The trees are yellow, the grass is blue

Fall in the Colorado Rockies is hard to beat. Fewer tourists, the turning of the colors, the free fall music festivals. 

Free? Wait, did you read that right?

For the second year in a row, the city of Vail is hosting a Free Fall Bluegrass Festival Friday through Sunday. 

This year’s event features some of the biggest names in the bluegrass and jamgrass worlds — the Sam Bush Band and mandolin player/lead singer Paul Hoffman from Greensky Bluegrass will headline Saturday’s offerings while Chris Pandolphi and Andy Hall from the Infamous Stringdusters and Billy Nershi from String Cheese Incident will be performing Sunday. Music runs from noon to 7:30 p.m. on both days. 

Specifically on Saturday, Hoffman takes the stage at 4 p.m. and Sam Bush plays at 6 p.m. Sunday’s music starts at 2 p.m. with a special performance by Nikki Bluhm, who is not necessarily a bluegrass performer; she is, however, an accomplished front woman who has played with her own band The Gramblers and in many different Grateful Dead next-generation configurations, particularly with Phil Lesh. Bluhm will be followed at 4 p.m. by the Andy Hall, Billy Nershi and Eric Thorlin Trio. The festival closes out with the Terrapin Family Band featuring Pandolfi and Bluhm (and likely some special guests). 

There are three stages — the Solaris Stage, the International Bridge Stage and the Gore Creek Plaza Stage, all located in Vail Village. The Free Fall Bluegrass Festival is the brainchild of Diane Moudy of Resort Entertainment. 

“We wanted to create an event for the offseason that would help bring some business to the Vail Valley,” Moody said. “We also really wanted to put together a family friendly music event for all the families. It’s expensive to take a family to a music festival or pay for child care so the parents have to go on their own so we brought in the rock n’ roll playhouse.”

The playhouse, from 11 a.m. to noon both Saturday and Sunday, is designed to kick off the festivities. An entire street is blocked off with a stage and activities for children. The music there will consist of the Grateful Dead on Saturday and Bob Marley on Sunday.

Think of it as a kid-friendly environment where parents get to enjoy the music they love while their children enjoy supervised play. There are bounce houses, games and instruments for youths to enjoy. Following the playhouse hour, a “kids zone” with more bounce houses and activities for children will run throughout the day.

The concept of the rock ’n’ roll playhouse at a music festival is the brainchild of concert impresario Peter Shapiro who promoted “Fare Thee Well,” the first of several farewell tours of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. “Fare Thee Well” shows were held in Santa Clara, California and Chicago in 2015. Shapiro is widely regarded as the greatest promoter of his generation.

The Free Fall Bluegrass Festival has a spring counterpart.  Both festivals are anchored in bluegrass and jamgrass, which is an offshoot of bluegrass that emerged from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 1990 when the Salmon Heads and the Left Hand String Band merged and became Leftover Salmon. A new style of music was born. 

Jamgrass is rooted in bluegrass. It’s predominantly upbeat and danceable, highly improvisational and contains myriad musical flavors from ska to funk to reggae and more. The bands predominantly play two sets and an encore and mix up the sets every night. 

Friday headliner Sam Bush was a member of the New Grass Revival, the original progenitors of jamgrass — they are to jamgrass what the Grateful Dead is to jambands. 

New Grass Revival formed in 1971. In 1972, this group of bluegrass-playing hippies began showing up at bluegrass festivals, much to the chagrin of traditional bluegrass musicians and to the delight of long-haired enthusiasts excited to shake the genre up. New Grass Revival brought elements of rock, jazz and other elements, with an emphasis on improvisation, marking the birth of jamgrass.

New Grass Revival was composed of Bush on mandolin, Curtis Burch on guitar and dobro, Courtney Johnson on banjo and Ebo Walker on bass. Walker was soon replaced by John Cowan on bass and Pat Flyy would take over for Burch. 

“There were already people that had deviated from Bill Monroe’s style of bluegrass,” Bush says on his website. “If anything, we were reviving a newgrass style that had already been started. Our kind of music tended to come from the idea of long jams and rock ’n’ roll songs.”

New Grass Revival reached a wider audience when Leon Russell took them out as his backup band on a nationwide tour in 1973. The Telluride Bluegrass Festival was created as a way to bring New Grass Revival to Telluride in 1975 and the band was the centerpiece of the festival until they disbanded in 1989. Bush has played every festival since and was crowned the “King of Telluride” in 1991. 

New Grass Revival played its last show warming up for the Grateful Dead at the Dead’s 1989-90 New Year’s show. Bush played with Emmylou Harris for the next several years as part of her backing band, the Nash Ramblers. He then formed the Sam Bush Band and has toured relentlessly and over the last 30 years, releasing seven albums and a live DVD.

Bush is universally regarded as the father of jamgrass music. The Americana Music Association awarded Bush the Lifetime Achievement Award as an instrumentalist and he was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame as a member of New Grass Revival in 2020. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame a second time in 2023 as a solo artist.

“With this band I have now I am free to try anything,” Bush said. “Looking back at the last 50 years of playing newgrass, with the elements of jazz improvisation and rock ’n’ roll, jamming, playing with New Grass Revival, Leon and Emmylou; it’s a culmination of all of that. I can unapologetically stand onstage and feel I’m representing those songs well.”

Hoffman likes to tell the story of how he once took a fanboy picture of himself and Sam Bush at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. The two are now dear friends and Bush plays with Greensky at the Telluride every year. There is certain to be some cross-pollination this weekend in Vail.

Greensky formed in 2000. The group came to Telluride for the band contest in 2006 but were told they signed up too late and could not perform. Heartbroken, they decided to stay and watch the festival anyway as fans. As fate would have it, another band canceled and Greensky got a chance at the contest and won. 

With the win came a slot on the main stage in 2007 and Greensky has set up a permanent residence ever since. Greensky went on to be the only band to ever win the band competition and then headline a night of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. 

Greensky makes use of traditional bluegrass instrumentation: mandolin (Hoffman), acoustic guitar (Bruzza), banjo (Michael Arlen Bont), upright bass (Mike Devol) and dobro (Beck). From that traditional starting point, Greensky takes the genre to places that Bill Monroe could never have imagined.

Pandolphi and Andy Hall play guitar and dobro in The Infamous Stringdusters respectively. The two have formed the nucleus of their side project, The Bluegrass Generals, for the last several years in which they team up with other all-star players. The Dusters, as they are known, are a five-piece group that was formed in 2006 in Nashville. They immediately made an impact with a five-song extended play CD, which was followed by their heralded first record, “Fork in the Road.” The band won a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2018 for their album “Laws of Gravity.”

Finally, Billy Nershi is a founding member of String Cheese Incident. The band came together in Crested Butte 1993, but Nershi had lived in Telluride for years and he convinced his bandmates to move there as the town had a more prolific music scene and hosted the bluegrass festival. That move paid off in spades when festival promoter Craig Ferguson tapped “Cheese,” as they are known, to open the festival in 1994, one year after they formed. 

String Cheese has built a massive following, sustaining national tours and multiple night runs at Red Rocks.

While Aspen and Vail are competing resorts, Moudy commented on the high interest in the Vail event throughout the region.

“There are plenty of Vail folks who go to Aspen for Belly Up shows and Jazz Aspen Snowmass and we get quite a few Aspen folks who come to our Gerald Ford Amphitheater shows in the summertime. When it comes to music, we’re all one family.”

For more information on the festival, visit freefallbluegrassfest.com.