Feelings, Finesse, Fear & Festivity

It’s that time of year again...that time we’re reminded that Charlie Parker is as right as ever when he said, “Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.” That time of year where when most pop listeners are taking their aspirin, many blues Magoos are out enjoying the vitamins of the blues. That time of year where we understand, ever more than we usually admit, that as Peter Tork said, “The blues isn't about the blues, it's about we have all had the blues and we are all in this together.” and we find ourselves brought back into the fold of music’s purest functionality.



Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival Official Site

You got it! Next Friday, the 2006 Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival kicks off at Tom McCall Waterfront Park in the heart of the City of Roses and my home sweet home that is Portland, Oregon, and I will be returning to share on-site remote anchoring duties with other fellow KBOO Community Radio volunteers to bring thousands of listeners across Oregon and Southwestern Washington the pure American voice of the crossroads. And you can catch me live on the airwaves from the festival next Saturday from 3:00-7:00 P.M Pacific Standard Time, joined with fellow KBOO volunteer Julie Sabatier, who actually is the super-cool friend who helped get me started in the KBOO News & Public Affairs Department in April of last year when she shared temporary PM News & Public Affairs Director duties with Jamie Heim. I also encourage y’all to check out her wonderful blog, “The Littlest Blog”. She has embraced the heart of the community, which her frequent reflections, production of her new monthly KBOO program “DIY (Do It Yourself)” and freelance writing from Free Speech Radio News to local newspapers proves out loud. I believe Julie understands more than most people what Robert McAfee Brown meant when he said, “Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.” Her will and altruism are indispensable, and I strongly believe she’s destined for many great things, and while my politics in particular are not quite like hers, I absolutely respect she stands for what she believes in and am glad she’ll be sharing on-site anchoring duties, yay! :)



I’ll go ahead and admit that blues music isn’t exactly among my top five favorite genres of music actually, LOL, as I guess blues music isn’t exactly “endorphiny” and once you listen to it for a while it can get a little monotonous. Nonetheless, I absolutely respect the culture behind blues, jazz and the roots of rock and roll, for I believe it’s there where some of the purest, authentic American soul can be found, it’s the voice that speaks of the deepest struggles, both socially and with everyday emotions and matters at hand, and its call and response can be traced back to a darker past where plantation workers communicated through field holler, some of the earliest song and communication in African Diaspora, as well as through work calls, chanted by peddlers in cities everywhere. What I think many often overlook or miss about blues music these days is that the call and response is still there always, it’s just the response doesn’t come from someone else, the response comes from the singer him/herself. Where W.B DuBois and Langston Hughes was for literature, Booker T. Washington was for blues music, for he believed that the individual determines his/her own destiny, thus is how blues music has become personified as it is to this day. Albert Collins said, “Simple music is the hardest to play and blues is simple music.” That’s why I have a profound respect for the musical culture even while I don’t consider myself a huge fan of the musical genre; you just have to respect these many artists for forging their destinies, speaking it as it is, and it’s in doing just that where, as Ralph Ellison said, it becomes an “art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.”



This year’s festival is going to be incredibly special, because as y’all may be well aware, this is the first Waterfront Blues Festival since the tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina last year, which in some ways will forever change New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, though the culture and spirit I’m convinced will continue living on through thick and thin. And so this year’s festival is going to have a very special tribute theme to both New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, with this being the largest line-up of Gulf Coast artists outside of New Orleans’ own Jazz & Heritage Festival nation-wide. The opening night is going to be kicked off by Dr. John (a.k.a “The Night Tripper”) a killer New Orleans pianist and singer who can pack blues, boogie-woogie and rock and roll all into one. His name even came from a 19th century voodoo summoner, so you can imagine exactly how psychedelic just five minutes with him on stage can be. And just for kicks, he just can’t resist providing jingle vocals to many Popeyes Chicken commericals, LOL! Great AIEEYAH-poppin’ flavor even Little Nicky enjoys! J And the closing night, the 4th of July, will be hosted by Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans”, who has been performing soul and rhythm & blues music for over four decades now in New Orleans and beyond.



In addition, though the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival has always well-incorporated Zydeco and other blues-based sounds that originated in the heart of the Louisiana bayous and such, this festival is going to feature much more musicians from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on all four stages and eight Blues Cruises, including Bo Dollis & The Wild Magnolias, Buckwheat Zydeco, The Bluerunners, Marva Wright, the Rebirth Brass Band, and so many more. What many of these artists have in common is that they experienced loss and heartache through and in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina & Rita, where the waters of Lake Pontchartrain flooded the neighborhoods where many of these musicians have lived much of their lives, including those of Phil Frazer of the Rebirth Brass Band, who lost the roof of his house and both his cars, while the band’s drummers lost virtually everything, and Irva Thomas, who lost her home and her acclaimed New Orleans club, “The Lion’s Den”. And so indeed the Hurricane Katrina disaster touched every one of us in many ways, but most of us will never even begin to understand or relate to exactly how much their community endured physically and emotionally, and their presence at this year’s Waterfront Blues Festival will both generate a much greater sense of relational empathy, as well as fuel an incandescent sense of cultural pride and musical spirit that you can only find stronger back in The Crescent City itself.



I can already feel deep down this will be a festival I will never forget, and with an average as many as 120,000 blues enthusiasts packing Tom McCall Waterfront Park at a single time last year, my bet is it’ll easily be far more packed this year with a renewed sense of appreciation coming from millions of Americans following Hurricanes Katrina & Rita toward exactly how special the Gulf culture is, and thousands more will seek a sentimental experience this summer and travel straight here to the City of Roses.



But I don’t only enjoy taking part in the Waterfront Blues Festival to give to KBOO, listen to stunning live music or even soak up that bright-lemon Vitamin D under clouds of dragonflies. I’m also proud to take part in this festival because it also happens to be the largest annual benefit event for the Oregon Food Bank, a statewide network of 894 hunger relief agencies serving Oregon and Clark County, Washington, helping recover food from farms, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, individuals and government source, and distributing it to twenty regional food banks, sixteen of which are independent, which helps feed hundreds of Oregonians, especially children, and hopes to “eliminate the root causes of hunger through advocacy and public education.” Hunger is a scary thing, for many health studies have shown that health status of youngsters from impoverished homes experiencing hunger and food insecurity is much worse than for non-deprived children, who are known to get sick more often, have much higher rates of hospitalizations, ear infections and huge iron deficiencies, thus childhood hunger and malnutrition can cause irreversible, critical health problems later in life for any child. In fact, here in Oregon, we’re ranked as one of the hungriest states in the nation, and one in five people even ate meals from an emergency food box at least once last year, most of which were children, senior citizens on fixed incomes, people who are disabled and people who work hard at low-paying jobs.



The Waterfront Blues Festival is the greatest opportunity yearly for the Oregon Food Bank (ranked a four-star charity service by Charity Navigator) to collect donations and food to nourish these thousands living and coping with hunger. In fact, last year, blues fans donated more than $348,000 and gave more than 107,000 pounds of food to support their benevolent cause. And thanks to each showing of magnanimity, each month, Oregon Food Bank Network’s 362 food pantries distributes emergency food boxes to an estimated 194,000 people -- 38 percent of whom are children --in Oregon and Clark County, Washington. You know, Mahalia Jackson said, “Anybody singing the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help.” That’s exactly where many of these children and families are, and so let’s let their prayers be answered!



So if you’d like to enjoy some vibrant live music and also give yourself a hug knowing you’ve done something very good for the world, come on by from Friday, June 30 through Tuesday, July 4. The admission is most generous, with a suggested donation of $8 per person plus two cans of non-perishable food. Hold that thought for a moment here. $8 per person, for a diverse, day-long parade featuring many of over 150 shows. I find that easily the best $8 you will spend this entire year, guaranteed, something to satisfy your soul as well as the hearts of many who crucially need that nutrition in their lives.



Last year was my first year taking part in this exciting event with KBOO, and I certainly hope this becomes a tradition for me. I immersed myself to lots of great artists last year, from Buddy Guy to Mavis Staples to Shemekia Copeland, as well as acquainting myself to new talents I was previously unfamiliar with, my favorite being Jackie Greene. I came along two days of the festival last year, making the suggested donations and hauling along 25 cans of food. In all honesty, I kind of felt like a celebrity last year simply by being there. Every 45 minutes or so I’d sit there under the KBOO tent with my headphones on, announcing the end of a featured performance, providing commentary about the next featured act, the Oregon Food Bank, the festival itself and the occasional KBOO underwriting message, and then during each featured performance, I had the complete freedom to wander around the venue, standing backstage behind the curtain watching featured musicians perform just inches away from me like Jackie Greene, or place the Sponsor tag around my neck so I could have access to the volunteers deck, where they had a fine lunch and dinner buffet table arranged, as well as Coleman coolers full of icy cool sodas and Glauceau Vitamin Water. It was so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk last year during the festival (in fact we’ve been having a heat wave this entire weekend here, reaching up to 100 degrees yesterday) and they had these suntan lotion packets available which I used liberally, and I’d frequently head over to the volunteers deck for dragon fruit-flavored Vitamin Water (Formula 50 or citrus if not available) and paper bowls full of Chex Mix. The kind folks of Chipotle even offered me a complimentary burrito the first evening I volunteered, and boy was that satisfying! Sure brought me back to my initial home state of Colorado and the many days my hero Philippe Ernewein first got me into the Chipotle craze! :) And finally, I got a complimentary 2005 Waterfront Blues Festival T-shirt for helping out, which I still frequently don to this day! :)



Stream Live: KBOO Community Radio

So you can catch me live on the airwaves from Tom McCall Waterfront Park this Saturday from 3:00-7:00 P.M Pacific Standard Time (10:00 P.M Eastern Standard Time for my friends on the East Coast) at the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival by clicking on the link above, where you can stream KBOO Community Radio anywhere in the world from your home computer. Or, if you are around the Portland area, you can tune in at 90.7 FM on your FM dial to KBOO, where we'll be broadcasting featured live coverage of the Waterfront Blues Festival all five days of the festival! :)

They say there’s ten rules for getting rid of the blues; go out and do something for someone else, then repeat it nine times. And as Dan Castellaneta of “The Simpsons” says, “Go ahead and play the blues if it’ll make you happy!” where there’ll certainly be plenty of that to go around all throughout the 4th of July weekend here! :)

Love,
Noah Eaton
(Mistletoe Angel)
(Emmanuel Endorphin)