Last weekend marked the 33rd year of the Redwood Coast Music Festival in Eureka. The event evolved a long way from its original Dixieland jazz era into what organizer Mark Jansen describes as “a musician’s festival where players collaborate with each other and one that they all want to come to.”
“The musical focus of the festival now is on collaboration and collaboration sets,” said Jansen. “Most bands on tour come to town, play their 90-minute set and then go off the next day to the next town with the same 90-minute set, and so on. At our Redwood Coast Music Festival, they come for two to four days, are encouraged to bring their own projects and get to do collaborative sets with their peers, idols and musicians. It’s something they look forward to and plan for all year. Blues musicians sitting in with jazz musicians, jazz musicians sitting in with western swing musicians — everyone loving the chance to stretch their chops and create something different.
Jansen notes Duke Robillard as a prime example. “He’s a legendary blues guitarist who came here years ago with his band and just by chance, spent the festival weekend listening to music. He absolutely loved it and now hails us as his favorite music festival in the world. He’s been back for several years now, sitting in with different collaborations of blues, jazz and swing.” In Robillard’s late Sunday afternoon set of “Ladies of Song,” featuring vocalists Dawn Lambeth, Valerie Kirchhoff and Alice Spencer, he was backed up by a jazz/swing band.
“What I loved about this year’s festival was the amazing spectrum of American roots music,” said Paul DeMark, long-time local drummer/musician. “I checked out some really cool ’30s jazz by Miss Jubilee and San Lyon, and world-class musicians like electric guitarist Joel Patterson. This is no longer the Dixieland jazz festival. It’s roots music.”
Swing dancers are drawn to the festival from all over, as it features plenty of floor space compared to other events. This year it expanded to eight venues at the Eagle House, the Adorni Center, the Eureka Theater, the Eureka Veterans Hall, the Sequoia Conference Center, the Morris Graves Museum of Art, the Red Lion Hotel and an Old Town street stage next to the gazebo on Saturday night. Jansen said organizers also added the Eagle House to Thursday’s opening night venues this year and extended the Sunday schedule into the evening by keeping the Eagle House and the Veterans Hall open until 9 p.m.
Encouraging even more people to get on the dance floor were free dance lessons offered by Debra Seeck and Johnny Ochoa at the beginning and intermediate level of swing, Lindy Hop, Charleston, boogie woogie and Whiskey River Jitterbug.
On Saturday, the festival offered two guitar master classes in partnership with Humboldt Folklife that featured Robillard (with guitarist Tommy Harkenrider as moderator), whose work spanning from traditional blues to jazz and swing have won him W.C. Handy Awards for Best Blues Guitarist and Grammy nominations, and Grammy winner Redd Volkaert, who’s played with Merle Haggard’s backing band The Strangers, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam, Buck Owens, Alison Krauss, Rhonda Vincent and others.
The lineup of 121 sets across varied locations created an enormous but fun challenge for attendees: picking and choosing among competing sets offered at the same time, and then getting to the next venue in time to another set. (The free shuttle service among venues was popular again this year so at least that was simpler.) All that plus finding time to grab lunch or dinner. The good news was that many groups were scheduled for repeat sets at different times on different days, and many featured collaborators from other groups. Their unrehearsed interactions and performances were fun to watch and hard to find anywhere else.
Mark Larson (he/him) is a retired Cal Poly Humboldt journalism professor and active freelance photographer who likes to walk.
This article appears in ‘What Else Can We Do?’.