Tag: Rochefort
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A tip of the hat to Olivier Longuet
I have been taking photographs about as long as I have been playing music, which is a long time… about back to age 8 or 9. My father and grandfather were amateur photographers with a darkroom in the basement for black and white processing and printing. For my grandfather it goes back to the early…
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The French Are Different…
from Americans, in many ways. Up front there is the fact that a small community like Rochefort, France puts on a well supported festival at all. We have cities here in the US that don’t do half as much despite much larger populations and more financial resources. The way the arts are integral to daily…
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Rochefort Festival Wrap Up – Finale
I will be looking over the previous posts and inserting images, and cleaning up text, fixing typos and misspelled names, and maybe editing some dupe info and omissions. Otherwise, that is the story from beautiful Rochefort, France. Some really amazing and dedicated people run a very ambitious festival, the artists are treated very well, and…
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Rochefort Festival Wrap Up – 5
The Festival The actual performances were scheduled for Thursday August 25 through Saturday August 27. After three days of prep and rehearsals I was now balancing rehearsal schedules with performance schedules. On Thursday I had one gig with Innes Sibun at the Corderie Stage. This is at the west end of the historical Corderie building,…
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Rochefort Festival Wrap Up – 4
Festival Preparation Monday was travel day to get from the wilds of Picardie to the Atlantic coast and Rochefort. The drive was uneventful, with the understanding that it was a groggy entourage operating on not much sleep. Getting the vehicles packed was the first hurdle, then getting to Nicolas’ place for the meetup, and then…
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Rochefort Festival Wrap Up – 3
People (photos to come later) The largest unknown about this experience was the people. I had only met Napoleon as a fan/musician and never as part of one of his bands. Beyond that I knew absolutely nobody at this festival. As well, I was going to be playing with musicians that I had no common…
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Rochefort Festival Wrap Up – 2
Music The invitation to this festival came almost exactly two years after my last festival experience, Zappanale 20. I came back from Zappanale 20 drained, disgusted, disillusioned, and thinking that I was done playing covers of Zappa. When I returned from Zappanale I received the invitation to play bass in Mayhem Circus Electric, and that…
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Rochefort Festival Wrap-Up 1
This is the first in what I believe will be a string of blog posts where I will try to make sense of what the past ten days have involved. I think it it is fair to say that the intent is for me to make some kind of concrete statement, but I don’t think…
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