After three decades of hosting the Great Blue Heron Music Festival near the small Southern Tier town of Sherman, organizer Julie Rockcastle decided for more. Over the remainder of the summer, her Heron Farm and Event Center will host four "smaller" festivals called "Beyond the Blue." The first is Saturday.
She says it's "giving people more reasons to come all the way out to Sherman. And be out in nature and enjoy the place and the music. We're all about the live music."
The festivals, Rockcastle says, will be "genre specific." The first features Americana, with headliners The Arcadian Wild and Upstate.
The Buffalo-based band Folkfaces will also play at the event. Lead singer/guitarist Tyler Wescott and percussionist Dan Schwach joined us in the WBFO studio to discuss their music. They say it's influenced by traditional jazz, rock and roll, jugband, western swing and more. Their path in coming together has been a winding road, 10 years in the making.
Schwach, who arrived to WBFO ready to play his homemade washboard, studied music at the University at Buffalo. He recalls seeing Folkfaces perform at a Buffalo bar without a drummer. Schwach predicted correctly that night that he would soon be their percussionist.
Tyler Westcott said he tried college for a year. He also says he spent some time "homeless in New York City." But his story began in a small town in Livingston County.
"I was raised by hippies, not by wolves," said Westcott, blurry-eyed that morning after performing the previous night in Ithaca.
"There are not very many musical opportunities in Hunt, New York. People, you know, can be close-minded and I was pining for a little bit of diversity whereas other people acted like it was a bad thing."
Westcott seems to have found that diversity in Buffalo.
"There's an amazing, rich jazz scene here, which is pretty cool and, I think, pretty singular to Buffalo," Westcott said.
"One thing that I really appreciate about the Buffalo music scene is the fact that everyone is so accepting, said Schwach, who grew up in Lancaster.
"No matter how polished you want your music to be or how 'out there' you want your music to be, there's people who are going to love it, or, at least if they don't love it, they're going to come and support you."
