Utah Arts Festival

I'm sort of late with this. Spent the summer moving to a new house, setting up the "man cave", and dealing with a new status as landlord for my old house. So I finally processed several recordings I did at this summer's Art Festival. I caught several acts, mostly using my hat mikes and a new Sony D50 flash recorder. The exception was John Henry, where I brought out a bigger rig, and managed to avoid getting it soaked in the big rainstorm (see resulting rainbow above). I have some great samples of the music from several groups on the Rev Willis web site (scroll to the link at the bottom of the Home page), or click the links after each of the following pics.

John Flanders seems to play with about 20 groups during the festival. He must make enough dough during this one event to retire for the winter (does he ski?). Anyway, he played in a new group (at least to me) from Park City. Highlighted by the great pipes of Alicia Faith, Radius thoroughly entertained the cafe audience.

Click here to direct to the tunes site.

Ken Critchfield is a bassist who tends toward free jazz and total improv. His group Seraphim combines music with spoken word.
Click here to direct to the tunes site.

A festival favorite is Zion Tribe. They finished their set with the best version of Turning Point that I've heard them do. Flanders on sax, of course.
Click here to direct to the tunes site.

Following Zion Tribe was the one man band, That One Guy! He played a weird home brew pipe device with more contact mikes and effects than I could ever figure out. Amazing stuff! He's occasionally associated with the Mermen, a bay area psychedelic surf music band, and one of my favorites. TOG had to compete with bleed from some sort of Neal Diamond clone band, but he blew my mind (as you'll probably hear).
Click here to direct to the tunes site.

John Flanders was on the festival schedule with his own group, the expanded Double Helix (Ryan Shephard on trombone). He introduced a new tune, Latin Blues, which had some great percussion sequences.
Click here to direct to the tunes site.

Finally, we have John Henry, the best jazz combo in SLC. The guys started out hot, but got cooled off by a major rain shower which shut down the electricity. Well, not too cooled off, they came out to play a couple gospel tunes as acoustic, for the packed audience seeking shelter from the storm. Where Derek got the accordian, I'll never know (for a solo on a Monk tune).
I've linked to their Meat Grinder for a musical example.

A great festival for music, more than I could catch. Also some fine art, I spent way too much on neato glass sculptures.