Vernon Reid – Memphis Flyer

The question on everyone’s lips this Monday after the 2023 Beale Street Music Festival is “Well, how was it?” The answer, from my perspective, is “It was okay.”

After the pandemic disruption was extended into a construction delay which moved the festival to the fairgrounds in Midtown, BSMF returned to a Tom Lee Park that is very different than it was in 2019. I’ve attended the Beale Street Music Festival for the better part of 30 years, and this year was unlike any other I’ve experienced.

Tom Lee Park has been transformed from a flat flood plane to a modestly hilly area spotted with with copses of trees, split by winding concrete paths. The official opening of the park isn’t until Labor Day weekend, and things were still very much under construction. Several areas with freshly planted trees were roped off from public access, and people seemed to respect the restrictions for the most part. The paths were a welcome addition to many people I spoke with, but several pointed out that being on your feet for several hours on concrete is much harder on the joints and bones than walking on turf — or more accurately to the historical Memphis in May experience, mud.

Threatening clouds over Tom Lee Park never delivered heavy rains. (Photo by Chris McCoy)

The forecast called for rain all weekend, but nothing beyond the lightest of drizzle ever came down from the threatening clouds. The newly installed turf and landscaping seemed to hold up very well under the onslaught of tens of thousands of boots and flip flops. (Seriously, don’t wear flip flops to a music festival.) But the ultimate test, in the form of a rainy weekend, never came.

But could the new Tom Lee Park handle a real crowd? On Friday before I headed down to Tom Lee for the first time, I said we’d find out the answer to that question about 8:45 p.m. on Saturday, when GloRilla took the stage. I was right on that account. Official attendance figures are not available as of this writing, but Memphis Travel’s Kevin Kane was pre-spinning low numbers to Channel 3 on Friday. But the Saturday night audience for GloRilla stretched the central Bud Light stage to its limits.

About a third of the crowd gathered for GloRilla on Saturday night of Beale Street Music Festival, as seen from the bluff. (Photo by Laura Jean Hocking).

It was GloRilla’s homecoming show after blowing up in popularity over the last year, and she got a hero’s welcome. Raw charisma is more important to a rapper than any other performing artist. There are a lot of people who can spit fire bars in a recording studio, but who wilt under the glare of the stage lights. GloRilla is a fighter. She will not be ignored in favor of your phone. Backed by a 30-foot inflatable gorilla which seemed to embody her fierceness, she surround herself with six of the best dancers in Memphis — and this is a city with a very, very deep bench of dancers. Dripping in jewels and a shiny gold outfit, GloRilla grabbed the crowd out of the gate and roared through bangers like “Internet Trolls.” When she paused to monologue about the difficulty of being a woman shut out of the hip hop boys club, and ended with “we kicked the door in!”, everyone in Tom Lee Park believed her.

GloRilla on stage. (Photo by Laura Jean Hocking)

From ground level, and later the bluff, the new park appeared to handle GloRilla’s horde of fans without much trouble. The biggest innovation in crowd movement turned out to be the walkway that now runs the length of the river bank, which served as a kind of freeway for people going from one stage to the next on the long, park. The weekend provided three great sunsets, and on Saturday, people were lined up along the path to take selfies with the river in the background.

Selfies with the sun on the new river walk in Tom Lee Park. (Photo by Chris McCoy)

The biggest challenge to the Beale Street Music Festival’s attendance may be simple timing. This year, the festival fell on the second weekend of New Orleans Jazz Fest, which, judging from its A-list lineup, is much better capitalized than Memphis In May. To make things worse, this was the weekend Taylor Swift made a three-night stand in Nashville. Since the Swiftie fandom is the closest thing we have to a monoculture in 2023, the vast majority of Memphis’ younger, musically inclined folks made the trip to the Music City this weekend rather than checking out The Lumineers in the new Tom Lee Park.

Earth, Wind & Fire. (Photo by Laura Jean Hocking)

They missed some good sets on Friday night, beginning with Memphis gospel duo The Sensational Barnes Brothers, then moving directly to The Bar-Kays. (One of my favorite things about being a long-term Memphis music fanatic is watching yet another audience lose their collective minds when The Bar-Kays remind them about “Freakshow On The Dance Floor.”) Earth, Wind & Fire paid tribute to Memphian Maurice White during their high-voltage vintage funk set. Then the crowd at the Zyn Stage swelled for 311, the ’90s cult band that has found the key to long-lasting success is just making sure you throw a great party every night.

Aside from GloRilla’s rapturous reception, BSMF ’23 never reached those heights again. The most puzzling addition to the bill was a band called Colony House who replaced White Reaper on the Volkswagen stage on Saturday. MIM had more than a week to find a new act after the lead singer of White Reaper broke his collarbone, but instead of picking up the phone and calling any one of the dozen of hungry Memphis rock acts who could kill on 30 minutes notice, they chose to spend the money on a mushy mess of warmed-over worship band music from the ritzy Middle Tennessee enclave of Franklin.

Living Colour. (photo by Laura Jean Hocking)

It didn’t help that Colony House followed Living Colour, the legendary ’90s prog-punk pioneers who haven’t lost their edge. Guitar god Vernon Reid and throat-ripping vocalist Corey Glover provide the band’s formidable one-two punch. Early songs like “Open Letter to a Landlord,” which takes on gentrification, and their smash “Cult of Personality,” which pretty much explains the Trump era of American politics in four minutes, are, if anything, even more relevant today than when they were written. The Beale Street Music Festival may have evolved, but some things never seem to change.

Allison Krauss and Robert Plant. (photo by Chris McCoy)

Ben Rednour

Jenny Davis plays amplified cacti in John Cage’s ‘Child of Tree’ at the 2018 Continuum Fest

While several cities have renovated former Sears, Roebuck & Company warehouses/retail centers, including Minneapolis, Atlanta and Boston, Memphis’ own Crosstown Concourse may take the cake in terms of grounding such projects in community art projects and concerts. And, far from curating softball ‘pops’ concerts and blockbuster movies, Crosstown Arts, the nonprofit that jump started the local Sears building’s revitalization in 2010, has kept the “urban” in its original vision of a “mixed-used vertical urban village.”

In this context, urban means bringing to Midtown the kind of pioneering music that one might find at world-class halls like the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) or C4 Atlanta’s FUSE Arts Center. With three venues, an artist fellowship program, a recording studio, a music film series, and other resources for local and international musicians (and other artists), Crosstown Arts has become one of the nation’s premier centers of innovation.

Case in point: the upcoming Continuum Music Festival, now in its third year, which, in hosting events in the Crosstown Theater, the Green Room, and the East Atrium Stage, may make the fullest use yet of all the old retail center’s environs. As a festival of new sounds, from experimental to electronic, classical to multimedia, Continuum is beyond most precedents in the local scene. Headlining is Project Logic, featuring local bass wunderkind MonoNeon, guitar virtuoso Vernon Reid (Living Colour), and drummer Daru Jones. The festival also features Opera Memphis’ staging of the transgender-themed work As One, a chamber opera created by Laura Kaminsky, Mark Campbell, and Kimberly Reed.

CROSSTOWN ARTS PRESENTS: CONTINUUM MUSIC FESTIVAL 2019 from Crosstown Arts on Vimeo.

From Continuum Fest to A Change of Tone, Crosstown Keeps It Edgy

The kick-off show on Thursday, August 15th features the Blueshift Ensemble playing compositions by longtime collaborators from the ICEBERG New Music collective and is to be held at Crosstown Brewing Company.The festival will also feature a Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel, a concert by multi-instrumentalist New Memphis Colorways, and a performance of Sarah Hennies’ ‘The Reinvention of Romance’ by Two Way Street.

Finally, like any good gathering of the tribes, there will be many interactive workshops and talks: Sweet Soul Restorative (Yoga with Live Music); The Quest for the Perfect Pop Song; The Metaphysics of Sound; Sheltering Voices: Impactful Community Storytelling; Breaking Boundaries: The Music of ShoutHouse; and The Sounds of ‘Starry Night:’ Writing Music to Van Gogh’s Masterpiece.

But Continuum is really only among many examples of the cutting edge curation of the Crosstown Concourse space going on now. In addition to last year’s Mellotron Variations or this spring’s Memphis Concrète electronic music festival, more ideas are percolating in the wings. For example, musical artists who are pushing the very boundaries of how concerts are experienced will be featured in next spring’s A Change of Tone concerts.

Four such shows are planned for April 18th-21st, 2020, but we don’t yet know what we’ll hear. Musicians of any genre are applying to be featured as we go to press, and may do so until September 10th of this year. Click here to submit a proposal.

One thing they all will have in common is thinking outside of the music box, or rather, outside of the venue. Subtitled “In/Out of Sync,” the concerts will be organized around a weirdly specific, yet open ended theme: Musicians will “exhibit” their music for a listening audience over loudspeakers in one venue as they simultaneously perform it in another, creating a non-traditional listening experience.

With a live-feeds between The Green Room music venue and Crosstown Theater, audio from the latter will be piped over to the audience in The Green Room to listen to, as the musicians, out of sight, perform their original work live in the otherwise empty Crosstown Theater auditorium. The second feed will video-capture The Green Room audience for the performing musicians in the theater to see on a screen, so that they may virtually watch their audience as they play. With such technological feats, concert organizers hope the performers “might achieve a vivid and seemingly living omnipresence.” As the organizers further expound:

Similar to the experience of being inside of a haunted house or abandoned building, this spectral approach to auditory perception will be, among other things, a sonic experiment in vulnerability. It will be an attempt to enhance and heighten the audio-sensory experience for the listener, and perhaps will intensify the presence and impact that music can have when our fight-or-flight response is instinctively activated, giving the sounds we hear the power to demand our full attention.

It’s an embarrassment of riches, really, for those hoping to reimagine their sonic art. In fact, the many series at the Concourse may be remaking the musical arts as Crosstown Arts remade the empty shell of an abandoned retail center only a few short years ago.