“Bumbershoot” was (is?) an
annual festival held at Seattle
Center
The notion for Bumbershoot was
pretty much hatched by Anne Focke — an arts administrator for the City of
Seattle — as a morale builder during the “Last
Person Out of Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights” days of the late 60s as
the City Arts Festival. By 1971 it had
evolved into Bumbershoot, a goofy, volunteer-powered, community event with free
admission (later low cost admission) that featured mostly local music in a wide
variety of styles, an extensive visual arts exhibition, and a steady stream of impromptu
performances. Each day of the festival
there was at least one ad hoc parade of some kind, often accompanied by a lusty
if inept brass band.
“The Big Naso” was leading one
such parade.
So Bumbershoot remained for
perhaps thirty years. A combination of
volunteer burnout, declining individual donations and reduced support from the
city during the recent recession precipitated a search for a sugar daddy to pay
the bills. Enter AEG, a national
promoter of music festivals, who contracted with the city and One Reel but took
over booking and management of the event.
Over the next several years, AEG
morphed Bumbershoot into a high-priced, high-intensity, headliner-driven, music
festival that eliminated or downsized areas for dancing, squeezed out most of
the visual art, seriously restricted pop-up performances, buskers, and prohibited
cameras with interchangeable lenses, ostensibly because the headliners “don’t
permit photography during their performances.”
Three years ago I was denied
admission even with a paid daily pass because of my vintage Canon SLR. (Hmmm, how do the modern pancake 20 megapixel
digital cameras with ISO 10,000 and 20:1 zoom lenses fit into this picture?)
I haven’t even bothered to go
since then — long lines of
people waiting to get into the headline venues (all staring at their smart
phones) don’t seem like good photograph fodder to me.
The tide may have turned once
again. AEG, noting a precipitate drop in
patronage and a national overabundance of headliner festivals, declined to
renew their contract with the local One Reel organization and the city after
the 2019 event — crowds were
less than 50% of expected.
My opinion: good!
One Reel took over once more as
the festival organizer and says: “While
the details won’t be announced until early next year, we can tell you this:
Everyone at One Reel is excited to usher in a new era for Bumbershoot that
embraces the festival’s long legacy of multi- generational programming and
community participation. We are
currently working with the City of Seattle and Seattle Center
My opinion: hooray!
Best of luck to One Reel, the
city and a small army of volunteers. This
will be the 50th Bumbershoot and all of us ol’ timers are holding
our breath.
My cameras still work.
