A Hawaiian steel group that is somewhere between Hawaiian music and 1950s swing. A revival of an “incredibly vibrant Mexican music system” that is not just music, but dance, poetry, chanting, clogging, with indigenous pre-Columbian instruments from the Gulf Coast region of Mexico. Ragtime era songs from the turn of the last century, or, as the band jokes, the songs they were singing on the Titanic while it was sinking.
The music you can hear at the second annual Down County Jump, a two-day music festival coming up at Race Brook Lodge on June 28 and 29, is “kind of hard to describe,” says artistic programmer Alex Harvey. It is a roots-ish, folk-ish festival, not singer-songwriter or country or bluegrass, but “in between all those forms.” It is interested in “the emergence of styles as opposed to the codification of styles,” and the “moments in American vernacular music where the tone or the idea of a music is still kind of discovering itself.
” The first Down County Jump happened last fall, in lieu of the similarly inspired Old Tone Festival when several of its programmers spun off to form the new festival. Harvey, a multi-faceted musician himself, had a strong connection with the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music in Brooklyn, N.Y.
, which is sponsoring the Jump. The idea was to create “a little bit of an outpost of the Brooklyn Folk Festival, a version of the Jalopy aesthetic up here.” The Old Tone Festival will resume this year, so Harvey recast the Ju.