Festival season: jazz and classical festivals enliven Viroqua

Festival season
jazz and classical festivals enliven viroqua

If you were a world-class musician who decided to tuck yourself away in the gorgeous and little-known splendor of the Driftless Region, how might you ensure that you could play with other good musicians?

Tom Gullion and Bill Neil have sorted this question out in a way that works well for jazz fans, both new and experienced, in the region. The second annual Driftless Jazz Festival pulls some talented musicians from around the region and puts them in various configurations in several locations around Viroqua over four days, Memorial Day weekend. The results are bound to bring surprises and a lot of good music.

“A festival is unique,” Neil says. “It’s a way to bring unique artistic perspectives together. Something new can happen and we don’t know what. That’s the exciting part.”

For musicians who like to push the envelope, jazz is the right genre. Neil and Gullion take that impulse and stretch to see how far they can go in an already complex and rich environment. Project Fourthstream is the result of these explorations. Lately, Neil has been working with digital acoustic, isolating one single sound and building it into a beautiful tapestry of sound. “There’s a symphony in the chirp of a cricket, a rainforest in a drop of rain,” Neil says.

Sunday night, festival goers will get a chance to hear what that sounds like as the duo takes the stage, Neil on piano and Gullion grabbing from an assortment of instruments, including saxophone, bass clarinet or maybe the flute. Joining them for this show is percussionist Davu Seru, whose lively switching from one instrument or object to another is fun to watch.

Not everything at the festival will be so intense. It’s all solid music—no smooth jazz here—but there is a variety of music to meet a variety of listeners. There’s a jam session Friday night and Saturday, while a free afternoon show at the Viroqua Food Co-op will feature some blues, including the Ted Parrish trio and Jim Schaffer. The organizers are aware that jazz can have an elitist shadowing, and they’re filling the festival with fun and accessible acts.

Gullion considers himself part of a new wave of jazz musicians, opening jazz back up to general audiences. The origins of jazz are very democratic and are entwined with the civil rights movement. As with many things coming from a minority position, jazz had to become more complex, more adept, more sophisticated simply to gain credibility and become a legitimate musical style.

“Jazz is a niche music, but it didn’t start off that way,” Gullion says. “My music now is influenced as much by Coltrane as Maceo Parker. James Brown is okay; we’ll pull from everyone. It’s about bringing the music back to the people. It was theirs to begin with.”

There’s a lot in the festival to make the people happy—musicians and audience both. Gullion says that one of the joys of having a festival in this area is that there aren’t the hassles of big-city life. People can walk between venues and the musicians are all intimately connected with each other and their audiences.

“Tom and I want to play with top-flight musicians,” says Neil. “This feels like what a small festival should be.” The big wrap-up comes Memorial Day at Greenman Music. The grill will be going, and as things heat up, the music, too, will intensify. Ted Parrish and Catherine Hall Parrish, his wife, will start off the day, Christie Knapp comes next, and the topper of the weekend will be the Tom Gullion Quartet. Gullion is on sax, bassist Geoff Lowe joins them from Chicago, drummer Rich MacDonald swings down from Minnesota, and Tim Whalen is on the piano. These guys aren’t likely to be docile and proper. They’ll play hard and fast. If you have some notion that jazz doesn’t rock, come and see if you can keep up. And grab back a little bit of the music for the people. A complete listing of festival events is on page 2.
—Anne O’Connor

Life here in southwest Wisconsin can yield a benevolent isolation. We are far from the crowded cities, the traffic, and the noise. We have many more trees around than people, and we have the privilege of knowing our neighbors personally. Odds are most of us out here like it this way.

But especially in this modern age of television and YouTube, when most of the old small-town opera houses and municipal theaters have been converted to antique malls or worse, there are days when the emotional and intellectual stimulation of live music can feel out of reach. These are the days, whether you were born and raised country or left the city behind, when you kind of get a hankerin’ for a genuine concert experience. Like lots of other things out here, if you want it, you have to make it yourself.

Harpist Liz Cifani is but one example. When she’s not performing with Chicago’s Lyric Opera Company, she’s throwing informal concerts in her cabin near Avalanche. Ed Christie, a dentist and classical music fan who retired to the area, remembers attending one of her living room concerts in 2003, and thinking that he might not be the only one to value the experience.

He and a few friends put their heads together, including Cifani and Sue Walby, a revered piano teacher who was born and raised here. The restored Temple Theatre seemed a likely spot for a concert of classical music. “We knew there was a beautiful, classic theatre at our disposal,” says Christie, “and we decided to try it.” This was the birth of the Viroqua Fine Arts Association, for which Christie served as president for the first three years. The group has put on a successful spring concert every May, each year true to its mission to simultaneously highlight local artists and bring in performers from around the world. This year’s program should satisfy both of those criteria quite well. It will be kicked off by lyric mezzo-soprano Lauren Curnow, a rising star on the world opera scene. Curnow has been in numerous productions with the Chicago Lyric Opera. She will be accompanied on piano by Elizabeth Buccheri, an assistant conductor of the Chicago Lyric Opera, which should be an impressive pairing indeed. Pianist Jess Salek, a Westby native who was taught by Walby, will take the stage next, making a living connection between this community and the international classical community.

The final segment of the program will be a performance by YellowCello Young Artists, a youth ensemble founded in 2007. The group is comprised of up to 45 young players, ranging in age from 10 to 22, from both the local community and the Milwaukee area. The group is unique in that it has no conductor, but relies instead on self-direction.

The group’s coach, Wyatt Sutherland, was inspired to create a different model for a youth ensemble during his tenure as chamber director for the La Crosse Youth Ensemble. He realized that simply getting kids to play the music wasn’t enough. “I asked myself, ‘What am I teaching my kids?’ Music is more than just notes on the page; it’s about coming together.”

Sutherland recalls an experience performing under the conduction of the famous Leonard Bernstein, where in front of a crowd of thousands, Bernstein simply stopped conducting. It was a seminal moment, and one that provided the spiritual imprint for YellowCello. This year’s concert was planned to coincide with the celebration of Norway’s independence, Syttende Mai. All of the music on the program is Scandinavian in origin. While the music is decidedly classical, artistic coordinator Sue Walby points out that the composers take inspiration from Norwegian folk idioms.

Another aspect of the Fine Arts Association’s programming has been outreach. This year harpist Liz Cifani will give an afternoon performance at the Maplewood Terrace assisted living complex in Viroqua. In the past, the association has also sponsored free school programs. When school funding gets cut, music programs are often the first to go, so this kind of outreach makes an even greater impact. Rural areas don’t have the luxury of well-heeled institutions of culture to provide a constant flow of entertainment, and it takes grassroots organizations like the Fine Arts Association to make it happen here. But without the corporate sponsorships and high-buck ticket prices, culture only gets more interesting, more immediate, and arguably, more vital. Walby, who has watched many of her students go on to successful performing careers, takes particular umbrage at stereotypes of uncultured hayseeds from the provinces.

It’s a common misunderstanding of rural character, she maintains. You don’t need a Lexus and a city address to enjoy this kind of music.

That’s a lesson Christie had to learn firsthand. He chuckles that he used to tell friends that there were two prominent musical genres in the region, Country and Western. At the outset, he says, “we were anxious at first about what the response would be.” He thought perhaps most of the attendees would be urban transplants. “After the first concert, a local farmer came up to me and said, ‘It’s about time we got some good music out here!’”
—Davy Schmitz