Highlights From The Newport Folk Festival

(Michael Kiwanuka)

SUNDAY

Ramblin’ Jack Elliot – After an evening of after-partying that may have included arguing with Jim James about “The Rolling Stone Cover” (that’s what people told us, anyway) and definitely involved us taking a spill or two on a dark Newport sidestreet (we’re still digging gravel out of our knees), getting to the festival on Sunday was a little slow going. We may have missed a couple of artistS, but we didn’t miss Ramblin’ Jack and that’s what counts.  Elliot played his first Newport Folk Festival fifty years ago (!!!) but the crowd up front were mostly young devotees hanging on every word of his stories, every note from his guitar. And he told a lot of stories –he he’s the paterfamilius of American folk and he’s got some tales to tell. He’s also an architect of the modern folk aesthetic, a bridge between Woody Guthrie and the up-and-coming kids, and it was an honor and a pleasure to watch him perform.

Bombino – Newport, for all its recent embracing of sounds beyond trad-folk, still doesn’t reach too far beyond Anglo-American traditions, so this Taureg musicians’ set of psychedelic sub-Saharan blues was truly welcome. Bombino’s new Dan Auerbach-produced album Nomad is one of the year’s most breathtaking, a proper studio album after years of scrappy low-budget recordings that were stunning despite their sonic minimalism. That Nomad has been able to usher the unbelievably talented guitarist and songwriter from so far away into the edge of the American Mainstream is pretty amazing. That Nomad means we get to see Bombino play a few times a year now is even more amazing – he is hands down one of the world’s most intoxicating performers and he left the Harbor Tent reeling from the grooves tracks like “Imuhar” and “Amidinine.”

Michael Kiwanuka – British folk-soul on a Sunday afternoon by the ocean? Yep, this is all we really want out of life. The sky’s may have been grey but Kiwanuka’s band delivered some serious sushine vibes on the Fort Stage, with jazzier more rockin’ arrangements of songs from his should-be-classic-sooner-rather-than-later debut Home Again. And while “Home Again” wasn’t the last song we heard at the festival – what we caught of Felice Brothers and Beck were wonderful –it was the song stuck in our festival-fried brains as we boarded the ferry to head back to the real world and the work week ahead. See ya next year, Newport.