So How Was DjangoFest?

cbwim

Even though it was 15 miles north of me, I stayed home. Too busy with other things musical this weekend including visits from European clients and I have a ton of instrument wood to pay for so money was tight. Am sure it was fun.

But one thing concerns me - how full were the houses? When I checked WICA a week ago, Friday and Saturday night's concerts were only about 50% sold seat-wise. Am hoping that they made enough to keep this going well into the future.

B25Gib

I also heard from my musician friends who attended concerts at DFNW that attendence was significantly lower. Ticket prices for sure reduced attendence. Concert promoters and WICA will evaluate their pricing policy after this year. There were less players around town also.
.......Still, lots of good jams around town, incl. the Dog House that was temporarily reopened saturday and sunday. Really good jams at the Fairgrounds every day and night with many musicians who know each other as well as others who came up from town after meeting the "campers" in jams downtown.
.......Great jams again at Troy's Friday night, Thanks!
.......Rocky

Phil

http://youtu.be/jC9Aw6bLB3s

http://youtu.be/d8x03trIqRI

Phil

oh...and also this great version of "Seul ce soir" ~ enjoy !- cheers Phil


http://youtu.be/aRQs83rGQj4

rimm

Nice jam on Í can´t get started' ´at the start of ´Shine´. Tasty.

Phil

his a clip of Antoine's wonderful solo on Dance Norwegian -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JBRTyTqlTs&feature=plcp

Bob Holo

Cool vids, Phil!

Let me see if I can take a shot at answering the original question. This is just one opinion, but I've been going to DFNW for nearly its entire existence. I think Djangofest is clearly evolving. I'm not sure we'll know exactly how till we look back 10 years from now. It started out very small attended by only hardcores and now is attracting people who are more casual attendees. It wasn't all that long ago that most of the people I knew got "tickets" for Djangofest... which is to say... tickets for every show... and there were so many shows it was just brutal. The goal was to go and immerse for 5 days until you had jammed and listened and drank yourself into a finger-blistered-quasi-comatose-audio-overstimulated mess and then fly home and recuperate. Langley vibrated at 220bpm for a straight week... sort of like Samoreau with a small concert hall and a large pub which started hosting about 5 jams at a time from the time the concerts let out till city sound ordinances forced people to leave Langley township and go to the campground or find a house-jam. Pomping stopped briefly between 4am and 5am so people could go throw-up, try to eat something, change their strings, take some aspirin, and then get back to the festivities.

Now, the venues are a little larger for the shows more likely to attract people who don't buy full-festival passes, and the jams in town are more mellow - and the campground scene is still it's wonderfully genial self with nice midsized jams of people who like to talk and play.

The talent Nick brings is stellar every year. His challenge is that people get stressed about ticket prices and advance sponsorship sales - but these are exactly the things he needs to do to get more money and get more of it up front so that he can get top acts. He competes with well-funded venues all over the world who have this annoying tendency to call up his festival artists at the last moment and offer them a lot more money than he can pay, so he winds up changing the schedule several times. This distresses people who have their hearts set on some particular act. But somehow he seems to be able to use his contacts or call in favors and get a great lineup. The schedule changes used to bother me but I've gotten zen about it and I just buy my tickets knowing that Nick is going to walk across broken glass to deliver the goods. I have not yet been disappointed. Samois seems to be ahead of the evolution curve from Djangofest as it is older, but my friends from Europe tell me it also has growing pains... people who want evolution/growth/mainstream and people who want tradition & stasis. I imagine all music festivals in all genres have these dynamics in play; we just happen to be really close to this particular festival and so we perceive its evolution to be unique... but I suspect that it is not.

Any people on the board who are long time attendees of other festivals? (Montreax, Monterey, Newport, Blythe, Telluride... or some newer festivals such as Hyde Park, Hildesheim etc...?)