Bonnaroo: Live From Bonnaroo Music Festival CD

Recorded live at the Bonnaroo Music Festival, Manchester, Tennessee on June 21-23, 2002. Includes liner notes by Keith Spera.

The double CD set BONNAROO MUSIC FESTIVAL features live performances from Phil Lesh, Bob Weir & Friends, Widespread Panic, Govt Mule, Galactic, North Mississippi Allstars, and Norah Jones, among others.

In the spirit of peaceable camping and music festivals (excluding Woodstock 99), BONNAROO puts the rural locale of Manchester, Tennessee on the map. Thumbing its nose at trends and formula, BONNAROO celebrates the magic that is musical improvisation and the feeling of community among true fans.

The production values on this two-CD set are impeccable, and the artist roster is as diverse as it is the stuff of legend. From hip-hop mavens Jurassic 5 and alternative rockers Ween and Moe to jam-band masters including Trey Anastasio and Gov't Mule, BONNAROO has something for everyone. Fringe rockers Frog Brigade offer up a straightforward cover of Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath" while newly crowned pop-jazz queen Norah Jones croons her way through "Nightingale." Bluegrass and jazz collide with the Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer duet "Bonnaroo Traveler." With 70,000 fans in attendance for it's inaugural weekend, the Bonnaroo event is the beginning of a new legacy in music festival history.

The sheer amount of music presented over the course of the three days of the Bonnaroo Music Festival, held in Tennessee over a June weekend in 2002, was staggeringly diverse. With more than four stages, music was presented from roughly 2:00 in the afternoon to sometime after sunrise (a schedule is included in the liner notes). Though the appeal of the event was built around a number of strong-drawing jam bands (notably Widespread Panic, Phish's Trey Anastasio, String Cheese Incident, the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, moe., and the Disco Biscuits), the music looked much deeper than that and included acts such as Ween, Amon Tobin, Norah Jones, Z-Trip, Jurassic 5, and Blackalicious, among others. The resulting two-CD set, Bonnaroo: Live From the Bonnaroo Music Festival, while unfortunately giving the short end of the stick to most of the hip-hop and electronic artists on the bill, serves as a nice road map to the indie/college music scene as it was in 2002. The music is extremely accessible on the whole; stuff that 60,000 people could get behind. Despite a predilection toward jam bands, the music rarely gets too exploratory, as the producers struggle to cram 21 performers across two discs. The most interesting and original improvisation comes from Trey Anastasio's big band (performing with far more aplomb than on Anastasio's contemporary solo effort) through a ten-minute skronking freefall on "Last Tube." The disc is also peppered with a few derivative efforts, including Gov't Mule's "Banks of the Deep End" and North Mississippi Allstars' "Sugartown." But for every boring number, there are also creative original songs from the likes of moe. ("Captain America") and Ween ("Bananas and Blow"). There is a palpable energy on each and every one of the two CDs' tracks, as the performers (most of whom weren't used to performing in front of such huge crowds) are clearly jazzed to be performing in front of a sea of seething bodies. [Also available as a special limited edition version.] ~ Jesse Jarnow

Includes a 48-page full color booklet.

Recording information: 06/21/2002-06/23/2002.

This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.Rolling Stone (11/14/02, p.89) - 3 stars out of 5 - "...This two-disc survey of the Bonnaroo Festival features plenty of winning, ambling rock forays..."