Fiddle Tunes fill the air at Fort Worden

PORT TOWNSEND — Fort Worden campus is bursting with music as Centrum’s Fiddle Tunes has taken the campus over.

On Wednesday, every corner of many of the campus’ historic buildings was filled up with musicians, learning from masters, jamming in circles or in motion, looking for their next connection. The fields and roadsides were spotted with instrument cases slung on shoulders and hanging at attendees sides.

The week of workshops, concerts, jams and parties started last Sunday and wraps up tomorrow.

Open to the public today are two events: Fiddlers Rule! at 1:30 p.m. and Creole & Cayman Islands Dance Party at 7:30 p.m. at the McCurdy Pavilion, 200 Battery Way.

Tickets for Fiddlers Rule! are $18 to $35, and can be purchased online at https://tinyurl.com/bd7uhe3j. Tickets for the dance party are $25 and can purchased online at https://tinyurl.com/3ytxhn2t.

The festival attendee registered 416, said program manager Peter McCracken. Eighty under the age of 12 and 60 teenagers, he said.

Thirty-five artist faculty members teach workshops, lead bandlabs and play for concerts or dances throughout the week. Another 35 faculty teach the kids classes and tutor, according to McCracken.

Fiddle Tunes, established in 1977, is about more than the music alone. Many have returned to the Fiddle Tunes year after year for decades.

“This week is sacred,” said Laurie Hampton of Seattle.

Hampton first came in 1979. She came to dance. It wasn’t until 1994 that she started playing music.

“We call this our high holy days of being with friends, new friends, old friends, some friends you’ve known for most of your life, it’s our tribe,” said Mel Luedders, who lives in Spokane. She has attended Fiddle Tunes since 2000.

Edie Holt, travels to Fiddle Tunes from Hawaii most years. She first came to the festival in in the 1980s, she stopped coming when she moved to Hawaii, but returned to the tradition in 2009.

Ted Lockery, a Seattle resident, started coming to Fiddle Tunes in the early 90s,

“I started coming as a participant and signed up for classes and stayed in the dormitory or tried to stay in my car if I could get away with it,” Lockery said. “I didn’t even know about the campground. I was just studying and meeting people in the dining hall and going to tutorials and bandlabs.”

At some point Lockery wandered over to the campground where he found that not everyone was taking the workshops. Everyone was playing music and sharing meals, he said.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is where I want to be,’” he said. “I’ve been here ever since, it’s become this sort of brigadoon of, everyone shows up, we create this little village, we stay together, then we take it down.”

Luedders, who sings and plays guitar, teaches music workshops for kids with teaching partner Dina Blade.

Fiddle Tunes artistic directors Sami Braman, Riley Calcagno, Vivian Leva and Leo Shannon of The Onlies, who are now in their late 20s, were in Luedders’s kids classes years ago, Hampton said.

“They grew up and all became incredible musicians,” Luedders said. “They travel around the world playing.”

First held in 1997, and now hosted in the Forest Campground, the crazy hat party has become a tenured tradition.

The hat party generally involves music and people jamming everywhere, Hampton said. Wednesday’s party was no different, as five or six musicians sat around a fire playing their instruments.

Hats can vary widely, from a banana taped to a bald head to ornate pieces of art, Luedders said.

At some point gumbo became a part of the crazy hat party tradition.

“There’s always a cajun presence here,” Hampton said. “Not every music tradition had a food that’s associated with it, but cajun music is definitely associated with gumbo.”

Fiddle Tunes previous Artistic Diretor Joel Savoy is Cajun, Hampton said.

“When he was the artistic director, there were tons of Cajuns here, it really got going strong,” she added.

Gumbo cook Colin Gould has cooked for the hat party for the last four years. Originally from Louisiana, he came up for the week from his current home in Colorado.

Gould, who plays the fiddle, drums and cajun accordion, said he’d heard about the event for years before coming to it.

Early Wednesday afternoon, Gould browned meat in a 100 quart stockpot. He said there should be around 250 to 300 servings.

“The meat base is a smoked andouille pork sausage and chicken thighs, dark meat,” he said. “In that oil and everything you put your bell pepper, onion and celery, the Cajun holy trinity. You keep cooking that down until it starts to build liquid. Beer to deglaze. You build up chicken stock and then water eventually.”

On Tuesday, Gould led a group of people in preparing a roux for the gumbo.

Three-hundred servings of rice were prepared in one rice cooker for the party.

Music in the kitchen isn’t limited to the hat party. On Wednesday afternoon, the Cayman Islands kitchen dance music group, Swanky Kitchen Band, taught a workshop on playing the grater, as in the kitchen utensil.

The grater is used as a percussion instrument. Beneil Miller, who usually sings and plays keytar, passed some homemade examples around to a group of students.

“Normally we play it with a fork,” he said.

In the workshop, Nicholas Johnson played the song “Munzie Boat in the Sound,” while Chris Seymour, who typically plays lead guitar, drummed on a floor tom dampened with a towel over the drum head.

“Munzie boat in the sound boy, Munzie boat in the sound, when you talk about blue squab head, blue squab head all around,” the three sang together, harmonizing.

The three exemplified what the grater did for the music by playing the song with and without the grater, before showing the class a few of the core rhythms the instrument plays in the Cayman Islands’ indigenous music.

To learn more about the band, visit https://swankykitchenband.com/our-story.

Belen Escobedo, a violinist from San Antonio, taught workshops on Tejano Roots music and played dance music on Friday night.

“Tejano roots, from Texas, roots means the early music from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s,” said Ramon Gutierrez, who plays with Escoberdo, he is also married to her.

In her band are Ramon, who plays tololoche, an upright bass, and Alvaro Gutierrez who plays bajo sexto, or 12-string-guitar. The two call each other cousins, but are unrelated.

Escobedo’s musical life was dictated by the needs of her family, she said.

Part of a public school pilot program which paid for her first violin, she became interested in pursuing classical training in university, but life got in the way.

When she was 15, her family needed the money, so she started playing on mariachi recordings in San Antonio.

“Back then, in the 70s, women were looked down upon, being female musicians in an ensemble” Escobedo said. “The females were either dancers or singers. Old school Mexican tradition, machismo. So, because I was formally trained, I knew how to shift on my instrument and so the mariachies needed someone to play the hard parts in recordings. I was hired to record more often than to perform in public because I wasn’t seen.”

Escobedo didn’t receive credit on those recordings, but she didn’t care because she made the money her family needed, she said.

Escobedo said the musicians she played with eventually mustered the courage to bring her along to the club gigs. She said she faced obstacles in that time, but overcame them with with help from God.

Eventually, Escobedo was playing so well that she was invited to join a mariachi band that was the house band for San Antonio’s KCRO Radio and KWEX television live on-air programs.

“They would call in the artists that were most popular from Mexico, the singers,” she said. “We had to learn their music to accompany their recordings. That’s how I got accompany many artists.”

Playing club shows was culturally improper for a woman where Escobedo came from, she said.

“It’s hard on the body, the no sleeping,” she said.

She and Ramon remember eating cold pizza at 3 a.m. regularly, she said.

Eventually, she got her teaching degree and taught orchestra and band in public schools in San Antonio and quit the mariachi scene.

Later, Escobedo resumed playing gigs, once again to support her family. During that time, Escobedo would play club gigs most nights, until two or three in the morning, in addition to teaching during the day, she said.

As a freelancer, she met Ramon in the music scene.

She would play in his band, Mariachi San Antonio de Bejar. They were getting a lot of bookings at the time, she said.

Escobedo and Ramon would eventually marry, in defiance of an old Mexican tradition which prohibited first born daughters from marrying, she said.

In 2017, Escobedo was awarded the Master Texas Fiddler Award in recognition of her significance as one of the only people, and only woman, maintaining the rich traditions of Texas-Mexican fiddling, according to her Fiddle Tunes biography.

Now retired from teaching in school, Escobedo continues to teach and perform because she wants to, she said.

To learn more about Escobedo’s distinguished life in music, see her Fiddle Tunes biography at https://tinyurl.com/yv4usyjd.

Late Wednesday afternoon, on the porch of the historic Colonel’s House, event founder Bertram Levy played his one of a kind “Levytar” that a friend built and named for him. He was playing chords for world renowned Danish violinist Kristian Bugge on historical Danish folk tunes from the 17th century.

Bugge, who has been touring in the United States since the beginning of June, playing Midsommar festivals and folk festivals, came out to the Fiddle Tunes on a whim.

He has attended the festival five times including this year, as faculty previously. Fiddle Tunes is a truly special festival, Bugge said.

Henry Barnes, fiddle player of the Tennessee Hillbuddies and festival faculty, said he appreciated the pace of the festival. Many festivals work their faculty to the ground teaching during the day and entertaining at night, he said.

“That’s my experience too,” said Trevor Holder, the Hillbuddies’ banjo player.

“How this is set up for myself and the rest of the staff, I feel like my time is valued here,” Barnes said.

The Fort Worden location doesn’t hurt either.

“You walk out, you’ve got swallows around you, there’s a bald eagle flying right by your head, you can swim in the brackish channel and you have the views of volcanoes,” Barnes said. “Where else do you get to do this in view of volcanoes?”

________

Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at Elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com