Bluesfest: early review

2 April 2010 by Max Easton

Bluesfest 2010 is go. Was go. Continues to go. Kicking off with a delayed starting time on the Thursday, Byron Bay's premier music festival brought in its 21st birthday with a New Orleans themed day of tunes. But since this is a flashy new blog, I don't even need to waste my, your and our time with lengthy introductory sentences.

The new festival site at Tyagarah ushered in an era of logistical convenience, with the Mojo, APRA and Caba Caba Ray stages clustered within a short walk of each other. Likewise for the Crossroads, Jambalaya and First Nations. The result of this was the ability to catch partial sets of every clashing artist, which is damn comforting considering the infamous walk to the Mojo stage at Belongil fields made that nearly impossible. Of concern for the rest of the festival was the drastically reduced site area and tent sizes, standing in fierce contradiction to the supposed increase in ticket sales...but time and a fuller festival over the weekend will tell whether that causes a problem.

Anyway, you don't come to a music website to read about tents (but if you do, then it seems you've come to the right place.)  Amongst all the mud, wood chips and food stalls was a music festival, a superbly programmed one at that. The Avett Brothers played a phenomenal introductory set to Australian audiences, winning over the thousands who made their way to the Mojo stage. They played an alt-country, banjo-centric set of booming vocals overlayed with cello, bass and guitar. The similarities to the next short-lived thing, Mumford & Sons, were ever-present, however the Avett Brothers not only pre-date their rise to fame by a decade, but fill their tracks with vocal substance and a fervour for the development of the entire song rather than an endless reliance on a chorus. The Avett Brothers are sure to have kicked of a love affair with Australian audiences and it's a mighty shame we didn't hear about them earlier.

From there on in, Bluesfest embraced Louisiana with a New Orleans themed evening fronted by Galactic (with Cyril Neville of the Neville Brothers), The Lil' Band of Gold and the almost legendary Dr. John and the Lower 911. All three impressed with their own variations on the theme, with Galactic's modern take on the varied jazz personalities present in the city's pubs and bars running against Dr. John's decade-spanning look a the genre. With Ozomatli delivering a typically high-energy set prior to the significantly lower key set of Jack Johnson at Mojo, the night was rounded out to close day one of the festival.

With Bluesfest today featuring names like Buddy Guy, Rodriguez and Colin Hay, there's more than enough tunes to head out and see to justify the cost of a ticket. We'll catch you out there...we're the ones watching the music at that stage in that location which you think is described quite accurately, but can never be found in reality...

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