BottleRock had some amazing emerging artists play, but besides going through all 70 or so performers before the festival on Spotify, there wasn’t any easy way to find what performance to go to next. Discovering new artists is a problem I see at all festivals, but I think there is a solution – something I briefly go over in my 2019 SXSW recap.
Unfortunately, I was only able to listen to half of the performers before BottleRock, and of course, by the time I got around to listen to the other half, I missed my top discovery, Watchhouse (but Jessie Reyez was an excellent alternative).
I may have missed half the musicians I wanted to see at BottleRock, but Jon Batiste wasn’t one of them. And what a set to remember! I didn’t realize Batiste was the voice and part of the production behind the music of Pixar’s Soul, along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, but he sounded so familiar on stage that day and on Spotify a few hours before it.
I recently heard Dave Chappelle talk about Robin Williams’s standup performance. How he remembered the audience’s reactions to the standup more than what Robin said himself. That’s stuck with me over the past few months and has popped up in different forms, most recently at Jon Batiste’s charismatic performance at BottleRock this year. There’s nothing like a day party with live Soul music, especially one with a crowd like that.
BottleRock has been my first festival since the pandemic hit. One of my last music festivals, before it hit, was SXSW 2019, where I first discovered Black Pumas. It’s fascinating to see where their trajectory has put them. On the main stage at BottleRock, so I couldn’t get any decent footage. Here’s a clip from SXSW.
