Bluegrass Generals photographed at the 2023 Free Fall Bluegrass Festival in Vail. Andy Hall (center) and Jay Pandolfi (far right) of the Infamous Stringdusters perform Sunday at this weekend’s Free Fall Bluegrass Festival in Vail.
Jason Schalm/Aspen Daily News
Autumn in the Colorado Rockies is hard to beat. Fewer tourists, autumn leaves, and a freefall music festival.
free? Wait, did you read that correctly?
For the second year in a row, the City of Vail is hosting the Free Fall Bluegrass Festival Friday through Sunday.
This year’s event will feature some of the biggest names in the world of bluegrass and jamgrass. Green Sky Bluegrass’ Sam Bush Band and mandolinist/lead singer Paul Hoffman will headline Saturday’s show, while Chris Pandolfi and Andy Hall of the Infamous Stringdusters and strings Starring Billy Nasi. Cheese Incident will be performing on Sunday. Musical performances will take place both days from noon to 7:30 p.m.
Specifically, on Saturday, Hoffman will take the stage at 4 p.m., and Sam Bush will perform at 6 p.m. Sunday’s music begins at 2 p.m. with a special performance by Nikki Bloom, who isn’t necessarily a bluegrass player. But she is an accomplished frontwoman, having played with her own band, the Gramblers, and various next-generation Grateful Dead formations, most notably with Phil Lesh. Bloom will be followed by the Andy Hall, Billy Nasi and Eric Sorin Trio from 4 p.m. The festival concludes with the Terrapin Family Band featuring Pandolfi and Bloom (and perhaps some special guests).
There are three stages: Solaris Stage, International Bridge Stage, and Gore Creek Plaza Stage, all located in Vail Village. Free Fall Bluegrass Festival is the brainchild of Diane Moody of Resort Entertainment.
“We wanted to create an event that would bring business to the Vail Valley during the off-season,” Moody said. “We also really wanted to organize a family music event that the whole family could enjoy. Taking the family to music festivals and paying for childcare costs money, so parents can do it themselves. We had to go, so we brought in the Rock and Roll Playhouse.”
The Playhouse will kick off the festivities Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to noon. The entire street will be cordoned off with a stage and activities for children. The music there consists of the Grateful Dead on Saturdays and Bob Marley on Sundays.
Think of this as a child-friendly environment where parents can enjoy their favorite music while children enjoy supervised play. There will be bounce houses, games and musical instruments for young people to enjoy. Following playhouse time, a “Kids Zone” with more bounce houses and activities for children will be held throughout the day.
Paul Hoffman performs at the Wheeler Opera House. Hoffman, lead singer and mandolinist for Greensky Bluegrass, will perform at the Freefall Bluegrass Festival in Vail on Saturday.
Jason Schalm/Aspen Daily News
The concept of a rock and roll playhouse at a music festival was the brainchild of concert impresario Peter Shapiro, who promoted Fare Thee Well, the first of several farewell tours for the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. It is something. In 2015, “Fare Thee Well” shows were held in Santa Clara, California and Chicago. Shapiro is widely regarded as the greatest promoter of his generation.
Free Fall Bluegrass Festival also has a spring festival. Both festivals center around bluegrass and jamgrass. Jamgrass is an offshoot of bluegrass that grew out of the 1990 Telluride Bluegrass Festival, when the Salmon Heads and Left Hand String Band merged to become Leftover Salmon. A new style of music was born.
Jamgrass has its roots in bluegrass. Primarily upbeat, danceable, and highly improvisational, it includes a myriad of musical flavors, from ska to funk to reggae and more. The band primarily plays two sets and an encore, and mixes up its sets each night.
Friday’s headliner, Sam Bush, was a member of New Grass Revival, the original band of jamgrass. They’re supposed to be to jamgrass what the Grateful Dead is to jam bands.
New Grass Revival was formed in 1971. In 1972, this group of bluegrass-playing hippies began showing up at bluegrass festivals. Traditional bluegrass musicians were disappointed, and long-haired enthusiasts excited about revolutionizing the genre were overjoyed. The New Grass Revival incorporated elements of rock and jazz that emphasized improvisation, and jamgrass was born.
New Grass Revival consisted of Bush on mandolin, Curtis Birch on guitar and dobro, Courtney Johnson on banjo, and Evo Walker on bass. Walker was soon replaced by John Cowan on bass, with Pat Fry taking Birch’s place.
“There were already people who deviated from Bill Monroe’s bluegrass style,” Bush says on his website. “If anything, we were reviving the new grass style that had already started. Our type of music tended to come from long jams and rock ‘n’ roll song ideas.”
New Grass Revival reached a wider audience in 1973 when Leon Russell took New Grass Revival as his backing band on a national tour. The Telluride Bluegrass Festival was founded in 1975 as a way to bring a new grass revival to Telluride, and the band was a central part of it. Busch has performed at every festival since then, earning him the title “King of Telluride” in 1991.
New Grass Revival played their last show as a warm-up for the Grateful Dead at The Dead’s New Year’s show in 1989-1990. Bush played with Emmylou Harris for several years as a member of her backing band, the Nash Ramblers. He then formed the Sam Bush Band, which has toured constantly for the past 30 years, releasing seven albums and one live DVD.
Bush is widely regarded as the father of jamgrass music. The Americana Music Association honored Bush with its Lifetime Achievement Award as an instrumentalist, and he was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2020 as a member of New Grass Revival. He will be inducted into the Hall of Fame for the second time as a solo artist in 2023. .
“With this band we have now, we’re free to try anything we want,” Bush said. “I look back on the past 50 years of new grass playing: jazz improvisation, rock and roll, jamming, the New Grass Revival, playing with Leon, Emmylou and others. It’s the culmination of everything. I stand on stage unapologetic. I feel like I was able to express those songs well.”
Hoffman likes to tell a story about how he once took a fanboy photo of himself and Sam Bush at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. The two are now close friends, and Busch plays with Greenski every year at Telluride. There’s definitely going to be some cross-pollination in Vail this weekend.
Greensky was formed in 2000. The group came to Telluride in 2006 for a band contest, but was told they applied too late to perform. Heartbroken, they decided to watch the festival as fans anyway. As fate would have it, another band canceled and Greenski got a chance to enter the contest, which he won.
This win earned him a spot on the main stage in 2007, and Greenski has made a permanent home ever since. Greensky subsequently won a band contest and became the only band to headline a night at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.
Greensky uses traditional bluegrass instruments: mandolin (Hoffman), acoustic guitar (Bruzza), banjo (Michael Arlen Bont), upright bass (Mike Devol), and dobro (Beck). From its traditional starting point, Greensky takes the genre to places Bill Monroe could never have imagined.
Pandolfi and Andy Hall play guitar and dobro, respectively, with the Infamous Stringdusters. For the past few years, the two have formed the core of Bluegrass Generals, a side project that teams up with other All-Stars. The Dusters, as they are known, are a five-piece group formed in Nashville in 2006. They made an immediate impact with a five-song extended play CD, followed by their heralded first record, Fork in the Road. The band won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2018 for their album Laws of Gravity.
Finally, Billy Nasi is a founding member of the String Cheese Incident. The band was formed in Crested Butte in 1993, but Nelsi had lived in Telluride for many years and was inspired by his bandmates to move there because the town had a richer music scene and hosted a bluegrass festival. I persuaded him. The move paid off in 1994, a year after the group’s formation, when festival promoter Craig Ferguson selected the band, known as “Cheese,” to open the festival.
String Cheese has developed a large following and maintains national tours and multiple night runs at Red Rocks.
Although Aspen and Vail are competing resorts, Moody commented that there is strong interest in Vail events throughout the region.
“We have a lot of people from Vail who go to Aspen for Belly Up shows and Jazz Aspen Snowmass, and we also have quite a few people from Aspen who come to Gerald Ford Amphitheater shows in the summer. We are all one family.”
For more information about the festival, visit freefallbluegrassfest.com.