Mark Reveley expects big things at the 15th annual Gem & Jam Festival.
As Dirtwire, he, David Satori and Evan Fraser are bringing new music and video elements to the Pima County Fairground. The festival runs Friday, Feb. 3, to Sunday, Feb. 5, with Dirtwire hitting the stage Sunday, Feb. 5, just before friends, The String Cheese Incident.
“We’re going to have some improv, just mixing it up,” Reveley said.
Dirtwire blends traditional instrumentation with modern technology, which they call a mix of ethnomusicology and the psychedelic trance state.
The sound is informed by Dirtwire’s travels and performances around the globe. From the favelas in Brazil, Femi Kuti’s Shrine in Lagos, Tokyo’s bluegrass clubs, Ayahuasca ceremonies in Central America, Gamelan performances in Bali, desert festivals in the Australian Outback, and the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s modernized new capital Astana, the band spreads its message by building bridges across musical cultures.
The trio plays an array of instruments ancient and modern, including West African kamale ngonis, jaw harps, space fiddles, whamola basses, Rickenbacker electric 12-string guitars, bowed banjos and mouth harps from around the globe, all interwoven into modern laptop beat creation.
Dirtwire considers itself at the forefront of experimental electronic music production mixing in their wide array of world instruments with sampled beats and 808s.
The crisscrossing genres attracts a variety of folks to their shows, Fraser said.
“That’s been cool,” he said. “Sometimes there will be a kid in the audience and I wonder how they got in there. I’m glad they’re in the front row enjoying it, don’t get me wrong.
“Their mom must have figured out how to get him in there. We’re drawing so much on music from my parents’ generation—old blues stuff. Mark’s done cool music research into delta blues and that stuff comes out in our production. Genre-wise, we’re all over the map—same with different eras. That’s definitely part of the fun. We love showing how the music is made and the instruments we’re using. There are a lot of interesting instruments we’ve collected. We have to figure out how to travel with them.”
The three musicians met at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where they studied world music in various forms.
“We were exposed to the core elements of the band — electronic music, blues, country and world music,” he said. “We mashed those up at an early point and kept working together in various guises in different bands and learned how to combine those three things.”
Reveley said he feels the band is very influenced by the Southwest in a lot of ways.
“We grew up on the west coast,” he said. “For us, in some ways, the west represents the frontier for a lot of people. The southwest represents the frontier to us. I’m from the northwest. It’s (the southwest) an exotic part of our own backyard. It’s been a lot of fun for us to discover it and make connections there.”
The songwriting process is simple. They start with a beat, lyric or riff and expand on that, according to Fraser.
“We have a loop that gets it started and we start adding things to support that idea,” he said. “We pass it back and forth. It unfolds as we follow our inspiration.”
Gem & Jam
WHEN: Various times Friday, Feb. 3, to Sunday, Feb. 5
WHERE: Pima County Fairgrounds, 11300 S. Houghton Road, Tucson
COST: Tickets start at $75
INFO: gemandjamfestival.com
