The Telluride Bluegrass Festivarian and bride-to-be was hanging on to the gate, shaking a shoe and frantically waving a cardboard sign which read "Play My Wedding," at the band on stage. Kay Vollmayer was not disappointed.Greensky Bluegrass, former band contest winners and new Festival...
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.
Dobro 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...
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.
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.It's been a stormy several days in Telluride, but that hasn't stopped a contingent of wounded vets from enjoying a busy schedule of activities with TASP. Participants from all over the country did some rock climbing, biking, jeeping, horseback riding, rafting and generally digging...
by Jennifer Nyman-Julia
Telluride can be a scrappy town, but just as quickly, it is a place that wears its heart on its sleeve.
It's Day One of Sheridan Arts Foundation's Wild West Fest, a program that brings 50 inner city children from Boys and Girls Clubs all over the country to town every spring for a week of exciting learning programs under the guidance of talented local mentors. My name is Jennifer Nyman-Julia. This is my 11th year as the Mentorship Program Director, and I really love my job.
Astronaut John Grunsfeld has been to Telluride Mountainfilm twice, the first time in 2000, and the second in 2006.
IN 2006, John spoke on the subject was ET, NASA's search for planets with "life signatures." His objective: to help reframe people's thinking about life in the universe. He also addressed "Man, Moon, and Beyond," how NASA was planning its next push towards manned missions. Finally, John provided an astronaut’s eye view of the mountain ranges of our blue planet, not from the Hubble – which Grunsfeld has been in charge of repairing – but from his own Hasselblad. But the Hubble has been one of the astronaut's pet project for years.
Lots of things were broken in the early 1990s: the economy and my arm. The country turned to the Man from Hope to fix the economic downturn. (Clinton did.) To fix the arm, the result of a horseback riding accident, I turned to a part-time Telluride local, world renowned hand and arm surgeon Dr. Hill Hastings of the Indiana Hand Center/Shoulder & Elbow Institute, our Indianapolis connection.
Meeting HIll was yet another in the endless variations on the theme of six degrees of separation: a friend of a friend, he happened to be in residence at his Telluride Ski Ranches home just three weeks before I was scheduled for surgery in New York. The man's genius was apparent after our first meeting: he had created architectural drawings of my arm, complete with moving parts to illustrate what needed to happen. He generously offered to participate in a conference call with my New York doc. Clint and I decided to jump ship and have him do the surgery.
[click "Play" button to hear Susan's conversation with Kent Tompkins]
Tompkins uses words/images to go "Beyond Shamanic Visions" April 22 at Wilkinson Library in Telluride
Telluriders may be exceptions to the rule. We tend to march to our own drum. However, in this Piscean Age, the rest of the world has made like sheep, relying on bellwethers for guidance to the Promised Land. According to healer/counseler/documentary photographer Kent Tompkins that mindset is about to become toast. Just as the flower children of "Hair" sang: "It is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius," when each individual becomes capable of spiritual awareness without the intercession of religious authority.
To date, the way of the seeker has been littered with metaphysical possibilities, rituals, prayers and lessons entirely from ancient cultures, largely from the East. Yoga, Sufis, I Ching, Kaballah are on a long list of examples.
