Down to the River to Play, and Sing and Dance

By PHILLIP LUTZ

Published: June 11, 2010

LAST year, when Jeff Rumpf was planning the 32nd annual Great Hudson River Revival — some version of the event, widely known as the Clearwater Festival, has been held since the mid-1960s — he made what he now calls a big mistake.

Tracy Bonham will sing at the Beacon Riverfest.

“I took advice from everybody in the industry,” he said.

He was advised to market the festival like a commercial enterprise, even though its prevailing aesthetic is noncommercial and its proceeds go directly to Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a nonprofit environmental group, where Mr. Rumpf is the executive director.

“‘Why don’t you guys do Mountain Jam? Why don’t you guys be like K-Rock?’ ” he said he was told, referring to the popular festival upstate at Hunter Mountain and the New York City radio station. And in retrospect, he said, that “was not what we wanted.”

This year, the festival, which will take place June 19 and 20 at Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson, is returning to form — reasserting its identity as a musical hub for social causes, reinvigorating its world music offerings and reaching out to a new festival, Beacon Riverfest, to discuss coordinating activities next year.

“We’re going back to the good old days,” said Pete Seeger, folk-singing legend and the festival’s founder.

With seven stages to fill and the weight of history to contend with, Clearwater’s programmers have plenty on their hands just balancing musical constituencies. This year’s programming will address an imbalance that Mr. Seeger said had developed on the festival’s Dance Stage, where he felt that some of the amplified music had grown so loud that people were discouraged from dancing.

Under a new festival director, Steve Lurie, the stage has been renamed — it is now the World Dance Stage — and its programming revamped. As in earlier years, Mr. Lurie said, it will host a wide global mix, with Celtic interpretations from the Irish fiddler Eileen Ivers and the Québécois folk group Le Vent du Nord; percussion-based sounds from Bonga and the Vodou Drums of Haiti and Famoro Dioubaté’s Kakande; Balkan-flavored brass from Slavic Soul Party; and folk-inflected jazz from Folklore Urbano, which hails from Colombia by way of Tarrytown. Pablo Mayor, Urbano’s leader, said he will bring a 12-piece ensemble to the show.

Bonga and Famoro Dioubaté will also appear on the Sloop Stage, where the festival’s workshops will be consolidated. There, David Amram will do double duty — holding a workshop on world dance rhythms and appearing at a tribute to the singer and activist Odetta, who died in 2008, that will involve at least five performers, including the singer-songwriter Steve Earle. Mr. Earle will also appear on the Rainbow Stage, the biggest platform, where the singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin and the guitarist and composer David Bromberg will play.

One workshop will analyze songs that promote social causes. Mr. Seeger, 91, regularly works with Hudson Valley schoolchildren — a recent session involved changes to his classic song “If I Had a Hammer” — and some of the children are scheduled to appear with him on the Rainbow and Family Stages. His unscheduled appearances, Mr. Seeger said, may include one with Ms. Ivers. As usual, he will also lead the riverfront ceremony that closes the festival.

A week after Clearwater begins, Beacon Riverfest, a one-day event in Beacon’s Riverfront Park, will make its debut. Mr. Rumpf said he might be interested in collaborating with Riverfest and in opening discussions about sending a flotilla there next year. “Everybody who gets down to the river is a real plus for these communities, economically as well as socially,” he said.

Whether the fit would be a good one remains to be seen. While Riverfront Park is surrounded on three sides by the Hudson, Riverfest at this point has no special commitment to the river’s cleanup, said Stephen Clair, the festival’s director. Rather, he said, it is simply a rock concert — on the bill are the Fleshtones, Tracy Bonham and Yarn — and, for the moment, a free one that will generate little revenue.

Mr. Clair, whose home, like Clearwater’s headquarters, is in Beacon, has connections of sorts to Mr. Seeger, who is also a Beacon resident: Habitat for Humanity of Newburgh has hired Mr. Clair as producer of a July 3 benefit at which Mr. Seeger will appear.

Told of Mr. Rumpf’s offer, Mr. Clair said, “I’m certainly open to conversation with anyone about expanding the reach of this event, but at the same time, I want this event to have its own identity.”