When we’ve seen a lot of recent news about festivals folding or long-running Jams ceasing to continue, it’s nice to see a story about an annual Jam that is becoming a mini-festival.
From Germany, Dieter Stoll sends us news and photos from the third "Bluegrass im Klosterhof"
“We're happy to report that the third "Bluegrass im Klosterhof" concert has turned into a mini festival of sorts - with eight acts, 25 musicians, a final jam session, and five and a half hours of live music in front of a 200+ audience. Apart from the sheer bliss and great fun to share the stage with such great musicians we, the organizers Birgit and Dieter aka Horse Mountain, take great pleasure in the fact that more than half the audience are locals. Most of them didn't know the first thing about bluegrass, acoustic country, or old-time music a few years back. We try to educate them as best we can...
This year was the first attempt at raising reliable money for the bands by selling tickets in advance. The first two years it was free admission, donations welcome. We were pleasantly surprised at how quickly the venue sold out.
It had started out three years ago as a jam session with a public concert appendage, more or less to talk the municipality into letting us have the venue free of charge for the jam. It was five bands back then. Now, with eight bands and a joint final jam, we've maxed out - 7pm to 12:30am, I guess, is about as much as the average attendee will be able to take.
It may be noteworthy that this is not sponsored or supported by an association or a club, neither financially nor in terms of manpower. It's basically my wife and I (we're "Horse Mountain") doing seat-of-the-pants work in advance, and a couple of friends helping us out during the show, doing background chores such as catering. The only support we get, and the only support we've ever asked for, is free use of the venue.
The venue is an old farmhouse from the late 18th century, carefully and beautifully remodeled into a multi-purpose venue that packs a crowd of 200.
Looking forward to next year's meeting which is scheduled for Saturday, Jan 11, 2014.”
Dieter sent a follow-up comment that:
A video compilation of the event is now online (you should watch it in glorious 720p HD, and turn on Captions to view English subtitles to the interviews):
You can check out the event’s bi-lingual German/English website here.
2 comments:
A video compilation of the event is now online
(you should watch it in glorious 720p HD, and turn on Captions to view English subtitles to the interviews):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w9SnSuLAjQ
Thank you Dieter. We've embedded the video into the story but if you'd like English subtitles you'll still need to visit the You Tube site and watch it there.
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