Providence, RI-September 2, 2007
Rhythm & Roots Festival Hits Its Stride
CHARLESTOWN — In 1984, Kev Wimmer, then a student at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, went to the Cajun and Bluegrass Festival, in Escoheag. He was a member of Bill Hall and Northwind Bluegrass, but it was the first time Wimmer had seen live Cajun music.
He met Dewey Balfa at that festival, and the next year, he was playing with him. And when Balfa invited him down to Louisiana to study with him, he drove down before Balfa “could change his mind,” Wimmer said from the stage yesterday.
He spent years literally playing second fiddle to Balfa, and after the legend’s death, Wimmer eventually returned to the Labor Day festival in Rhode Island, now the Rhythm & Roots Festival, with Balfa Toujours, with Balfa’s daughter.
Now, with The Red Stick Ramblers, Wimmer was part of the host band for the Rhythm & Roots Festival, and “we’re real happy to be here,” he said from the workshop stage. “It’s a big honor,” bassist Eric Frey said later.
That’s the kind of festival Rhythm & Roots is. Not only does the music have roots and branches, but the performers do too. And an estimated 4,500 people at three stages in Ninigret Park heard a panoply of American roots — musical styles alternately served up straight, lovingly updated and messed with.
This was the Ramblers’ fourth visit to the festival, and as the host band, it played on the main stage in the early afternoon and the small workshop tent in the late afternoon, and was scheduled to hold court in the dance tent until midnight. And in its two early appearances, the quintet justified its lofty placing, energizing the sun-baked main stage crowd and levitating the workshop tent with an energetic mix of winsome Cajun music, Western swing and traditional “hot” jazz, benefiting from a two-fiddle attack, electric guitar, upright bass and drums, all combined with high tempos and good humor. Traditional Cajun fiddlesticks (with Wimmer playing a tune while fiddler Linzay Young tapped on Wimmer’s strings with thin sticks, providing tuned percussion) alternated with covers of jazz chestnuts such as “Some of These Days” and “Prisoner of Love.”
It was no accident, said festival organizer Chuck Wentworth, that the core of the festival was made up of young Louisiana bands such as the Ramblers, The Pine Leaf Boys and Corey Ledet. “These kids — and they are kids, most of them are in their 20s — … they’ve learned the right way,” from heroes such as Balfa, Django Reinhardt and Bob Wills.
- Rick Massimo