Now & Then: Colossal Jam IV

Colossal Jam IV (ft. Daniel Lanois, Elaquent and Nels Cline Singers) Main Stage, July 25, 2015

A truly improvised and unrehearsed session with these talented musicians who have never performed together. The Colossal Jam series is the essence of what we call a festival workshop except we do it on the main stage instead of in one of the tent stages as the sonic territory can become quite huge like it does here. This presentation features a segment of the session from that toasty Saturday afternoon as the jam soared with all pistons firing and the participants communicating with each other in a new language they had just created together.

Daniel Lanois – pedal steel, electric guitar  (Hamilton, ON)
Elaquent – DJ/electronic samples/beats/loops/laptop    (Guelph, ON)
Nels Cline Singers   (USA):
Nels Cline – Guitar
Scott Amendola – Drums
Trevor Dunn – Bass
Cyro Baptista – Percussion

About Now & Then
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us to fulfill our mission and to stay relevant at a time when our raison d’être, to present live arts events to our community, has been nullified.  When we couldn’t showcase artists in person, we turned to  an extensive library of archival video and audio footage from our festival that includes multiple camera angles and high-resolution recording.  We have never used this footage because our focus is always on the future—the next artist we will showcase live, the next workshop that will blow people away.  And though we don’t think of ourselves as hoarders, we do have at least 15 years of high-quality footage that we keep and rarely touch.  So, for this special project series, we have asked some of the artists whose performances were beloved by our audience, unusual in some way, even epic, to sit with us to talk about their Hillside experience, their music, the sets we recorded in the past, and the paths they have followed since in their careers.  This interview will be interwoven with the archival footage in such a way that they comment, both directly and indirectly, on each other.  Some artists we interview will perform a couple of songs for us in the here and now, which will round out the documentary about them.  It is our hope that each facet of this documentary exploration teases out the individuality of the artist and prompts us all to reflect on the trajectories of creative lives and the inspirational role festivals play in showcasing brilliant artists, quirky personalities, and wild improvisational sets between performers from different cultures, traditions and generations.  We also hope this Now & Then project grounds you in sweet memories of past festivals and gives you hope as we move into the uncertain future.

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