Telluride Bluegrass Festival: 30 Years
September 2005 Reviewed by: David Cantor Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

The Telluride Bluegrass Festival assembles recording artists annually in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. The DVD video Telluride Bluegrass Festival, recorded on June 19, 20, 21, 22 of 2003, presents 19 select performances from the 30th-anniversary Festival. Tastefully brief backstage scenes and interviews punctuate the wide range of musical styles that now visit the Telluride stage -- from traditional folk to rock-rhythm bluegrass to Grateful Dead-like tunes with full drum sets and elaborate keyboard rigs. The sound and mix hold up throughout, even when some 15 jammers take the stage.

I found the fourth track -- Delbert McClinton’s "Two More Bottles of Wine" sung by Emmylou Harris with the Sam Bush Band -- the first really engaging one. The initial three are lyrically mediocre soft-rock-style love songs that do not anchor the DVD in the tradition on which the Festival is based. Unfortunate, since material from the very same master grassers could accomplish that.

A "Going to Glasgow" medley by the Alison Brown Quartet and "Runaway Train" by Kasey Chambers are excellent tracks. In Ivy Rorschact’s "Human Fly" performed by The Horse Flies, we find bluegrass adopting even some of rock’s "edgier" traits: Byrne-like pseudo-psychotic physical and vocal gestures. The Waifs are a fine, straightforward band, with a member-penned tune that sounds traditional. The Andy Irvine tune "Sabra Girl" performed by the brilliant young group Nickel Creek is the disc’s most delicately delivered item. A couple of "Telluride Jams," one traditional, one a Bill Monroe classic, are appealing but not glorious on the home screen, ending on something of a you-had-to-be-there note.

But what we hear isn’t what the concert audience heard. We see members of the audience and know they’re attending a performance of the music we’re viewing, but the musicians’ voices and instruments jack into mixers that take both branches of a fork in Audio Road: one to DVD and CD Land (Rounder offers a CD of the same Festival), the other to giant speakers unloading into space with thousands of human ears nearby.

Both are fine, and the recorded sound may at times surpass the live sound. But the DVD, by putting me in various visual perspectives in relation to the stage, asks me to participate in the fiction that I am experiencing a concert. At least the CD based on the same concert is saying only that here’s a recording of some music people heard at such-and-such a time and place.

The DVD’s extras, on the other hand, contain material the concertgoers didn’t experience. Have they missed much? Not to denigrate anyone’s heroes, but these folks are superb musicians, not philosopher kings. Would their comments about the festival, togetherness, and the like provoke much thought if we didn’t know who they were? For the most part, I don’t think so. As I said, though, the interviews and pickup jams are tastefully brief -- I think the producers recognized the limitations.

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