Blues musician Ruthie Foster highlights the festival's rootsy-folk-America offerings.
(He was asking for the spring membership campaign, people, so get ready!)
Anyway, I had to answer that a big highlight for me is getting to profile musicans, local and visiting. And among the latter, artists coming to the Savannah Music Festival, which begins this week, are very important to profile.
The music festival bills itself as Georgia's largest music festival. It's also one of the city's largest tourism draws. And this year, it comes right on the heels of the St. Patrick's Day festival.
With scores of musicians coming, it's hard to pick highlights, let alone, the few that I actually interview. These are just a few you might be hearing more about.
Of course, Lang Lang is drawing a lot of attention. He's a global superstar. He performed at President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. The Chinese pianist sells out wherever he goes. And I expect he'll do the same here, when he appears with the Atlanta Symphony at the Lucas Theater.
I'm going to the Zydeco dance party. I just happened to visit New Orleans last year and the infectious music I enjoyed at Tipitina's was enough to convince me that this concert had to be great. The festival does something like this just about every year. This year, it features Jeffery Broussard and the Creole Cowboys, winners of the 2007 Zydeco Music and Creole Heritage Awards.
I suspect Kristina Train is going to generate some publicity. That's because she's a Savannah native who's just released an album on Blue Note Records. So she's a local who's gone national. I figured she'd get a lot of press here, so I profiled the other musician on the same bill, "The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster," a Grammy-nominated blues artist who's released six CD's. Listen to my story on her below.
The Savannah Music Festival has tried in recent years to attract a younger crowd. They had a young adult social group at one point, which they still might have. This year's big nod to that front is Wilco, an exuberant Chicago band whose 2009 album Rolling Stone described as "a thrilling triumph of determined simplicity by a band that has been running from the obvious for most of this decade." I bought tickets to indie rockers She and Him.
Winton Marsalis is coming back. And the whole festival has a lot of jazz star power to it.
Those are my recommendations for now. Check out my profiles, below.
Sara Jarosz:
Ruthie Foster:
