Get TIO in your Inbox!

Events

[click "Play" to hear Bouqion interview]

Bertrand New 1-07dCopy You may hear unfamiliar murmurings on the streets of Telluride this weekend. The conversation won't be about dogs on sacred tracts of land or the local economy.
The talk may be about "terroir" versus technology. This weekend is all about drinking wine, consuming copious amounts of fabulous food. It is the 28th annual Telluride Wine Festival.

The French word “terroir,” from a Latin root meaning “earth,” describes the relationship between a given wine and the place that wine comes from. The ongoing debate in the wine world about “terroir” versus technology asks the question: Is wine about some place or about the expertise of someone, aided by technology? At its heart, however, the debate is all about the Old World, meaning primarily France, telling the New World, meaning places like Napa, it’s all about the land stupid: We have had it for centuries. You are upstarts.

22 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Barbara Heinrich]

Unknown Jeweler Barbara Heinrich of the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art is a gold medal artist specializing in gold. Her professional training began when she was a young woman living in Germany, her native country, where she studied goldsmithing at Pestalozzi Kinderdorf Wahlwies for four years.

Barbara moved to America to earn a second masters degree in her craft at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and never looked over her shoulder.

21 June, 2009 /

Thursday night's closer for Telluride Bluegrass was David Byrne. OK, skeptics, maybe David Byrne doesn't represent bluegrass for you, but what a show! Everyone was dressed in white- David, the band, the three very energetic dancers, and at the end of the evening the crowd,...

20 June, 2009 /

The 2009 Telluride Bluegrass Festival kicked off Thursday morning with a great set by two artists who really need no introduction to Telluride audiences. Tim O'Brien has performed at TBF for over 25 years, and the 36th running is Jerry Douglas' 25th appearance. Gentlemen, it...

19 June, 2009 /

Rattlin Bones Roots music goes global when Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson perform at the 36th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival on Saturday, June 20.

Country music by any name – bluegrass, roots, Americana –  is as southern as Martha White's self-rising flour, the Confederate Flag and hospitality, the genre derived from the Scots-Irish who settled in the Appalachian Mountains to the Africans who worked plantations in Georgia. But like so many industries, that sound has been outsourced, in this case with great success.

19 June, 2009 /

The real opening of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival each morning is the "Tarp Run" which determines who gets the best spots to view the festivities on stage. TIO was on hand Thursday morning to film this athletic endeavor. And we say: "Devil take the hindmost!"[double...

18 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Jerry Douglas]

Tn_NEADobro player Jerry Douglas is definitely Telluride's B.M.O.C.  this weekend. He is in town celebrating his silver anniversary at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival: 25 years at the 36th annual gathering of the tribe of legendary artists on a first name basis with the crowd: Sam, Bela, Edgar, Bryan, Peter, Emmylou, Tim – and Jerry.

You might say Jerry is the alpha and omega of this year's Telluride Bluegrass: he and Tim (O'Brien for the uninitiated) kick off the fun and games with a special duet set Thursday morning. Jerry joins the group who have come to define the Festival (as above) to close the curtain on Sunday night. In between, he should be everywhere you want to be...


18 June, 2009 /

TimO,Bela1995 They are an odd couple, the flame haired Irishman and the soft spoken guy from Ohio, but they are also two of the top musicians in the world. When the curtain goes up on the 36th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival Thursday afternoon, the opening act is dobro titan Jerry Douglas and Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist/singer/songwriter Tim O'Brien. Who could ask for anything more...

Jerry is celebrating #25. Tim sends a salute:

Tim on Jerry:

"Jerry Douglas is a well traveled, universal bridge between traditional bluegrass and every other kind of music. He seems like my brother who just happened to reinvent the Dobro. The two of us have worked together closely at various times over the years, but our intersections have been infrequent in the past decade, so Thursday's Bluegrass show will be a wonderful reunion. We've each grown some while apart, so it'll be fresh and instructive. I'm hoping the tempos will be a little slower. He's like Sam Bush in that the only way to keep up with him is to start out earlier than him.

17 June, 2009 /
[click "Play" to hear Kris Holstrom on the greening of Bluegrass]

100_0002 Once upon a time, Telluride Bluegrass meant dumpsters belching the remains of the day that had been marinated in one too many beers drunk from one too many plastic cups. Do you recall the debris littering Town Park, including plastic everything, from water bottles to utensils? Do you remember when the Festival changed its tune?

About 10 years ago, Kris Holstrom saw the festival waste as a resource for compost for her organic farm. The now director of The New Community Coalition began gathering food scraps behind the scenes from the vendors.

 "Initially, I was taking home maybe two pickup truckloads of food scraps from the event."

17 June, 2009 /
BelaJD The fraternity meeting known as Telluride Bluegrass opens this weekend, June 18 – June 21, and a favorite son returns to town to join his friends.

Bela Fleck is named after the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, also a passionate ethnomusicologist known for mixing sounds – in Bartok’s case, Hungarian and other folk sounds with the music of his contemporaries – to create distinctive music.

16 June, 2009 /