As a way of bringing the spirit and thrill of the Tennessee-based Bonnaroo Festival to the rest of the United States, headlining musicians Trey Anastasio and Ben Harper will kick off a series of summer concerts across the country dubbed the Zooma Tour, featuring a group of rotating support acts beginning in mid-June.
"It came up and when I heard it was with Trey I jumped at it," said Harper. "Personally, I thought it sounded great, and with the second stage and rotating groups coming on every few days, it just sounded too good not to do."
Harper and Anastasio will begin the tour in New Jersey June 16 and hit 29 cities throughout the season, ending July 31 at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington.
"You know the motion when you're on tour, they take on a life of their own," said Anastasio. "It's a living, breathing thing. At the beginning you're excited, then you go through emotional waves on the whole thing and so this is a change that happens automatically. Location has so much to do with music, so it's going to be different at the Gorge than it is in Cleveland."
The Zooma Tour will showcase music on two stages and an "activity village" with vendors and attractions. Locally, the tour will hit Irvine's Verizon Wireless Amphitheater July 28 and includes performances by G. Love & Special Sauce and Galactic.
"What's really cool is Trey and I, we have our own directions of musical interests and appreciation, but we also have a place where we meet dead center," said Harper. "Like our appreciation for, say, Jerry Garcia and Jerry's appreciation for the blues and for Hendrix and for Dylan and for Gillian Welch and Alison Krause. We both have a passion for people like Elizabeth Cotton and Woody Guthrie, all the way to modern music. It would be impossible for us not to musically collaborate and get together on some things.
"I just love making music anywhere any time, and when I'm with Trey, it just feels like the summer has a fresh feel to it. This tour has a fresh feel to it, the way it's structured, the bands that are on it. It draws you in, music pulls you in. There's nothing more seductive than music and love."
Creators of Bonnaroo- Superfly Productions and A.C. Entertainment - are organizing the Zooma Tour. According to promoters, between 20 and 25 bands and solo artists such as Medeski Martin & Wood, Gomez, Toots & The Maytals, Jurassic 5, Galactic, G. Love & Special Sauce, Black Keys, Brazilian Girls, Ray Lamontagne, Xavier Rudd and Donavon Frankenreiter will perform as rotating guest acts along the tour. Anastasio, Harper and his band the Innocent Criminals will serve as the headlining acts of each show.
"My experience in spending so much time at Bonnaroo is that you've got sort of an informed audience and that this festival is representative of that with all the different kinds of bands, so they wanted to take it on the road," said Anastasio. "That was a natural progression. I know, for myself Phish - my career with Phish was - we did a lot of festivals alone ... and we didn't have a lot of warm-up acts and I'm craving the experience of going out and collaborating with people, right now, at this stage of my career. Ben is somebody I'm dying to play with."
Anastasio, former guitarist of the now-defunct band Phish, played a farewell tour with the group's three other members in 2004 and subsequently began writing new material for his solo effort with his new band, 70 Volt Parade - Peter Chwazik on bass; Les Hall on keys, guitar and synths; Skeeto Valdez on drums; and Ray Paczkowski on keys.
Harper, originally from Claremont, Calif., this year put out the album "There Will Be A Light," collaborating with the Blind Boys of Alabama, a group founded in 1939.
"It's the first record I made that was of one style of music because I tend to jump around a bit. This record reeled me in and showed me the beauty of making a record with that type of synthesis and flow to it of one style and sound," said Harper, "When you're with the Blind Boys, you have to step up in a soulful way that doesn't always serve all the music, so I find myself having to reel myself in from super soul back to just sort of a straighter singing style."
Harper is famous for his slide guitar work and soulful crooning while Anastasio has become popular as a virtuoso guitarist.
"The beauty of a jazz festival or the beauty of this kind of a festival, like a Zooma, you know, is you walk around the corner and it's the person you didn't expect to see who'll kick your ass," said Anastasio. "Like Ray's band, my keyboard player, Borgia. They're going to play a couple of shows. They're amazing and nobody knows that they even exist. Gabe Jarrett, Keith Jarrett's son, plays the drums and it's like a jazz trio."
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