdom. What Finch calls its "barrage of incongruous elements" flows from its deep sincerity, outstanding musicianship, and a firm belief that music should be fun and life-affirming.

This mission statement has yielded more than two dozen albums that range from Japanese pop to Latin American dance tunes to the orchestral classics to more permutations on the polka than you can shake a beer stein at. They have marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade underneath Woody Woodpecker, recorded with the late Tiny Tim, and played such private fetes as David Byrne's wedding and the 200th episode party for "The Simpsons." The Brave Combo trail also includes festivals of all stripes, rock clubs, colleges, roadhouses, dances, state fairs, cultural centers (including the annual Midsummer Night's Swing at Lincoln Center in New York City) and more - basically anywhere there's a stage and an audience willing to open up their minds and dance.

Along the way they've won the admiration of such fellow visionaries and iconoclasts as Groening, Byrne, Garrison Keillor, and Harvey Pekar, as well as audiences of all ages, persuasions, and musical tastes. Brave Combo has charmed countless listeners and won avid devotees as they play some 150 dates a year that include everything from the Labor Day weekend West Fest Czech polka festival in Central Texas to being perhaps the world's finest (okay, maybe only) St. Patrick's Day polka band. They've taken their polka-plus-more sound multiple times to Japan and Europe, including appearances at such Continental festivals as Roskilde (Denmark), Printemps de Bourges (France), Steirischer Herbst (Austria), Storsjoyran (Sweden), and Lowlands (Holland).

Brace Combo's vivid music can be heard in the films David Byrne's True Stories, Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions, Late Bloomers, Fools Rush In, Envy, The Academy award winning The Personals, and Fox Television's "Bakersfield P.D." In addition, 1994 U.S. Olympic Ice Dancers, Elizabeth Punsalan and Jerod Swallow have skated to their music during numerous competitions and Brave Combo has been frequent guests on such public broadcasting shows as The Lonesome Pine Special, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, The Next Big Thing and A Prairie Home Companion, whose host Garrison Keillor calls them "entertainers who just won't take no for an answer." The Brave Combo that has accomplished all that and more is a five-piece veritable orchestra that originated and is still based in Denton, TX. Keyboardist, guitarist, accordionist, and singer Carl Finch founded the band in 1979, releasing their first records on the band's own Four Dots Records. He has also produced artists like Little Jack Melody And His Young Turks, Trout Fishing In America, Santiago Jimenez Jr., and Mingo Salvidar, compiled the Rhino Records collection Legends of the Accordion, and released on Four Dots the debut album by Sara Hickman, Equal Scary People, that helped win her a major label record deal.

Alongside Finch for most of Brave Combo's 27 years has been multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Barnes, who joined in 1983. Barnes is known for his lively and imaginative stage wear, as well as playing an array of reeds and woodwinds, harmonica, pennywhistle, guitars, you name it, sometimes in multiple, simultaneous combinations. Rounding out the current line-up are trumpet and flugelhorn player Danny O'Brien, drummer Alan Emert and Ann Marie Harrop on bass guitar.

The band's musical agility and diversity has no doubt helped it win "Pop/Rock Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" honors three years in a row in the annual Critics Poll for the jazz bible Downbeat. And yes, Brave Combo remains a band, despite all the achievements, whose music all but begs wider airing, even if they have succeeded in winning over the various, finicky, disparate factions of the polka world, garnered consistently high praise in the music press, and picked up new fans every time they’ve played.

Does this mean Brave Combo is a cult band? Well, if it is, it’s one with converts and outposts across North America and south of the border, as well as around the world. And like any self-respecting cult, there is an underlying international agenda behind the music, as The Chicago Tribune divined when it dubbed Brave Combo a "party band with a purpose." And yes, there is a purpose. "Peace through polka" may sound like a quip, but the way Brave Combo can erase musical prejudices and seduce people to like music they thought they wouldn't or didn't, does serve a higher calling. "I do think the acceptance of polka and other dance rhythms can help bring about world peace. If the people of the world can start dancing together, they can learn to respect each other's cultures, too," concludes Finch. "That kind of understanding will give us all a better chance to survive."

ERIN McKEOWN

From elegant pop to balls-out rock, sweet electronics to witty swing, Erin McKeown has packed a ton of music into her young career. With 5 studio albums, 2 EPs, and numerous soundtracks and compilations to her credit, the 28-year-old songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hasn't stopped for a breather in the last 10 years. Along the way she has averaged 200 shows a year and garnered the praise of fans and critics alike. McKeown's newest release is Sing You Sinners, a singular and sly take on the not-so-standard entries in the american songbook.

"Airborne metaphors carry the songwriter Erin McKeown all the way through her fourth album, "We Will Become Like Birds" (Nettwerk). Her clear mezzo-soprano sounds perpetually optimistic, and so do the syncopated electric guitar parts she picks and plucks through the sparsely arranged but fully realized songs." -Jon Pareles, New York Times

"Her operative mood is effortless grace." -LA Weekly

"Her playing is so muscular, her arrangements so well conceived that she succeeds brilliantly. As with all truly great guitarists, the wonder is less in her chops than her choices." - Boston Globe

"In several distinctive ways- voice, dynamic subtlety, and sheer songwriting ability- Erin McKeown is in a class of her own." -Sunday Times (UK)

HILLBILLY IDOL

Like missionaries from the Mother Church of Country Music, these guys love to spread the word of Hank, Bill, George, Lefty, and Merle. It's "real" country music with plenty of fine singing, crisp and clear instrumental picking, smart original tunes and new spins on classic songs from the masters. Hillbilly Idol reaches back to embrace the traditions of bluegrass, western swing, and honky tonk, and brings them forward to "water the roots" of those traditions today -- and -- they have a great time doing it.

The band has produced two fine discs of music, 1999's, "Town and Country" and the 2001, Slewfoot Records release, "Hillbilly Idol". Both discs have been critically well-received and generated lots of interest and airplay on Americana radio programs in the U.S and around the globe. --- and -- a brand new, full length, professionally recorded album of HBI music shall appear in September '05.

"Hillbilly IDOL is the real deal, with decades of collective experience in bluegrass and country music. The sound is honest and inspired and steeped in tradition, with forward vision for maximum freshness." - Jim Manion, Bloomington Independent, 11/19/99

The band: Paul Kovac: vocal, guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle. Al Moss: vocal, pedal steel, acoustic guitar. Bill Watson: acoustic bass.

BAKELITE 78

HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Arriving in Chicago in 2000, singer and guitarist Robert Rial continued a musical direction he started at college in southeastern Ohio. Robert emulated the styles he loved most: country blues and swing, Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, American folk songs, jazz and mountain music. Many of these styles of music were originally released on 78-speed records. Some 78s were made from a "new" material, an early form of plastic called Bakelite. Bakelite 78 records preserved the music of this era. Bakelite 78 the band was born to bring them back to life.

ASSEMBLING THE PLAYERS
Robert Rial's choice of instruments in his new group reflected the era of Bakelite 78's musical repertoire - tenor guitar, tenor banjo and stand-up megaphone to better emulate the singing style of classic "pre-microphone-era" singers. His voice is not so much "heard" as it is experienced. After a few years honing his craft at open stages, hootenannies, and various Chicago clubs, Robert assembled a choice group of musicians to fully realize the sound of Bakelite 78:

Bob Kessler - clarinet, harmonica.
Jason Grey - percussion, accordion and background vocalist.
Dick Unetich - trumpet, rhythm guitar, background vocalist.
Ariel Bolles - upright bass, trombone, background vocalist.

HOLDING COURT AT THE HIAWATHA...
Taking a cue from several successful Chicago-based bands, the group sought a semi-permanent residency. They found it on the near-West Side at Club Hiawatha. Steeped in Chicago history, it made a perfect setting for the vintage sound Bakelite 78 was ready to bring to a live audience. Bakelite 78 played their first in a long series of Friday night shows in April 2004. Their last came with the closing of the Hiawatha in April 2006.
The opportunity to perform before an empathetic, enthusiastic crowd for two straight years was of great value to the burgeoning band. Bakelite 78 has since become an in-demand act at other Chicago venues: the Bad Dog Tavern, Beat Kitchen, California Clipper, Candlelite, Hideout, Charleston, Bucktown Arts Festival, Taste of Lincoln Ave. the Horseshoe and elsewhere.