Festivals

Buddy Guy, B&B, 2009
Buddy Guy, 2009 B & B

The Telluride Blues & Brews Festival single day tickets went on sale Friday, July 1st at 10am (MST). Every September, the bands, the fans, and the barrels of beer roll into Telluride Town Park for the annual Telluride Blues & Brews Festival. The Festival is a three-day celebration of live blues, funk, rock, gospel and soul performances, hosting over 20 nationally touring bands, and over 50 of the best microbreweries in the country.
 
 
The 18th Annual Telluride Blues & Brews Festival lineup is complete, featuring headliners Willie Nelson, The Flaming Lips, and Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Additional performances include The Robert Cray Band, Zappa Plays Zappa, moe., Marcia Ball, Fitz and the Tantrums, The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band, Mavis Staples, Anders Osborne, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and many more.

By Elisabeth Gick

Lama2 

What makes the Compassion Festival a festival rather than a conference or symposium? The short answer is that a festival is more fun than a conference. There is art, there is food, there are things to look at, touch, hear, smell and taste.

The Compassion Festival, to be hosted this coming weekend by the Telluride Institute, may not have all those tempting ingredients, but a good number of them.

Brazilian musician to curate special program of films for the four-day Festival

Caetano+Veloso+126751636_f537753b33_o Telluride Film Festival (September 2-5, 2011), presented by National Film Preserve LTD., is proud to announce its 2011 Guest Director, Caetano Veloso. The beloved artist has been invited to select a series of films to present at the 38th Telluride Film Festival.  The Guest Director program is sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
 
Festival directors Tom Luddy, Gary Meyer and Julie Huntsinger annually select one of the world’s great film enthusiasts to join them in the creation of the Festival’s program lineup. The Guest Director serves as a key collaborator in the Festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to Telluride.

 

 

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By Elisabeth Gick

[click "Play" to listen to Elisabeth's conversation with Peter Gold]

Author/anthropologist Peter Gold is coming to the Telluride Institute’s Compassion for a World in Crisis Festival.

Peter Gold is a man of many titles - anthropologist, ethno musician, student of Buddhism, traveler, author, professor. Maybe it’s a result of his Buddhist training that he is so easy-going, with a great smile. He will give one of the keynote speeches at the Telluride Institute’s Compassion for a World in Crisis Festival, July 8 – 10.

[click "Play" to hear Pamela Zoline's interview with Clifford Saron]

 

by Pamela Zoline

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Among the frontiers on which we, smart chimps or bruised angels, find ourselves, perhaps the most intriguing, dangerous and profound is right here and now as we peer into the galaxies within our brainpans and begin to understand. Dr. Clifford Saron, Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis, is at the helm of the starship. His research style, rather than swashbuckling, is exquisite, patient, impeccable, respectful, and has to do with the most powerful experiment design, and the most sensitive investigation of psychological and physiological processes. This is basic and rigorous research into how meditation affects the mind. It takes the exploration beyond religion and even beyond first-person accounts into the realm of what can be tested and measured.

By J James McTigue

I love geeks; therefore I love Telluride Wine Fest. This year’s 30th festival was full of wine geeks and Pouring foodies, all intent on enthusiastically sharing the intricate technicalities and personal stories behind their artfully crafted creations.

It’s hard not to listen to a geek, because their passion carries their stories. Before you know it, you’re fully engaged, tasting their, let’s say… mezcals…noting hints of smoke in one and earthy minerals in the other.

This past weekend’s Wine Festival was nothing short of a geek-fest, celebrating some of the best food and wine in the country, and possibly the world. Keeping true to the spirit of Telluride, it was an anything goes affair, colored by educational seminars, blowout tastings and intimate meals carefully paired with specialty wines in chosen venues.

[click"Play" to hear Erik Dalton's description of River Festival]

 

RwayRiverFest11.jpg. Ridgway, Colorado, is so much more than a bedroom community for Telluride. The town is famous – or infamous – as the location for several movies, including "How the West Was Won," and one of actor John Wayne's latest and greatest, "True Grit," (1969), in which Wayne stars as Rooster Cogburn. Ridgway's True Grit Cafe is filled with John Wayne memorabilia, but as far as we know, no drunken, one-eyed federal marshals. And the Uncompaghre is a great source for trout fishing and the focus of Ridgway's fourth annual River Festival.

 

[click "Play", Chef Erich Owen talks with Susan]

 

Erich-owen-pensive Since 2008, Erich Owen has worked as the Executive Chef of The Chop House at Telluride's historic New Sheridan Hotel. His New American cuisine emphasizes quality fresh ingredients impeccably prepared with a light, deft touch in the French tradition for a simple but always elegant presentation. If you are a patron of the 30th annual Telluride Wine Festival, the proof of Erich's skills will be in the pudding – or whatever it is he prepares for the kick-off luncheon. Chef Erich Owen co-hosts the Telluride Wine Festival opening feast, Thursday, June 23, 11:30 a.m – 1:30 p.m. And that's big news. Here's why.

In the art world, there is a reflex known as The Cultural Cringe, an assumption that whatever anyone does in the arts – and we include the food arts here – is not validated until judged by those in the know from outside your world. We cry "foul."

By Jon Lovekin

A Tom Boy Ride
A Tom Boy Ride

Preparing for a festival as grand as the Telluride Bluegrass Festival takes time. For many Festivarians, the week to 10 day experience is their one vacation of the year. The excitement in the weeks before the Summer Solstice reaches a fever pitch the weekend before the music starts. In the early years, an entire festival was spent flopped in a tent in Town Park listening to the music from there, too sick from altitude, sun, and fun to be able to move.

As the festival caught on, pitching a tent in an empty lot or sleeping in a car late in the week ceased being possible. Prior planning became necessary and arrival in the campground early in the week morphed to getting there the weekend before. Town passes on the Landcruiser faded to no longer trying to leave town at all. We started working at the ticket booths, renting bikes, and moving in for the week.