Music festival had crowd bouncing

The crowd wasn’t so much dancing as it was bouncing along to the music.
On stage, a band known as Debo was blasting out a funky, infectious tune.
There were 11 of them in Debo by my count: A singer, a bass player, a guitar player, two fiddlers, two saxophonists, one guy on trumpet, a drummer, someone playing an accordion and a tuba player.
A tuba? In a pop music band?
But this was Ethiopian pop music, and the night had a decidedly international feel.
Welcome to Lotus World Music and Arts Festival, a Bloomington event that marked its 20th year over the weekend.
Despite the Lotus name, the festival didn’t originally derive from Asian or yoga influences. Instead, it’s named for a Hoosier Bluegrass musician by the name of Lotus Dickey.
In his honor, for 20 years now, the festival has provided a showcase for music you would otherwise never hear.
As a result, it’s a sometimes whiplash-inducing trip around the world to wander through downtown Bloomington on Lotus weekend. We were introduced to the festival last year thanks to my old childhood friend Jim Klopfenstein. This year, Jim couldn’t join us, but the weekend provided a great excuse to visit the IU campus and our daughter Sally.
The way the festival works, you buy a ticket for either the whole weekend or a single night’s entertainment, then you wander through seven different downtown venues, sampling music and food as your tastes dictate.
Our Saturday night, for instance, started with that Ethiopian funk band Debo. The band itself was international. There may have been two or three members from Ethiopia, but the horn section was all Caucasian and the accordion was played by a little Asian woman. None of that mattered. What mattered was they were good.
But there was more to sample, so after about half an hour, we wandered from the tent where Debo was playing over to the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, where we could find seats in the balcony for the last 15 minutes of an Indian classical music concert. There were three guys — a father and two sons — playing the sarod and a fourth on the tabla, the amazing pair of Indian drums.
Moving from venue to venue is the norm at Lotus. While the musicians are performing, the audience stays put. But in between numbers, it’s not uncommon to see 10 to 20 percent of the audience leave and as many new audience members arrive to take their place.
Between Debo and the Indians, we bought some brats at a stand outside Farm, a downtown restaurant, and ate dinner at a park bench.
Then it was time for the parade. Actually, it was time for two parades that started at two different spots and came together to merge their music in the middle. Sounds crazy, and it was. But it was fun, not just for the two bands, the people in costume, the hula hoop marching team, the roller derby girls and all the rest, but for the crowd of spectators as well.
After the parade, for a change of pace, we stopped at First Presbyterian Church — one of three downtown churches that serve as venues for Lotus — to sample a concert by a talented group of folksingers from New Foundland.
Then it was on to Bluebird, a nightclub, to hear a totally wacky group known as Japonize Elephants who play a frenetic, oddball mixture of a zillion different musical influences. There’s a little bit of Frank Zappa, some jazz, some Asian music and more than a little country. (At one point during a song that sounded as if it had been arranged in a kitchen blender, I swear I heard a fiddle player doing “When the Devil Went Down to Georgia.” And it somehow fit right in.)
For a single night, that was more than enough for us. But the full menu offered even more: Polish village music, Finnish music, a Ukrainian quartet, Colombian folk harp, Nordic bluegrass, hip-hop from Montreal and more.
In other words, plenty to dance to. Or maybe just bounce along in time with the music.[[In-content Ad]]