There is nothing wrong with your bluegrass music. Do not attempt to adjust the melody. We are controlling your picking. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the tempo. We will control the key. We can control the feedback, make it flutter. We can change the sound to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your bluegrass music. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to – The IBMA Limits. (With apologies to whoever wrote this for The Outer Limits).
For those of you who have the fantasy that being on the CBA IBMA suite team is a week of nonstop bluegrass picking, overindulging on new and famous bluegrass bands, drinking Sierra Nevada Beer, and hanging with professional musicians, well you are only partly right. Imagine if you will a week of hosting a small festival, complete with complementary drink and food for the participants, followed by a hosted post-festival jam where bluegrass warriors, professional musicians, and paparazzi gather to outdo each other. Well you’d still be only imagining part of the bacchanalia, the part that the public sees.
Our annual pilgrimage to the International Bluegrass Music Association meeting is a big deal for the CBA. We get a lot of business done. Yeah sure you could make jokes that would have the usual theme of making, or spending tens of dollars on bluegrass, or how does a bluegrass musician make a million dollars…they start with two million, but this is actually an important meeting for us to meet those musicians, all in one place, that we might hire next year, or three years from now. In the end the IBMA meeting actually saves us money because otherwise we (meaning CBA Board members and the Talent Acquisition Group…our committee of CBA members that recommend bands for the FDF festival) would have to spend the time and money to go visit festivals across the nation to preview bands. That actually sounds like a pretty cool thing to do, but it is simply impractical to expect the CBA to subsidize CBA members to leave their jobs and go on a months long road trip around the nation…no matter how much fun it sounds. So we go to the IBMA instead and, in addition to previewing old and new talent, we meet with other festival directors, band agents, attend workshops about licensing, insurance, future trends for the bluegrass music industry, and we host the CBA suite, which is a destination event all unto its own at the IBMA.
So now you might be thinking…sweeeeet, how do I get on this junket? My response is yeah….riiiight. Well to be a part of the CBA team you have to take about 10 days off from your job, pay for your travel costs out and back to Raleigh, pay for your food, pay for tickets to hear music at the Red Hat amphitheater, pay for the (discounted) IBMA registration fee, oh yes, and put in about six 10-12 hour days of work hosting the CBA suite as a CBA representative. Such a deal! You get to pay a bunch of dollars to go work really hard for a week representing the CBA. Now that isn’t all of the story…the CBA does subsidize some of the trip…which is where the instrument raffle funds go. And we also have some donation buckets in the suite to help offset costs. We need to rent a van (the food doesn’t just magically show up in the CBA suite all prepared and ready to go…we go to Walmart, Costco, etc and buy it), we need to purchase the chips, dip, and veggies for the evenings when we host the bands, and we need to pay for the suite and some hotel rooms to get the suite. To help with the cost of this we have some generous contributors. Sierra Nevada Brewery contributed a substantial amount of beer that we use as refreshments for visitors to the suite. John and Pat Rumiano of Rumiano cheese generously donated the cheese for our suite…and Pat also attends IBMA and helps work the suite. In fact Pat has a reputation that some of us affectionately refer to as “The Enforcer”. Good story there. And Bonneau Dickson generously contributed his custom-labeled wine to the suite. If you see Pat or Bonneau I want to encourage you to personally thank them for their contributions…and go buy some Sierra Nevada beer.
But the above just helps to create the setting. Every day about 4PM, the CBA team meets in the suite, earlier in the day the shoppers go out to buy food and 200 lbs of ice for the evening, and then about 5PM we start preparing food, icing the beer, and getting everything ready for 8 hours of non-stop bluegrass. Usually we open the suite to jammers about 6PM and then start the music at about 8PM. Lucy Smith, the IBMA coordinator spends about 10 months planning the CBA IBMA suite…everything from booking the bands to getting the van, etc. Lucy, bless her bluegrass heart, just can’t say no to a band so we have about 8 bands most evenings. Somewhere between midnight and 1 AM, after the last band plays, we open the suite to jamming, and what a jam we have. This year Peter Rowan came to pick with us, Eddie Gill, Jim Lauderdale, Jeff Scroggins, band members from many of the bands that play the suite…just too many names to remember. And then there are the gifted non-professional pickers, hot pickers from every corner of the world. It is almost jam heaven. And then we close the suite at 3 AM come hell, hurricane, or premature dawn. And we start again the next day, or later that day to be completely accurate. Your sense of time becomes distorted during IBMA week.
You might say exhausting and you would be right. But it doesn’t stop there. Consider that for the time that the bands are playing we have to have folks running the door. Yep you guessed it, so many folks show up to the CBA suite we cannot physically fit them all in and unfortunately we have to control who goes in and out. The hallway outside our suite is bedlam. And then there are the roving groups of Raleigh youth looking to take over a suite and turn it into a PARTY. That was interesting. So the Friday night at IBMA we opened the suite for jamming after the last band played and within 10 minutes of opening the door we had a full suite, so packed it was impossible to move, the jammers were pushed up against one wall, and the din was unimaginable. Consider a room so full of people you can’t even hear the banjo! And they kept coming…they were texting their friends to come to this great party, we started to get a little worried, and the jammers couldn’t even get in the room. Out of self-defense, and in sympathy to the banjo player, we emptied the suite to start over and only those folks packing an instrument could enter…didn’t matter what kind of instrument (we did have a bluegrass flautist one evening) but you had to have an instrument. Problem solved for Friday evening and Sat evening, but unfortunately that meant we had to have door monitors until 3AM…bummer. But some of the rumors that got back to us about emptying the suite were amusing…including this one rumor about the obnoxious bodyguards that were associated with the CBA suite.
So if you want to volunteer for the CBA IBMA team…it is actually really rewarding and what a group of absolutely wonderful, hardworking, generous people. If you see these folks give thanks to Lucy Smith, John Erwin, Lani Way, Frank Solivan, Dave Swartz, Gina Schaffer, Steve Ladonga, Teresa Michele (aka Jokey), Pat and John Rumianio, Bonneau Dickson, Sierra Nevada Beer, and thanks to all the unofficial volunteers that came to help out with the suite. See ya’ll again next year, same time, same place.
We return control back to your bluegrass music!
Thanks and see you October 17-23 at the Fall Campout at the Lodi Grape Festival and Harvest Fairgrounds, 413 E Lockeford Street, Lodi, CA 95240.
