An Arts and Ideas tip: For the final two weekends when there are shows on New Haven Green, show up early for the sound checks.
Last year the Kronos Quartet’s special guest performer, Wu Man, needed to break in a new pipa, as hers had been damaged by the airline that flew her to New Haven. So Kronos and Wu Man did virtually their entire concert, to a crowd of dozens in the early afternoon, just hours before they did the same set for thousands in the exact same location.
On Sunday, Dan Zanes was booked for two shows on the Green, and ended up doing two and a half. His first scheduled performance was at 3 p.m. in the Family Tent on the Chapel Street side of the lower Green. But he was there a couple of hours earlier, with some of his band, for a sound check. That sound check was a solid 20-minute set — full songs, long solos, between-song patter, even an audience singalong. Zanes played to the crowd, many of whom were children working on model buildings for Arts & Ideas’ annual Box City municipal-zoning activity. (Box City is a lot more fun than it sounds. The young real estate developers are given cardboard boxes to turn into buildings of their own design and purpose, then apply for zoning permits so they can add them to Box City and keep, say, their pet store away from someone else’s pet store.)
“How does it sound out there?” Zanes — the erstwhile Del Fuego and supreme kiddy-folk artist — asked the assembled Box Citizens. “Does it sound like music? Does it make you happy?”
Zanes’ full set later in the afternoon was an intimate, laid back, low-key delight, with a small combo and lots of singing along. Dan Zanes & Friends were followed on the Family Stage by more friends — Moona Luna, the especially family-friendly side project of the New York Latin pop combo Pistolera. Where Pistolera sings only in Spanish, Moona Luna is bilingual, with verses in both English and Spanish. While Pistolera has more of a folk sound, Moona Luna enjoys the simple rhythms and strums of early rock & roll, a genre the band explored on its second album, Vamos Let’s Go.
Just a few hours later, across the Green on the main Arts and Ideas bandstand, Dan Zanes and his band, then Pistolera, did full sets, and also combined for a few songs. It was assumed that, since both acts had played the Family Stage earlier and since it was billed as Pistolera and not Moona Luna, that the evening show would be more “grown up.” Which was sort of the case, since there was some rather complex full-band arrangements and even a lot of Zanes’ kid-friendly material is really universal folk music, not simplified for kids. (A good example is Zanes’ brilliant arrangement of Pete Seeger’s “All Around the Kitchen,” which incorporates layered beats, bursts into jump-swing kick-offs to the chorus, and delivers the spoken-word commands such as “Stop right there! Put your hands in the air!” in poetry-slamesque cadences.)
Yet when Zanes sensed the energy in the crowd dipping, he went straight to kid-game mode. First there was a train — some bands would call it a conga line, but to Zanes it’s a train — with hundreds of people lining up and chugging around the Green. A few songs later came the tunnel. Zanes asked “anyone over five feet tall” to join hands across the main Green path near the stage and form a tunnel. Then the smaller people were asked to duck down and pass through it. It soon became a massive round of “London Bridge is Falling Down,” with Zanes and his band stopping and starting the music so the tunnel could rise and fall.
Oh, and he invited some kids from a local mariachi academy, who’d done a few songs and dances before Zanes’ show began, back upstage to boogie down to a frantic version of the old folk tune “Down in the Valley (Rise Sally Rise).”
The Darlene Love set on the Green just 24 hours earlier was upbeat and fun and summery and ‘50s-girl-group groovy (especially that wide-ranging Marvin Gaye medley), but this was something else.
Zanes did songs with his own band, brought on several members of Pistolera (whom he gushed over in some eloquent spoken introductions), and then yielded the stage to Pistolera entirely. Zanes headed over to the Arts and Ideas info booth to sign autographs and chat with fans.
This was the third International Festival of Arts and Ideas that Dan Zanes has appeared at. The first was a ticketed event at the Shubert around the time that his album Catch That Train came out; he wandered the Green before the concert and ended up bringing a horde of children to the theater with him.
“It’s like he was the Pied Piper,” recalls festival director Mary Lou Aleskie. “He brought them into the Shubert and said ‘the festival said I could do this.’” When Zanes returned to the festival a few years later for a mainstage show on New Haven Green shortly after the release of his showtunes-for-kids album, the fest arranged a “76 Trombones”-inspired procession of local brass players as part of the concert. That went pretty well, but when Zanes took to the stage, he was dismayed to see the metal barriers that partitioned off the special seating section for VIP patrons. He insisted the barriers be moved so that folks, especially the youngest ones, could dance in front of the stage.
This year was the best of all possible Zanes: approachable, in great form, and in several different formats.
Dan Zanes is the consummate International Festival of Arts and Ideas performer. He understands the festival’s deft blend of authority and unpredictability, art and entertainment. He cares about musicianship but isn’t vain or needy about it. For all ages, for multiple cultures, in a tent or on a big stage, he makes sure everybody has a good time.
