Day Three: Super Flower Blood Moon
On the final afternoon of Waking Windows, spitting rain finally gives way on an otherwise beautiful weekend. The rotary stage has now been transformed into the mainstage and awaits for the festival’s final movement.
The rain shortly recoups for the start of Lily Seabird. The band touts James from Dari Bay on drums alongside Greg Freeman on lead guitar. Seabird’s vocals are reminiscent of Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker, shifting from fragile to sharp, hitting falsettos and salient lines throughout “Fire Song”. The rain gives way as Freeman provides a Meat Puppet-y solo to close out the tune.
The deluge intensifies throughout the set but the Winooski crowd couldn’t care less. The band decides to cut a few songs but elect to debut a new number “Wasted”. A similar progression to the Cranberries’ “Zombie,” the band chugs forth with the rain as Seabird sings with raw, mournful anger “She is just a ghost, He is just a ghost, She is always just behind you” before straining repetitions of “You are always on your own”.
The repetition builds and Seabird lets out a guttural scream, throwing her bleached hair forward and eventually launches her glasses across the stage. The progression sits and the crowd is rocking with the beat, a pedal is stepped on and the wall of sound becomes twice as thick. Stop and start tom hits from James walks the progression down to a haunting close, it seems “Wasted” was the perfect tune for the rainy day.
Following up Seabird is the all-female surf pop outfit, Habibi, for some groovy reprise to the Burlington angst. A few folks make their way under the cover of the Four Quarters Brewing patio to watch local jamband Avery Cooper Quartet serve up some saxophone forward numbers. An hour of stand-up then begins for all the beer-drinking patrons, and in wonderful comedic timing, the kindred laughs pull the sun back out.
Around the corner is Winooski’s Methodist Church, possibly the most impressive performance space of the festival. Sunlight pours through stained glass windows as a silent church crowd watches pianist and experimental beatmaker Kafari present one of the weekend’s most stunning performances.
Draped in red stage lights and splintered technicolors from the stained glass, the Maine-based artist wields a keyboard with one hand and a synthesizer with the other. Between each instrumental, Kafari explains the inspiration for each movement. His third number “Say Their Names” was written in the tumult of Summer 2020 after watching the Rodney King murder for the first time. In the wake of his confusion and frustration the composition came forth.
The piece begins in somber, repetitive jazz quotations, with each phrasing left unresolved. After two minutes, it hinges with an ominous chord, then joined by a sharp and clicking backing beat. The dissonances plunge from questioning to affirmative, with strong major-leaning resolutions. A clear theme condenses on the grand piano for a minute before wading back into the original lamenting melody.
No words were needed to get the message across, “Say Their Names” voiced the repetitive angst of monthly tragedies torrented over-social media, which seem to motivate great action, only to return to the same old phrasings.
A few songs later Kafari whips out the Irish bones, a clackity hand-played percussion instrument, and invites lap-steel guitarist Yasmin Williams to the altar for a dazzling duet. He preambles this performance by telling the crow “I want to teach y’all how to play these after this”.
The showman keeps his promise and invites anyone in the Church who would like to learn the bones to come and take a pair back to their pew. After explaining how to play basic couplets and triplets, the crowd eventually gets a shaky but unified rhythm. Kafari then plays an eloquent piano overture along with the crowd, keeping the delicate time which the crowd lost halfway through. The experiment ends with a clackity applause from the deputized audience. “Sorry to take away your bones but y’all sounded great” Kafari says with a chuckle.
Back at Rotary Park a ruckus crowd is packed around the stage for Low Cut Connie. During a break, the veteran frontman Adam Weiner recounts, “I did a show ten years ago at the Monkey House where the stage was bouncing!”
Weiner later announces Low Cut Connie will have a new album premiering next year. The nine-piece then debuts “Big Boy” off the new record, a punchy “Subterranean Blues”-esque party number. The roots-bluesman from Philadelphia is sweating profusely as he and his band send the rotary into utter jubilee with an animated performance.
Prior to their fan favorite “Big Thighs Nj”, Weiner reminisces about to his first time in Winooski, “Eleven years ago in some bar that ain’t here anymore, I thought ‘I need to come back to this place’- and I kept coming back, now I’m playing the big stage, so thank you for making my dreams so good!”.
Closing up day three on the precipice of a total lunar eclipse, it’s hard to knock the feeling that everything in the weekend was imbued with a little bit of serendipity.
Waking Window’s 10th anniversary was a breath of fresh air inside a festival-sphere which is often profit motivated rather than community oriented. The weekend was an incredible display of what Burlington and Winooski have to offer, scattered with many burgeoning talents. After two years of hiatus, Paddy Reagan and company truly stuck their landing.
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