Frederick Gazette

by Tripp Laino

Volunteer’s efforts made event possible; organizers hope to make it annual.

Brunswick’s Music Fest played host to about 400 people last weekend, bringing in music lovers from both Frederick County and states as far as North Carolina, according to Patrick Kay, executive director of Brunswick’s Main Street Association.

And though getting from the planning stage to the playing stage required the efforts of many people, the idea might have never moved forward had it not been for the efforts of Hanna Politis, co-owner of Beans in the Belfry and the music director for the coffee shop.

Brunswick had played host for the Frederick Blues Festival in 2008, and Kay said people in the city were clamoring for a repeat of the event last year, even though it never happened.

“When I first got here in 2009 during the summer season, I got several phone calls from people saying ‘When’s the blues fest? We had a great time at the last blues fest, when’s the next one?’” Kay said.

Kay said Politis applied for a grant from the Tourism Reinvestment in Promotion and Product Program, a fund generated by hotel tax revenues in Frederick County to spur tourism. The program provided $7,000 for the festival, but it wouldn’t have happened without Politis’ application.

“We were looking for a person who would spearhead it and I was excited about it, and I thought I could do it,” Politis said. “I’ve booked the events at Beans. … Over the five years at Beans, I had become confident of what I can do.”

Her years of booking music for the coffee shop also provided her with some beneficial contacts in putting together the concert. Carl Disque, who had performed at the café, founded the Western Maryland Bluesfest, and helped her write the grant application.

She also knew Cheryl Mansley, the director of RiverHouse Music, a series of concerts in Shepherdstown, W.Va., who was hired to book the bands for Music Fest from performances in the coffee shop.

Mansley also provided input to the festival’s organizers on various aspects of the event, as she has experience in these types of events. Politis said the scale of the event presented a different set of challenges than other music bookings she’d been involved with.

“It’s quite a difference to do a big event versus a venue where you come to have a meal and listen to the music,” she said. “It’s hugely different for promotion and distribution. Because it was the first time, to convey the vision, to get people excited [was tough].”

As for the future of the music festival, now that the first year is done, the town is in a better position to hold the event in the future, if the Main Street Association opts to hold the festival again.

“We’ve covered all of the expenses with sponsorships and the grant,” Politis said. “The ticket sales money will be invested in next year’s music, and I know we will get more sponsors. We can show a track record, we have had one [event]. It’s easier for companies to invest. They can see if you have it done once, they have more confidence in you.”

And though the driving force bringing people out was to hear music, organizers hoped that people might spend some time at the shops and restaurants in Brunswick as well, a goal Politis said was achieved.

“I saw plenty of people go into town,” Politis said. “That’s what we wanted to achieve as well, that they’d go into town and up and down and see the historic downtown and do a little shopping. I saw people go into the local restaurants as well.”

E-mail Tripp Laino at tlaino@gazette.net.

Gazette, June 17, 2010

by Nathan Oravec

On Saturday, Kelly Bell and Company will provide the inaugural Brunswick Music Fest with a Phat Blues-fueled culminating act. It will be festival number two for the band that day, following Virginia’s own Winchester Blues Festival.

Surprisingly, such back to back performances are largely the rule, not the exception, according to the band’s frontman.

“It’s festival season,” said Bell matter-of-factly, noting that the band regularly performs 200 gigs a year.

The Baltimore-based bluesmen — including Kirk Myers on keyboards, Ira Mayfield, Jr. on guitar, Spencer Brown on drums and Freddie Louden on bass — have certainly made a name for themselves throughout the years thanks to their far-reaching travels.

“Our sound has continued to grow even funkier, I think,” said Bell. “We made a concerted effort to go back and get hold of our blues roots.”

It’s blues with a twist, of course. Followers of the band are familiar with its aforementioned “Phat” philosophy — best described as “Muddy Waters wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt, riding in Black Sabbath’s tour bus, on his way to a Parliament Funkadelic concert, listening to a Sammy Davis, Jr. 8-track tape, humming a Run-DMC song.” And even that, states the band, would only be close.

It’s via this hybrid of sounds and successes that Bell hopes to introduce newcomers to the music that shaped his life.

“It’s a perpetual goal,” he said. “What we aspire to do is bring blues to people who wouldn’t seek it out. Specifically the younger generation. They have been listening to blues for years, they just didn’t know it. You can’t turn on the TV without being exposed to the Blues in some way. But what we do, is we give them something they can sink their teeth into … We present blues in a fashion they can understand.”

Reaching out to young listeners is the primary reason Bell looks forward to “festival season” every year.

“There’s nothing like a hot, cold bar show, at 1 a.m. in the morning, and no one’s going home. That’s all fine and good,” he said. “But when you’ve been in the business for a while, you start to think ‘This is something that I could be doing with the kids.’ We call our festival appearances the PG-13 version of the show. We rock out. I love doing it. It makes so much sense for me.”

If hearing Bell speak about the blues is like hearing a holy man speak the gospel, it’s likely because he took a page out of the First Chapter of Muddy Waters — the forerunner, Bell said, who preached the word by “plugging in,” from the Mississippi Delta all the way to Chicago.

The iconic influence of Bo Diddley, a mentor whom the band often opened for, gave him, perhaps, his greatest advice: “Bo Diddley told me, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll is merely the baby that the blues had,” said Bell.

But it was Bell’s father who introduced him to the sounds that would forever change his life, by way of Washington, D.C. radio station WPFW.

“I grew up in D.C. listening to Funk and Go-Go. My dad said, ‘This is where all that stuff you listen comes from,” said Bell. “Sometimes you need that other voice… And when I got to that question of ‘To Be or Not To Be,” as we all do at some point in our adolescence — it was the Blues that reminded me that none of us are alone in this world. I could always put on a Muddy Waters or a Howlin’ Wolf record and be reminded of that fact.”

At Saturday’s Brunswick Music Fest, Bell and the band may remind a few others in the audience as they help spread the word of the blues.

“Not that the blues needed the help,” said Bell. “I guess we’re giving back. And the way blues changed my life? I could give back forever, and we still wouldn’t be even.”

Bell urges fans old and new to visit the band’s website, www.phatblues.com, as well as following them on Twitter and Facebook.

“We’re on all of that,” Bell said. “People say, ‘Muddy Waters wouldn’t have been on Facebook.’ Sure he would. Muddy plugged in.”

Frederick News Post, June 17, 2010

By Lauren LaRocca

News-Post Staff

Brunswick once boomed as a railroad town, and that remains its claim to fame to this day. Most of the longtime residents are descendants of engineers, conductors and repairmen.

But the railroad that rolled through brought more than coal from West Virginia.

“Music grew out of railroading,” said Hanna Politis, co-owner of Beans in the Belfry and events coordinator for the Brunswick Music Fest.

The town celebrates Railroad Days each fall, and for the first time Saturday will host the Brunswick Music Fest, featuring bluegrass, blues and old-time music, beginning at 11 a.m. at Railroad Square.

Organizers hope it will become an annual event.

“Old-time was discovered and brought back here,” Politis continued. “Appalachian music was played on every porch. … They just played for themselves.”

Similarly, blues originated with black laborers, “talking about the woes of life,” Politis said. “They’d sing their stories and their ballads and their hard times.” Several of them were recruited to work on the railroad.

As a Brunswick Main Street, Inc. event, with support from the City of Brunswick and the Frederick County Tourism Council, festival organizers wanted to include all three genres. Bands performing Saturday include The Martin Family Band, Hardline Drive, Chocolate Thunder, Blue Moon Rising and Kelly Bell Band.

Chocolate Thunder “has a tremendous presence,” Politis said. “Her voice is like Aretha Franklin’s.”

And with Hardline Drive “you get newgrass that doesn’t talk about the farm, let’s say, but modern times,” she said. “They keep bluegrass alive.”

The Polka Dots, a young old-time trio from Loudoun County, will play near the gate, welcoming festival-goers onto the grounds.

Cheryl Mansley, music director and publicist for the festival, booked the acts.

“I’ve always heard how talented” The Martin Family Band is, she said. “I jammed with Lydia, Emily and Claude once, years ago … and was impressed with them then.”

She added that the Kelly Bell Band played Brunswick once before to a great response, so it was a no-brainer to invite them back to town.

Mansley said she discovered Chocolate Thunder via Internet searching. “When I received her CD I was blown away by how good it is.”

The festival will also include food, a beer garden and merchandise vendors.

MCs include Diana Gibson, news anchor of WFRE and WFMD, and singer-songwriter Tomy Wright.

Gary Free, 71, is a guitar legend in Brunswick and will serve as another MC at the festival. Following the festival ethos, he carries on the music of generations before him, having gotten his start in the railroad town in 340 West, the band his father, Woody, headed.