ENTER THE YOUNG

Blue Moose tears up the stage at the Champlain Folk Festival.


We’ve just come back from the 26th annual Champlain Folk Festival held at Kingsland Bay State Park and would like to report that acoustic music is alive and well in Vermont. We’d like to, but it’s not so.

This is not a slam against the Champlain Festival. It’s a miracle that it took place at all given the loss of corporate sponsorship and an economic collapse that has shrunk the donor list to one that fits on a single column of the program. And bad weather on Friday and Sunday didn’t help.

And it’s certainly no slam at the performances. Among the highlights were Jeni Hankins and Billy Kemp singing gorgeous songs of hardship and hope dug from the hills of West Virginia; Laura Risk, just one month removed from the birth of her second child, laying down misty Scottish fiddle tunes and lively Quebec reels; Sana Ndiaye explaining the intricacies of the ekonting, a three-stringed West African banjo ancestor; The MacArthurs anointing the new stage named for their late mother; Annie Rosen amazing with unexpected tender vocal moments; and Marc Maziade showcasing an unheard of thing: French-Canadian banjo picking. The dance floor was sizzling and packed, despite treacle-like humidity.

So what was lacking? Young folks! They were on site on Saturday, but seldom at the music venues. Instead they were busy plunging into Lake Champlain, sunning themselves on floating docks, scarping up Island Ice Cream—the ginger comes highly recommended—and heading back to the lake for more watery fun. To be fair, it was a hot day and the lake was inviting, but a generation ago if you had given young folks a choice between swimming or tunes, music would have won hands down. Music is the altar at which Baby Boomers and Gen X worshiped, but the missionary efforts have been weak. Much of what we see on acoustic music stages, dance floors, and in concert seats is simply too gray to be sustainable.

This brings me to the band that was the surprise hit of the festival: Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers, a saucy band from Boston that was everything that was lacking elsewhere: pathbreaking, energetic, insouciant, and young. Yes, guitarist Stash Wyslouch and fiddler Andy Reiner exude a bit of attitude. No, you won’t hear nyckelharpa maven Bronwyn Bird or fiddler Mariel Vandersteel give academic discourses on traditional playing styles. Blue Moose calls their mash-up of Norwegian, Swedish, and old-time American tunes “Scandilachian,” and good on them. Enough already with preservation—traditional music roots are deep enough. It’s time to get irreverent, funky, and greener. Blue Moose was the only band to pack the Saturday showcase concerts and the only one that lured the young folks out of the water. Like Canada’s The Dukhs, Sweden’s Vasen, or the rising American bluegrass band Crooked Still, they embody hope for the future of acoustic music, if Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and festival organizers can stop reliving the past and make way for the whelps.

Also on the festival lineup was Roland Clark, all of fourteen and scary good with the fiddle. Let the greening begin.

Caution: Check out Blue Moose live--their YouTube videos are pretty awful!