The mojo and magic of music festivals.
It was the last of the Saturday night sessions at the Richmond Folk Festival in 2015, on a cool and rainy night. The crowds had faded, and I figured I might as well hear the beginning of the Ensemble Shanbehzadeh, an Iranian father-son act, as it turned out. I had no idea what to expect.
The next thing I knew, I was being swept away, as Saeid Shanbehzadeh spun around the stage like a genie, singing and wailing on his high-pitched double-reed goatskin bagpipe, while his 22-year-old son, Naghib, kept apace, hands a blur on goblet drums. The crowd rose to its feet writhing to the desert sounds, and the party—a spontaneous act of common humanity—had begun.
Music festivals can do that. They connect their audiences and performers in unanticipated ways, sometimes deep and sometimes charmingly ephemeral, like that time at New Orleans Jazz Fest, when, following a set by the indie folk-rockers The Head and the Heart, we ran into the band’s Josiah Johnson and Jonathan Russell in the porta potty line. They mugged for photos with my daughter and her friend—a treasured moment.
Whereas music concerts are more like sprints—intense, and over in a blaze of glory—festivals are marathons, or at least 10Ks, with multiple stages, space to explore and discover, and plenty of time to meet up with others and bond over the music, local or international fare, and craft ales. Open up to their mojo, and you just might find yourself locked with performers and audience in a fit of wild abandon.
A good music festival is far more than just a slew of simultaneous concerts strung together over days. It’s a carefully curated and orchestrated celebration of a genre or theme, one that gains energy from a rich overlapping of performances and the sustained presence of artists who may at any moment unite in ad hoc jam sessions on stage or otherwise.
For festival goers, it’s a state of mind, a chance to discover new performers and sounds, and to participate—whether that means piling onto the dance floor for a soul set or swaying side to side in a crowd of thousands, or simply being swept away by the emotive power of a transcendent voice.
It isn’t just a quick escape from reality: It’s a commitment. And naturally, the more you put into it, the more you reap from it. Before Firefly (125 bands playing over four days) I listened to recordings of every one and ranked them according to how much I wanted to see them. But no need to always stick to a plan, because festivals are full of unexpected joys. I almost always head home with a new obsession, like the Quebe Sisters (a trio of champion Texas swing fiddlers) or BRONCHO (a weird noise pop band).
And, I mean, who knew that Paul McCartney—at age 70+—could still rock like that, or that Dan Fogerty would join Springsteen for a rousing version of “Proud Mary”?
