[Dixielandjazz] Venues? - How about this one?

[Steve barbone]

There is always a new venue for music, and/or a music festival. How about
this one? Shades of "Float Me Down That Old Green River". Apparently,
thinking outside the box has its rewards.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone



September 18, 2004 - New York Times - By Mindy Sink

In Nature's Own Concert Hall, Sound Is Forever

OAB, Utah, Sept. 17 - It is a rare music festival that requires patrons to
sign a risk waiver as they purchase tickets. But that is one of the
peculiarities of the Moab Music Festival, which takes the idea of outdoor
concerts to the extreme by ferrying musicians, guests and instruments -
including, on Thursday, a Steinway grand piano - 15 miles along the Colorado
River for a late afternoon performance in a towering red-rock grotto.

"My wife calls this 'extreme chamber music,' " said Michael Barrett,
co-founder and music director of the festival. Mr. Barrett, who is also the
director of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, N.Y.,
founded the festival 12 years ago with his wife, Leslie Tomkins, a violist.
"Our slogan is 'music in concert with the landscape,' '' Mr. Barrett said,
"and that really says it all."

After a visit to this small town adjacent to a group of national parks 13
years ago, the New York couple decided not only to start the nonprofit
festival but also to combine it with the desert scenery.

"It's so beautiful it's just indescribable," said Ms. Tomkins, the
festival's artistic director. "What we do in our lives is make this music
that is also very hard to describe. This is the best that nature has to
offer and the best that man has to offer. It's very seductive, and that's
why we are crazy enough to get out here in this grotto and play music."

On this day, Ms. Tomkins and the other female musicians had decided to go
barefoot and wiggle their toes in the pink sand as they played two
Brandenburg Concertos - in part to connect with the environment.

The festival, with a variety of classical, bluegrass, jazz and chamber
music, runs from Sept. 3 to Saturday, and includes two concerts in the
grotto. 

The two grotto shows - they cost $250 a person, with a portion of the
proceeds supporting the festival - neatly combine culture with the area's
reputation for adventure travel.

To put on a concert in a sandy alcove 45 miles from town, preparation begins
as the sun rises, with the meticulously wrapped piano being loaded on a
metal motor boat and taken to the grotto.

In years past the piano had to be borrowed, but the Steinway now used was
the festival's first capital acquisition, paid for mostly with donations.

For the performance, the 14 musicians headed down the river for some
rehearsal time in the grotto at midmorning on Thursday, and the 100 or so
patrons started their trip to the concert site shortly after noon. The
grotto, which is within the boundaries of Canyonlands National Park, is
tucked in from the river's edge by a thicket of shrubs and trees.

"It's all worth the look on people's faces when they walk in and see there
really is a piano here and there really is going to be a concert," Ms.
Tomkins said. 

Bob Jones, the owner of Tag-A-Long Expeditions, the boat company that
carries everything from piano to patrons to the site, first discovered the
grotto and its acoustic possibilities in 1987 when a Portland, Ore.,
musician on a raft trip tried it out. In the second year of the music
festival, Mr. Jones told Mr. Barrett about the place.

It's the rare natural acoustics of the grotto that attracts musicians from
all over.

"This is our Carnegie Hall," said Mr. Barrett, who on this day also played
piano and turned pages for other pianists. "God made this one and Carnegie
made the other one. I refer to this as my personal church."

Paquito D'Rivera, the Grammy award-winning clarinetist, has played in the
festival in recent years, but this was his first time in the grotto. He
performed in Brahms's Trio in A minor for clarinet, piano and cello.

"The sound is absolutely incredible," he said. "There is no way I have the
words to describe it. I love nature, so for me this feels like home."

Before beginning the concert with Claude Debussy's "Images," the San
Francisco-based pianist Paul Hersh asked that everyone sit and simply absorb
the silence for "5 to 10 seconds." Indeed, the silence is complete in the
grotto with only an occasional breeze rustling the leaves to interrupt. The
music does not bounce or echo off the spiraling multi-story rocks but
instead fills the natural chamber.

"The mindset of people is very different here," Ms. Tomkins said. "Their
senses are engaged with the physical beauty, and they are almost more
receptive to sound. You couldn't get an audience to sit in total silence in
a concert hall for 10 seconds!'' As she put her shoes on after performing
two Brandenburg concerto's, a violinist, Jennifer Frautschi, declared it the
most exciting experience of her life. "From when we started coming down the
river, this setting is just so inspiring," she said.

Bryant Summerhays of Salt Lake City came to the show with a friend.
"Classical music deserves to be heard in nature," he said. "The intimacy and
the isolation of this is what make it so amazing."

This summer's concerts were sold out, and tickets for next year are already
selling.