Manitou Music Festival turns 20
From staff reports
The Manitou Music Festival (MMF), celebrating its 20th season in the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula, presents another season of exciting and diverse concerts featuring jazz, classical, blues, folk, country, celtic, bluegrass and world music in some of Michigan’s most idyllic settings.
On Wednesday, July 21 at 8 p.m. the folk/jazz extraordinaire Claudia Schmidt will perform outdoors at the Studio Stage, located at Lake Street Studios in Glen Arbor. Rain location is the Glen Arbor Town Hall.
Claudia Schmidt has been perfecting her craft of performing for almost four decades. It is a quirky and wonderful hodge-podge (her word!) of music, poetry, story, laughter, drama, and celebrating the moment. Work in clubs, theaters, festivals, TV, radio has added depth and dimension, and since she has always included her original work along with very personal versions of the work of others, what you get is a unique look at the world from someone who says what she sees with clarity, humor, and wonder. The San Francisco Bay Guardian said: Schmidt’s shows are a lot like falling in love. You never know what’s going to happen next, chances are it’s going to be wonderful, every moment is burned into your memory and you know you’ll never be the same again.” More succinctly, Garrison Keillor said, “When Claudia sings a song, it stays sung”.
If it were the intention of the creator or creators of this universe to perfectly blend together the night sky with moon and stars, it might have been their intention as well to deliver Claudia Schmidt as their messenger of reminder. To say that Schmidt is simply a performer with a talent to entertain would be a miscarriage of understatement. Schmidt takes her audiences into her world as easily as the child who discovers the endless universes that exist in a cardboard box.
From lying on sandy beaches under an endless barrage of northern lights, to the expected anguish and frustration of spinning tires on cars stuck deep in snow, from the age-old struggle of change between adolescence and adulthood to the observation of sheer idiocy, she leaves it to the imagination of her audience to conjure their own images of her storytelling and song. No interpretation of a Claudia Schmidt song or story is wrong-she invites audiences to tie their associations to her style.
Schmidt weaves her way through her concert in much the same manner as a jester. Interwoven anecdotes, revealing her past and present, bring people to expect a relationship between themselves and memories driven deep with the passage of time. The concert is an endless display of self-realization through humor and longing, leaving audience members yearning to become an integral part of her world.
“Having performed on stages across the country, Schmidt has developed the ability to remain fresh. She enjoys her talent to entertain as much as the audience enjoys being entertained.” — Door County Advocate, Wisconsin
On Sunday, July 25 at 8 p.m. the blues duo Mulebone will perform outdoors at Studio Stage, located at Lake Street Studios in Glen Arbor. Rain location is the Glen Arbor Town Hall.
Mulebone is a partnership comprised of multi-instrumentalist John Ragusa and roots music specialist Hugh Pool. The launching pad for their musical expression is traditional blues. Together they have recorded a CD which spent 15 weeks in the Top 100 Albums in America. Along with playing live and TV appearances, they won blues artist of the year at radio stations from Seattle, Washington to Red Bank, New Jersey.
Together in Mulebone, Hugh and John play slide guitar boogies, 1-chord trance riffs a la Howlin Wolf, up-tempo rags of Reverend Gary Davis and country blues of all shapes and colors. Sometimes they play close to the source, almost as if tracing the image, and at other moments, they re-examine the source, float above it to take a new look as if seeing one’s home from a distant land.
John Ragusa plays conch shell, Jews harp, cornet, all manner of flutes, tin whistle, and chimes in on the harmony vocals. He is a member of Beth Nielson Chapman’s group as well as his own John Ragusa outfit, and plays regularly in conjunction with Deepak Chopra’s speaking engagements. Amongst dozens of studio credits are contemporary jazz greats: Joe Taylor, Jeremy Wall and world music icon Tom Ze. Hugh says, “One time we were in Lexington, Kentucky sitting at an outdoor cafe and John played me a bunch of melodies sliding a straw up and down in a cup of ice water” … you get the drift.
Hugh Pool plays guitars, harmonica, boot board and sings, all with a mouth full of whiskey and a giant heart. He has played his brand of blues in clubs and at festivals from Jakarta, Indonesia to North Cape, Norway; From Vienna, Austria to Ottawa, Ontario and has been critically lauded by The New York Times, New York Press, The Village Voice, Pittsburgh Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Blues Revue Magazine…the list goes on. He is also a noted producer who has worked on hundreds of records at his Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio, Excello, working with musicians such as: Taj Mahal, Debbie Harry, and Marah to name a few.
Please Visit www.manitoumusicfestival.com for information and tickets. All Tickets are $15 (Children 18 and under are free, except for the July 29 Benefit Concert. Tickets may be purchased at concert venues; or by calling the Glen Arbor Art Association (231) 334-6112 or Lake Street Studios (231) 334-3179. MMF is a presentation of the Glen Arbor Art Association, a nonprofit (501(c) 3) organization.