The Bluegrass Generals are pictured at the 2023 Free Fall Bluegrass Festival in Vail. Andy Hall, center, and Jay Pandolphi, far right, of the Infamous Stringdusters will perform Sunday at the Free Fall Bluegrass Festival in Vail this weekend.
Fall in the Colorado Rocky Mountains is hard to beat. Fewer tourists, changing colors, music festivals in free fall.
Free? Wait, did you read that right?
For the second year in a row, the city of Vail is hosting a Free Fall Bluegrass Festival Friday through Sunday.
This year’s event features some of the biggest names in the worlds of bluegrass and jamgrass: Sam Bush Band and mandolin player and singer Paul Hoffman of Greensky Bluegrass will headline Saturday’s performances, while Chris Pandolphi and Andy Hall of Infamous Stringdusters and Billy Nershi of String Cheese Incident will perform on Sunday. Music plays from noon to 7:30 pm both days.
Specifically on Saturday, Hoffman takes the stage at 4 pm and Sam Bush plays at 6 pm. Sunday’s music begins at 2 p.m. with a special performance by Nikki Bluhm, who is not necessarily a bluegrass player; she is, however, an accomplished frontwoman who has played with her own band The Gramblers and in many different next-generation Grateful Dead configurations, particularly with Phil Lesh. Bluhm will be followed at 4 p.m. by Andy Hall, Billy Nershi and the Eric Thorlin Trio. The festival closes with the Terrapin Family Band featuring Pandolfi and Bluhm (and probably some special guests).
There are three stages: the Solaris Stage, the International Bridge Stage, and the Gore Creek Plaza Stage, all located in Vail Village. The Free Fall Bluegrass Festival is the brainchild of Diane Moudy of Resort Entertainment.
“We wanted to create an off-season event that would help generate business in the Vail Valley,” Moody said. “We also wanted to organize a family musical event for all families. It’s expensive to take a family to a music festival or pay for childcare, so parents have to go alone, so we brought in the rock n’ roll playhouse.”
The theater, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday, is designed to kick off the festivities. An entire street is blocked off with a stage and activities for children. The music there will consist of the Grateful Dead on Saturday and Bob Marley on Sunday.
Think of it as a kid-friendly environment where parents can enjoy the music they love while their kids enjoy supervised play. There are bounce houses, games and instruments for youngsters to enjoy. After playhouse time, there will be a “kids zone” with more bounce houses and activities for kids throughout the day.
Paul Hoffman performs at the Wheeler Opera House. Hoffman, lead singer and mandolinist for Greensky Bluegrass, will perform at the Free Fall Bluegrass Festival in Vail on Saturday.
The concept of rock ‘n’ roll theater at a music festival is the brainchild of concert impresario Peter Shapiro, who promoted “Fare Thee Well,” the first of several farewell tours by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. The “Fare Thee Well” shows were held in Santa Clara, California and Chicago in 2015. Shapiro is widely considered the greatest promoter of his generation.
The Free Fall Bluegrass Festival has a spring counterpart. Both festivals are anchored in bluegrass and jamgrass, which is a branch of bluegrass that emerged from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 1990 when Salmon Heads and Left Hand String Band merged and became Leftover Salmon. A new style of music was born.
Jamgrass has its roots in bluegrass. It is predominantly upbeat and danceable, highly improvised and contains countless musical flavors, from ska to funk, reggae and more. The bands predominantly play two sets and an encore and mix up the sets every night.
Friday’s headliner, Sam Bush, was a member of New Grass Revival, the original progenitors of jamgrass: they are to jamgrass what the Grateful Dead are to jambands.
New Grass Revival formed in 1971. In 1972, this group of bluegrass-playing hippies began appearing at bluegrass festivals, much to the chagrin of traditional bluegrass musicians and the delight of long-haired enthusiasts excited to revolutionize the genre. New Grass Revival brought elements of rock, jazz and other elements, with an emphasis on improvisation, marking the birth of jamgrass.
New Grass Revival consisted of Bush on mandolin, Curtis Burch on guitar and dobro, Courtney Johnson on banjo, and Ebo Walker on bass. Walker was soon replaced by John Cowan on bass and Pat Flyy would replace Burch.
“There were already people who had deviated from Bill Monroe’s style of bluegrass,” Bush says on his website. “If anything, we were reviving a newgrass style that had already begun. Our type of music tended to come from the idea of long sessions and rock ‘n’ roll songs.”
New Grass Revival reached a wider audience when Leon Russell brought them as his backing band on a national tour in 1973. The Telluride Bluegrass Festival was created as a way to bring New Grass Revival to Telluride in 1975 and the band was the piece centerpiece of the festival until they disbanded in 1989. Bush has played every festival since then and was crowned “King of Telluride” in 1991.
New Grass Revival performed their last show preparing for the Grateful Dead at The Dead’s 1989-90 New Year’s show. Bush played with Emmylou Harris for the next few years as part of her backing band, the Nash Ramblers. He then formed the Sam Bush Band and has toured tirelessly for the past 30 years, releasing seven albums and one live DVD.
Bush is universally considered the father of jamgrass music. The Americana Music Association awarded Bush the Lifetime Achievement Award as an instrumentalist and he was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame as a member of New Grass Revival in 2020. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame for the second time in 2023 as a soloist. . .
“With this band that I have now I’m free to try anything,” Bush said. “Looking back at the last 50 years of playing newgrass, with elements of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll improvisation, improvising, playing with New Grass Revival, Leon and Emmylou; It is the culmination of all that. “I can go on stage unapologetically and feel like I’m representing those songs well.”
Hoffman likes to tell the story of how he once took a fanboy photo of him and Sam Bush at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Now the two are dear friends and Bush plays with Greensky at the Telluride every year. There’s bound to be some cross-pollination this weekend in Vail.
Greensky formed in 2000. The group arrived in Telluride for the band contest in 2006, but were told they had registered too late and could not perform. Heartbroken, they decided to stay and watch the festival anyway as fans. As fate would have it, another band canceled and Greensky had the opportunity to participate in the contest and won.
With the win came a spot on the main stage in 2007 and Greensky has taken up permanent residence ever since. Greensky went on to be the only band to win the band contest and went on to headline one night of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.
Greensky uses traditional bluegrass instrumentation: mandolin (Hoffman), acoustic guitar (Bruzza), banjo (Michael Arlen Bont), double bass (Mike Devol), and dobro (Beck). From that traditional starting point, Greensky takes the genre to places Bill Monroe could never have imagined.
Pandolphi and Andy Hall play guitar and dobro in The Infamous Stringdusters respectively. The two have formed the core of their side project, The Bluegrass Generals, for the past few years where they team up with other star players. The Dusters, as they are known, are a five-piece group that formed in 2006 in Nashville. They immediately made an impact with a five-song extended play CD, which was followed by their announced first album, “Fork in the Road.” The band won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2018 for their album “Laws of Gravity.”
Finally, Billy Nershi is a founding member of String Cheese Incident. The band formed in Crested Butte in 1993, but Nershi had lived in Telluride for years and convinced his bandmates to move there since the city had a more prolific music scene and was home to the bluegrass festival. That move paid off in spades when festival promoter Craig Ferguson chose “Cheese,” as they are known, to open the festival in 1994, a year after its formation.
String Cheese has built a large following, maintaining national tours and multiple late-night performances at Red Rocks.
While Aspen and Vail are competing resorts, Moudy commented on the strong interest in the Vail event throughout the region.
“There are a lot of people from Vail who go to Aspen to see Belly Up and Jazz Aspen Snowmass shows and we have quite a few people from Aspen who come to our shows at the Gerald Ford Amphitheater during the summer. When it comes to music, we are all family.”
For more information about the festival, visit freefallbluegrassfest.com.
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