Wall 2 Wall Guitar Festival, Champaign/Urbana, IL: September 2007

We really like taking road trips to go see live performances in non-smoking venues. It's what we do. It's our weekend getaway thang.

We discovered the Wall 2 Wall Guitar Festival online when Michael was looking for Andy Summers concerts and found that Andy -- who does not tour much -- had appeared at the 2005 Wall 2 Wall Guitar Festival. Additionally, we found a reference to the same Festival on the John McLaughlin website. That was enough for us, so we reviewed the program, made a massive ticket purchase and counted the days.

We left STL Friday 9/14 at around 8am and got to where we THOUGHT we needed to be around noon, which is when we wanted to catch the first free concert, Fareed Haque with Goran Ivanovic. There was a bit of confusion because we were on the Champaign part of the campus and needed to be on the Eastern part of the campus in Urbana. (Side note: If there was anything I could complain about concerning this whole Festival, it was the fact that online and venue signage and directions were either poor or non-existent for the out-of-town attendee.) We finally found where we needed to be around 12:20 and there were probably 250 or so people just standing around in the lobby of the Krannert Center listening to these amazing guys. We had to stand, but there was a lot of movement in the crowd toward the end of their 60 min. set, so we got to sit for the last few numbers and encore.

These guys were two acoustic guitarists who absolutely blew both of us away with their obvious mutual musical respect and give/take. And stellar musicianship!

Then, we had 5th row tix to see Shawn Colvin (Natalia Zukerman opened for her, who is the daughter of violinist/conductor Pinchas Zukerman). Natalia had a lot of energy and her songs were quite enjoyable. The acoustics in the venue were superb! NOTE: Krannert Center has three separate venues within and there were also two lobby stage areas set up. Anyway, both these gals were pretty much of the same school: Finger-picked acoustic guitar and whispery vocals. I found Colvin a bit annoying, but I always have. She seems to be a bit full of herself but obviously has an adoring fan base. Nonetheless, both were quite talented in their own right and since Colvin is kind of from the area, was applauded as a home-town gal.

We caught just a smidgen of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar performance in the lobby and went outside to take a look at the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, but we had that slated for a Saturday visit. The weather was WONDERFUL all weekend for us, sunny during the day and just cool enuff for a jacket at night. A great respite from the stupidly HOT weather we'd been having in STL.

We had 3rd row tickets for the 7pm Global Guitar show. It was three different acts: Rahim AlHaj of Baghdad, performing on oud; Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on mohan veena, accompanied by his son also on mohan veena and a tabla player; then Pierre Bensusan of Paris on acoustic guitar. AlHaj's and Bhatt's demeanor were both quite of the spiritual bent, and their performances surely had an elevated feel to them! Bensusan sang with his tunes in a really cool Francais accent, and did a lot of scat singing, as well. He did some 5 and maybe even some 6-fret stretches on his guitar and pretty much enthralled the audience, as he was more connected with the audience than the previous two acts, who were turned inwardly for the most part.

We were pretty drained after that show, but we had 10pm tix to see Los Lobos, who apparently were the marquee act. Their audience was more robust than any we saw for the whole festival, and seemed to be primed mightily with liquor! We were in the first row for this show, on the side and in front of a large speaker. There seemed to be quite a bit of tweaking of the sound for the first 30 min. of their set, lots of roadies on and off the stage messing with amps and drums, and it was really excruciatingly loud. Really a poor mix. We never did hear the keyboard player. I had earplugs in, but my ears still rang for the first half of the next day. I think they may have been pretty good, though, and they have been together for quite some time. Nice Tex-Mex, East L.A. party music. A pod of drunken fools filtered down to the area in front of the first row and bounced around dangerously near us, "dancing" for the last few songs and encore. Annoying. It was a good thing to be tall at that point, as we had no problem seeing over the euphoric fans.

Next day, we hit the Vintage Instrument Display that was about 3-5 miles away from campus. Caught the end of a fiddle performance by Banjo Billy, who apparently operates out of Reed Springs, MO (Ozarks). The venue for this was an odd little furniture store (!) and they had many, many, many banjos and mandolins and squeeze boxes and harmonicas and electric and acoustic guitars and basses and upright basses and violins from the 1870s era to the 1960s era on display. Cool to look at. I got yelled at for taking some photos of the instruments with my Blackberry, which turned out crappy, anyway.

Then we went to get onto the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, essentially a mobile recording studio for kids http://www.lennonbus.org/about_the_bus The dude on the bus was not very knowledgeable, and basically just had about 8-10 people on at once, showed us a music video that some kids had made with the bus and then had us leave so the next group could come aboard. It was a good thing I had visited the website previously, as at least I had some idea about the intent and history of the project. I noted no mentions of Yoko anywhere, and she usually makes sure she gets her name in there if her $ is involved at all. So maybe this comes out of a different part of the Lennon estate? Dunno.

At noonish, we caught the last half of another lobby concert, Ed Gerhard. Had to stand through this one, but really, really worth it. I had heard of him before and he has won a few Grammys. He was truly a talented 6 and 12 string acoustic guitarist and lap steel artist, and has MANY releases out, including a couple of Christmas albums: "Christmas" and "On A Cold Winter's Night." Lovely stuff. He was also pretty darned funny, too. Entertaining dude, and kinda looks like Arlo Guthrie with a bunch of long white hair. When we checked out his CDs in the merch room, turns out that Arlo has actually performed on a few of Ed's releases, oddly enough. The song he was doing when we walked in was a medley of "If I Fell / In My Life," so of course, he "had me at hello."
Gerhard samples here: http://www.virtuerecords.com/music/musicsamples.html

At 4pm, we caught Harry Manx with Kevin Breit in the lobby. This was a duo I wanted to see, so by now, we had the drill down and knew to show up early to get a seat. Which we did. Right up front. Harry Manx has studied with the abovementioned Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, but he took this Eastern approach to music and really Westernized it. Acoustic guitar and mohan veena with a Mississippi flavor. (No gourd resonators on Manx's mohan veena, as there were on Vishwa's.) Manx is also a very funny and charming entertainer, and quite in touch with his audience. Kevin Breit accompanied him on mandolin and electric guitar and we had a chance to speak with Kevin after the show. Kevin's from Toronto, Harry is from Vancouver. They haven't had more than a half dozen gigs together, but played like they had known each other for years, they were both THAT technically good and on the same page! Harry sang some really "out there" / hilarious lyrics to his songs, and Kevin's take on leads were really warped and odd. They fit right in, tho. Both REALLY intense dudes. It was cool to be right up front to experience their intensity.

We had tickets for John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension at 7pm, and we were in the front row for this one in the LOVELY Playhouse venue of Krannert. McLaughlin is, well, McLaughlin. He's an amazing talent and did not disappoint. Blew us away for a good 1.5 hours. He had a seriously intense keyboard player with him, Gary Husband, who also doubled on a small drum kit; a 25 year old French bass player -- Hadrien Feraud -- who darned near stole the show from McLaughlin. http://www.hadrien-feraud.com/main.php Michael's comment was that Hadrien must have been born with that bass in his hands, because you surely can't LEARN stuff that this guy did! Also, holding down all this intensity was an amazing drummer, Mark Mondesir. We ended up buying a sanctioned bootleg of the concert from 2 nights previous in South Carolina at the merch room...and it is a treasure.

We were exhausted by this time, but we had tickets for a 9:30 show with Abdoulaye Alhassane Toure with Banning Eyre; Jorma Kaukonen with Cindy Cashdollar; and Buddy Guy. We had the same seats at the venue as we did for the Los Lobos concert and were somewhat apprehensive that we'd get blown away again, but we were not. The first act was an African guy and his music was the only music of the event that did nothing for either of us. We found it repetitive and non-interesting. And we couldn't understand his extremely thick accent between songs, either. But he had a nice smile. Banning Eyre, accompanying him, seemed to be knowledgeable about Toure's music and accompanied him in an accomplished manner. However, they were out of tune for their entire part of this concert. Yack! Tune it or DIE!

Jorma Kaukonen and Cindy Cashdollar were accompanied by Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin, and it was a really nice, laid-back thing. Cindy played amazing slide laptop guitar and the three of them had a great musical rapport. The merch room was selling black t-shirts with "Got Jorma?" on them. Heh. When the roadies came out and started uncovering the Buddy Guy setup, we were beyond exhausted. We finally cried "uncle" on that concert. I'd seen him before, anyway, and Michael wasn't that interested. We left, happy.

So that's our music-o-rama experience. We'd do it again. Since U. of IL hasn't had one of these since 2005, perhaps it takes 2 years to plan one of them? Regardless, it was amazing. We were seriously astonished at the level of musicianship. One after another after another. Can one OD on music? I think we came danged close.

I know this is a lot to read, but it was really a wonderful experience and it almost felt like this entire Festival was a well-kept local secret. We'd attend it again in a heartbeat.