Borderland 2024: Well, that was epic!
The Black Crowes, Caamp, Marcus King, DSO, Cory Wong, and a cast of thousands conspire to create high watermark for annual festival
“Well, that was epic.”
I woke up to a text from a friend on Monday morning, still a bit pleasantly bleary-eyed from three days of outstanding music, positive vibes, and beautiful weather in Knox Farm State Park, where the 2024 edition of the Borderland Music & Art Festival turned a 633-acre former horse farm in East Aurora into a bucolic Garden of Eden for the weekend.
I admired my friend’s brevity, and the way she distilled the experience down to a single word. That this friend happened to be Borderland President and Co-founder Jennifer Brazill underscored the impact of that single word. Epic, indeed.
Friday’s bill was topped by the Black Crowes, Saturday’s by Caamp, and Sunday’s by Marcus King, but the headliners only tell part of the Borderland story.
Across twin stages separated by the Knox Farm stables, the music never stopped, from indie folk songwriter Evan Jennison’s 3 p.m. kickoff on the Homespun stage on Friday, through the Dark Star Orchestra’s inspired recreation of the Grateful Dead’s legendary 5/9/77 Buffalo show on the MainStage Sunday evening.
In between, we were treated to a heady mix of Americana, southern soul, hard funk, bluegrass, folk, New Orleans grooves, reggae, blues, rock, jam band stylings, and r&b. Rather incredibly, despite the deep diversity of the lineup, conceptual continuity ran throughout, so that all of these performances contributed to the seamless nature of the festival. It was as if a serious music-lover with a broad array of musical interests had curated a festival-length playlist for like-minded music-heads. Which is, in essence, exactly what happens every year at Borderland.
Friday’s roster offered a visceral case-in-point, as the MainStage resounded with the awesomely 70s-centric retro-rock of the Sheepdogs, the fiery, psychedelicized Americana of Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country, the searing, jaw-droppingly virtuosic funk of Cory Wong and his band, and the gloriously swanky sway and rumble of the Black Crowes. The consecutive sets commingled to create a 5-hour block of powerful, diverse, and incredibly well-played music.
And that was just day one.
It should be noted that a big part of the Borderland ethos is the idea of arriving with an open mind, and allowing yourself to be turned on to bands and artists you might’ve been unfamiliar with when you first walked through the gates.
This appeared to be the case with Cory Wong’s set, which left many among the densely packed crowd near the front of the stage visibly awestruck by the sheer drop-dead funkiness of the collective’s deep grooves and nigh-on-telepathic interplay. As Borderland wound down on Sunday, I casually polled crowd members (some old friends, some brand new ones) on their personal peak moments from the weekend. All of them mentioned Wong, the majority of them admitting that they’d either never heard of him previously, or had only a passing knowledge of the man through his work with Vulfpeck and the Fearless Flyers. Now, they all looked forward to seeing him again somewhere down the line.
That’s some Borderland magic at work, right there.
Equally significant in the Borderland experience is the concept of community. Spend three days in the blazingly beautiful sun listening to uniformly stellar music with multiple thousands of people, and you’ll feel some sense of togetherness, of a collective journey based on (at least some) shared values. Borderland’s emphasis on sustainability, healthy food options, free, clean water, sobriety support (the Borderland Sober Space, presented by The Phoenix National Sober Active Community and the Divided Sky Foundation Residential Recovery Program, co-founded by Trey Anastasio of Phish), and a general vibe of peaceful togetherness made this sense of community a tangible one.
Perhaps this conjures an image of blissed-out hippies hugging each other and yelling ‘I love you, man’ into the ear of someone they barely know. I hope it does. Because that was the vibe, all weekend long, hippy cliches notwithstanding. Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands? Yeah. I’ll have some of that, with gratitude.
Borderland drew a broad demographic to Knox Farm - young families grooved right next to grizzled middle-aged rock guys (ahem), and 20-somethings got giddy with Caamp right alongside 70-somethings.
Speaking of Caamp, the band’s only Northeast date of the summer brought the largest crowd in Borderland’s six-year history to the MainStage on Saturday evening for an incredibly well-received set. Interest in Caamp’s Saturday night closer was stoked by an appearance on the Homespun stage on Friday by the band’s Taylor Meier, who fronted side project Sumbuck before a rapt audience.
In fact, the action on the Homespun stage occupied much of my Saturday, particularly a block of bands comprised of musicians with ties to Western New York.
Uncle Ben’s Remedy brought a rowdy, rough-and-tumble Americana vibe to their mid-afternoon set, and the large crowd swallowed the band’s often hilarious and always hook-heavy tales of boozy misdeeds and love-gone-wrong whole. They danced, they hollered, and they generally looked more than happy to be alive, occupying this particular moment in time with this particular music as a soundtrack.
Handsome Jack brought an eminent soulfulness, tempered by a visceral garage-rock vibe, to their set, all vintage instruments and face-smacking grooves, and again, the crowd - many of whom I later learned were experiencing the band for the first time - turned the grove surrounding the Homespun stage into a dance party.
The Borderland Dead Allstars - featuring Dave Ruch, Corey Kertzie and Joe Bellanti of Organ Fairchild, joined by bassist Eric Wise and guitarist/vocalist Aaron Ziolkowski - rather effortlessly crafted one of Saturday’s most enjoyable sets, bringing organ trio vibes to bear on some of the most inspired ensemble improvisations - jams, is essentially what I’m saying - I heard all Borderland weekend long.
Similarly, on Friday, Big Martha offered an elegant and virtuosic set of Allman Brothers Band favorites on the Homespun stage, and Eggy wrapped up that evening’s Homespun roster with a set that more than validated the New Haven band’s rapidly exploding reputation on what we might loosely refer to as the ‘jam band scene.’ (Could Eggy be this year’s Goose? Seems plausible to me.)
Sunday’s Homespun activity was marked by an outstanding tribute to the late, great songwriter John Prine from Folkfaces, whose members treated the sacred material with reverence, but also brought their own sensibilities to bear on the music. Later, New Orleans funk/soul masters the Rumble - fronted by Chief Joseph Boudreaux, Jr., and presented by The Big Easy in Buffalo - tore it up in the mid-day heat. The band looked as surprised and delighted as we were when Marcus King (and his faithful, headphone-clad Labrador) hopped onto the stage for a jam offering a fiery blend of southern blues and second line strut.
Day three of Homespun activity kicked off at the rather ungodly hour of 11:30 a.m. with the Buffalo Music Club/Sportsmen’s Americana Music Foundation’s Borderland Band Camp, which found a team of professional musical mentors (Damone Jackson, Eric Crittenden, David Cloyd, Alex Overton, Jakob Jay and myself) leading a band of high school-age musicians through a set of their own design. Despite the early hour, the Borderland faithful showed up, and made the young musicians feel validated for the hard work they’d put into the camp.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that day three of such an intense festival would be a bit of a denouement, or at least somewhat of a chill-down. But you’d be wrong. The MainStage burned hard and hot all day long, with Buffalo’s own Johnny Hart & the Mess making their Borderland debut, followed by true reggae royalty in the form of the Wailers, featuring the formidable bass playing of Aston Barrett, Jr., son of original Wailers bassist Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett. The band’s wisely curated setlist of Bob Marley gems fit perfectly with the vibe of Borderland, and its emphasis on positivity, mutual respect, and, well, one love. Beautiful.
There’d been a buzz about Marcus King’s impending Sunday evening headlining set all weekend long, and the South Carolina-born singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist did not disappoint. King’s soulful blues/rock guitar playing may have been what first earned him his reputation, and he did indeed deliver plenty of it at Borderland, but in truth, the soulful subtlety of King’s singing and the nuance in his broad interpretation of Americana-based songwriting were equally as impressive. (Also, the man brings his dog on tour with him. How can I help but love him?)
Although King was technically Sunday’s headliner, Borderland was far from over when he left the stage. Booking Dark Star Orchestra to perform the Grateful Dead’s career-defining 5/9/77 Buffalo Memorial Auditorium concert was a masterstroke by Jennifer Brazill and her team, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, DSO absolutely crushed it, adding their own improvisational flair to this timeless music, while simultaneously honoring the evergreen compositional structures of these songs. (The opening ‘Help On the Way/Slipknot/Franklin’s Tower’ was worth the price of Sunday’s admission alone.)
Watching Borderland grow and evolve over the past six years has been both a thrill and an honor. Brazill and her team have worked tirelessly to bring a world-class music festival to the back yard of Western New Yorkers, and in the process, have created a new template for what a consciously curated, beautifully produced and elegantly presented music festival can be. While we’re counting down the day’s ‘till next year’s festival, we should also count our blessings. Life here is better because of Borderland.
Yes. It was, in a word, epic.
The whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts.
Fantastic Review.