Music in the trees? It conjures up images of a poet wearing millenniums-ago robe and sandals while playing a lute and propped onto the fourth fork of a bigger-than-usual apple tree and doing a balancing act on his ass while he sings a soliloquy or a soffit. Maybe taking a bite in-between verses, to match what listeners chomped on if they hauled it in down long nature paths, making for dinner and a show with duos and trios, and one huge and elaborate band.
Well didn’t quite get that lute-ist. Or a bassist so high on life and so-forth stoned and sleepy that he might fall out of the tree? After climbing the stairway to heaven?
What stood to be found on Saturday and Sunday, for most of each day ay the rapidly becoming annual event at the Lakeland nature preserve, were a spread-out set of stagings on metal ladders going up past knobs where there once were branches, up pole/lumber-style pine tree trunks, reaching to what resembled deer stands, but now having roadies rise with music stands propped up at the point, and bars for hanging triangles and the like. At least for one of the opening acts from the Minneapolis area, with shade from umbrellas with partially cut out corners, that would also cast shadows on conga-type tops. (There were several more groups to come.) However, there was not a set of drum kits transported up the trees — as there were two different stands where the playing was from what looked like a snare drum — to potentially drop from the tree’s crown. One of the drummers did lose his stick and down it fell from 15 feet up, and stuck the landing, like it had been purposely flung into the audience at a rockier concert, (Rocky Top?) And a stubborn umbrella was among the glitches that playfully flopped, in the breeze.
So, gotta drum with one hand like a Def Leppard or in an intro slow groove, like a Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin song, then change tempos? The listener kitty-corner away from me wore a Patagonia shirt — is that a metal band worthy of a steel staff or shaft, or spire or spine drumstick — no wait, that would be Pantera if rhyming. But the duo had all the drumming or drubbing longer devices worthy of their classical-plus-pulse, maybe adding a mellotron.
Again forming a double lead were a clarinet and cello, tweaking back and forth, next up the path and the set list. The backdrop is an ecological area with many historical orchestrations — and besides, bison nearby, for bonding with nature, but one wonders if given the opportunity, they would charge the tree stand if annoyed by the drum roll — not all of the species-oriented tree and butterfly evolutions correct in an eco sense thanks to man, as we and a couple who are benefactors for keeping it right, keep on keeping time.
One duo combined wooden flutes and hand percussion, with Swedish bagpipe that also got a bit into Norway and its past mythology and beyond, to go with vocals. A big lyrical focus was on a supernatural man from the bottom of the sea.
Other groups came and went, a few even pushing the limits of the nearby quiet area, but then it was time for a band that even moreso did it with building up flare and color, song and dance, and over a dozen instruments, including three types of the wind, then whistling through — the trees — and a brass horn too boot, with multiple people playing drums like the bongos, to the dancing with flashy colors of someone with a crow mask who looked, in a way I cannot really describe, as indigenous. We found out they go by Alma Andina, we’re guessing with styles from the mountain music from the south part of South America as in Andes and also Latin America.