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Festivals

[click "Play" to hear Eileen's conversation with Victor Wooten]

 

by Eileen Burns

Victor_wooten Telluride’s 38th Bluegrass Festival will spotlight a host of hall of fame musicians over the four-day celebration, beginning on June 16th, including five-time Grammy® winner Victor Wooten, who will be performing with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.   Heralded as “the Michael Jordan of the bass, Wooten was recently named in The Top 10 Greatest Bass Players of All Time in “Rolling Stone Magazine’s”  Readers’ Poll, and has won “Bass Player Magazine’s” prestigious “Bassist of the Year,” three times now.  Wooten’s style continues to grow and transform, but he is best known for bringing the electric base to the forefront with a rhythmic freedom unlike any other bassist performing today.

12 June, 2011 /
[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Tony Trischka]

 

Tony Trischka Not all of the action at the 38th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival takes place on the Fred Shellman Main Stage. Legendary banjo innovator Tony Trischka is in town for the launch of the new ArtistWorks Academy of Bluegrass via a workshop in Elks Park, Friday, June 18, 1:30 p.m. and an appearance at  around 4:30 p.m. on the Main Stage.

For more than 35 years, Tony Trishchka's stylings have inspired a whole generation of bluegrass and acoustic musicians. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential banjo players of the latter part of the 20th century (and counting), largely in terms of his influence on succeeding generations of players such as virtuosic Bela Fleck, back in town for the Festival for the 30th year in a row, this time reunited with the original Flecktones – and his teacher. When he was just a senior in high school, Bela made trips to Bronx, New York to study with Tony, who he once described to me as his "hero."

"... the godfather of what's sometimes called new acoustic music," said The New York Times.

12 June, 2011 /
[click "Play" to hear Susan's interview with Ben Kaufmann and Adam Aijala]

 

Yonder Mountain Telluride has its festivals. Nederland has Frozen Dead Guy Days. No kidding, celebrated annually from Friday – Sunday the first full weekend of March. A centerpiece of Frozen Guys Days is a screening of  the film "Grandpa's in the Tuff Shed," a magnum opus which premiered at Mountainfilm in Telluride in 1998. A centerpiece of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival is another Nederland import:  Yonder Mountain String Band.

Yonder  – banjoist Dave Johnston, mandolinist Jeff Austin, bassist Ben Kaufmann and guitarist Adam Aijala – is back again for the 38th annual event, June 16 – June 19, 2011, kicking off the long weekend with a Nightgrass set at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village and appearing again on the Main Stage on Saturday.

11 June, 2011 /
[click "Play", Susan talks with Colin Sullivan}

 

Heritage Fest poster Telluride's Heritage Festival takes a look hard long over its shoulder at Telluride's colorful past, back to the days when Butch Cassidy robbed the bank, and cowboys and prospectors with gold fever bellied up to our (numerous) bars. (Believe there were about 37 in Telluride's heyday.)

The following is the schedule of events:

Friday, June 10: Kick off Heritage Fest Friday night with wine, cheese and a selection of the Telluride Historical Museum's most popular and interesting images on display at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, 5-6 p.m.

09 June, 2011 /

 

At Telluride Inside... and Out we mostly have our gaze fixed on "the now" or on the future. Before we move on to Bluegrass and the rest of the Summer schedule, I'd like to share my take on Mountainfilm in Telluride, now a week and a half in the rear-view mirror. This is not meant to be a review, but one person's impression of a weekend of inspiration, cautionary tales, beauty, and calls to action.

The tribute to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was a standout, with intimate images of life with a famous father by sons David (Festival Director) and Anthony, juxtaposed with reminiscences by commentators on the world stage who knew Richard Holbrooke both on a personal and a professional level. The conversation among Roger Cohen, David Rohde and Vali Nasr particularly put the Holbrooke we in Telluride knew as a neighbor in a global perspective.

09 June, 2011 /

By J James McTigue

The Baffin Babes are four rad chics with whom it would be fun to have a beer, go dancing, or ski tour 1200 kilometers in the Canadian Arctic over 80 days. Except you weren’t invited on the ski trip; they chose to do it all on their own.

Babes Swedish sisters Vera and Emma Simonson, along with Norwegian friends Inga Tollefson and Kristin F. Olsen spent 80 days traveling along the eastern coast of Baffin Island, the largest island in Canada and the fifth largest island in the world.

At Mountainfilm in Telluride they will be presenting their trip, the glacial scenery, and remote Inuit villages they visited, as well as the fun they had, in a multimedia presentation at 6:45 Friday night at the Sheridan Opera House and 9:30 a.m. Monday at the Palm. (Palm showing is free to the public).

26 May, 2011 /

Brakes On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, about the time the Gulf oil spill was about to capped, Drew Ludwig decided to take a walk. A long walk. In August 2010, he traveled by foot 120 miles from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.

"I went to help. I went to work. I held lofty goals of an activist, and I wanted to use my hands."

And so he did, his hands and his unerring eye, recording images with his camera of people and places encountered along the way. Drew's motivation: break down the idea of "The Other," a complex concept lifted from the social sciences that defines the process by which individuals and groups create distance between themselves and those who do not seem to fit easily and comfortably into their cloistered worlds.

25 May, 2011 /
[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Judith and Richard]

 

kicker: trash to treasure

MickysMonkeyWeb October 5, 2010, the Town of Telluride passed an ordinance against single-use plastic shopping bags, making Telluride the first community in the state of Colorado to pass such a ban. 

The ordinance followed the popularity of the film "Bag It," made by Telluride local Suzan Beraza. "Bag It," which screened on National Public Television in April and garnered awards  at film festivals across the country, became as much a call-to-action as a documentary, not just locally, but nationally.

"Bag It" is  just one of a number of populist responses to another film, the Sixties pop phenomenon "The Graduate," a movie that predicted a future of plastics. Artists Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang's work represents another kind of response. They make "found art."

25 May, 2011 /
[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Tosh and Oscar]

 

Shakespeare Like the Telluride Film Festival, Mountainfilm in Telluride vets hundreds of movies submitted by hopeful directors from across the globe to select the best of the best to screen at its annual event. This year, festival director David Holbrooke whittled down the number of picks to about 60 features, including "Shakespeare High."

"Shakespeare High" is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of a socio-economic cross-section of teens in Southern California who study Shakespeare to compete in a drama festival run by the many thousand-strong volunteer teacher organization, DTASC (Drama Teachers Association of Southern California). The Festival, now 90 years old, counts among its alumnae Val Kilmer, Richard Dreyfuss, Mare Winningham, Sally Field, Nicolas Cage and Kevin Spacey. Spacey is also an executive producer (through Trigger Street) of the film.

24 May, 2011 /