Since 2009, I’ve been the Executive Producer and driving force behind the Drum Boogie Festival, a free, fun, daylong music festival. The fifth biennial Drum Boogie Festival was held in Woodstock, NY on Saturday, Sept. 9th, 2017. Several thousand people enjoyed a great day of music as eleven renowned acts, many of them GRAMMY® Award-winners, performed international styles of percussion and dance.
Prana performs with members of NEXUS, Russell Hartenberger and Garry Kvistad, during the opening ceremony
This year, the festival opened with a performance by throat singers from the local group Prana, and members of the GRAMMY® Award-winning percussion quartet NEXUS.
The Drum Boogie Festival is my brainchild and was spurred by numerous conversations with New York State Assembly member Kevin Cahill over a span of several years. After much encouragement from Cahill and a generous grant from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, I created a one-day event presenting performers of world drumming in many distinct forms: jazz, contemporary, ragtime, Caribbean, steel pan, Eastern, reggae and African styles.
Northeast Ghana All-Stars performing traditional African music alongside percussionist Ben Paulding
In addition to the performers, this year’s festival included several notable guests from both the music industry and the Woodstock area, who introduced the acts and heightened the crowd’s excitement. Presenters included Kevin Cahill, Tim Moore, Jack DeJohnette, Martha Frankel, Julian Lines, Dan Leader, Baird Hersey, Leslie Gerber and me.
Check out the past 2015 performances, which include many groups for the 2017 festival!
There will be a variety of food trucks on site.
Reggae Boy Café
And Art Stands
Xanadu Fine Minerals
Bring a lawn chair or blanket and stay for the day.
Drum Boogie Festival 2017!
A Free World-Class Music Festival with Dance, Voice, Food and Family Fun!
11 AM - 8 PM
Saturday, September 9, 2017
Andy Lee Field - Woodstock, N.Y.
Drum Boogie Festival 2017 Schedule
Click to enlarge
Drum Boogie Festival® is a free, one-day, family-oriented, multi-cultural arts and educational event, celebrating and promoting the many styles of high quality percussion music found throughout the world. The festival strives to keep a balance of entertainment, enlightenment, excitement and equality. All performances will highlight percussion instruments and percussion performers while sometimes including other instrumentalists, dancers and singers. Garry Kvistad, founder and CEO of Woodstock Chimes®, is a professional musician and creator / Executive Director of the Drum Boogie Festival..
“Garry has created a unique festival that celebrates the art of percussion from the world, it has been great fun to participate in it and I really enjoy seeing, hearing and meeting such a diversity of major talent from all over. I consider it to be very successful and look forward its ongoing cultural contribution to the richness of the Town of Woodstock and the Hudson Valley.” - Jack DeJohnette, GRAMMY® Award-Winning Jazz Musician
DRUM BOOGIE 2015 WAS A HUGE SUCCESS!
Photo by Joan Mack
Thousands of people enjoyed the full day of free performances of great music from around the world. Thanks to all the performers, crew and volunteers for their talent, intense commitment and hard work. One of the festival sponsors, Bread Alone, catered the green room for the performers and volunteers. Their culinary artistry goes beyond tasting great, it looks great too. They baked a Drum Boogie cake, and we ate it too! Check back often for video clips, photos and comments about the festival.
Thanks to all.
Garry and Diane Kvistad
Drum Boogie Festival Returns to Woodstock!
A Free World-Class Music Festival with Dance, Voice, Food & Family Fun!
Saturday, September 12, 2015 (rain 9/13)
11 AM - 8 PM
Andy Lee Field - Woodstock, NY
Drum Boogie Festival® is a free, one-day, family-oriented, multi-cultural arts and educational event, celebrating and promoting the many styles of high quality percussion music found throughout the world. The festival strives to keep a balance of entertainment, enlightenment, excitement and equality. All performances will highlight percussion instruments and percussion performers while sometimes including other instrumentalists, dancers and singers. Garry Kvistad, founder and CEO of Woodstock Chimes®, is a professional musician and creator / Executive Director of the Drum Boogie Festival..
Drum Boogie Festival 2015 Schedule
Food Trucks
Pippy’s Hot Dog Truck serves gourmet hot dogs, veggie dogs, bratwurst, homemade salads, and pure cane sugar beverages, locally sourced and lovingly prepared.pippyshotdogtruck.comfacebook.com/pippys.hotdogtruck
Featuring an assortment of cupcakes and cookies:
-Hippie Chippers - Chocolate chip cookies
-Amazin’ Oatmeal Raisin cookies
-The Food Network winning chocolate cupcake
- The Vanilla Tie-Dye Cupcake
- The Blood Sweat and Tears - a peanut butter swirl brownie with double fudge frosting woodstockcupcakes.com
We are a Tropical style shaved ice truck. We have over 50 awesome flavors! The Top 10 flavors are on the outside of the truck at the “FlavorWave”, where you can flavor your own Kona Ice!
Our product has NO high fructose corn syrup, it’s gluten-free, soy-free, corn-free, nut-free and dairy/lactose/casein-free. We also offer sugar free flavors. facebook.com/KonaIceMidHudsonValleyNorth
Serious BBQ - everything made from scratch! All meats are smoked in-house with Hickory wood. Updated versions of classic southern sides and irresistible home-style desserts - all homemade, using incredible fruits and vegetables from local farmers. See menu. cueshack.com
Serving Fresh, Organic, Vegan and Soy-Free! Plant Based Deliciousness with Gluten Free Options!
Featuring:
Farm Fresh Corn on the Cob
Rock City Spinach Poppers
Drum Boogie Spinach Pies
Organic Hummus & Warm Pita
Coney Island Potato Knish
And our ‘Taste of Woodstock’ Award Winning ‘Veggie Burger Sliders’
Beverages:
Ice Cold Organic Mango Lemonade
Sicilian Espressofacebook.com/TheGreenPalateGrill
Lucky Noodles serves fresh Ramen Noodles in rich “made from scratch” authentic Asian broths, topped with herbs, vegetables and condiments.
Distinctive menu featuring local, organic, seasonal and sustain ably grown ingredients.
We are an artisan ice cream soda fountain making everything from scratch here in our kitchen using only natural products and whole foods.
Art Stands
fiberflame invites you to try your hand at all-natural indigo dyeing! Learn to wrap, twist and fold fabric, then dip into our vat of indigo, and experience the magic of this ancient plant-based dye! Festival attendees, young and old, are encouraged to drop into fiberflame’s booth throughout the day and join the fun!Fee: $10 to dye a t-shirt or cotton tote bag (all materials included)Fiberflame is a walk-in, mixed-media art studio with two locations in the Hudson Valley. The studio is open daily for walk-in projects, parties, workshops and more! Find out more at fiberflamestudio.com and come play!
CHBO Drums, started by drummer, designer and studio builder Chris Bowman, focuses on drums for the discerning player. We offer our own line of new professional drums, percussion instruments and sticks, a large selection of refurbished vintage instruments and an extensive cymbal and gong collection. chbodrums.com
“Garry has created a unique festival that celebrates the art of percussion from the world, it has been great fun to participate in it and I really enjoy seeing, hearing and meeting such a diversity of major talent from all over. I consider it to be very successful and look forward its ongoing cultural contribution to the richness of the Town of Woodstock and the Hudson Valley.” - Jack DeJohnette, GRAMMY® Award-Winning Jazz Musician
Drum Boogie Festival 2013 Highlights
DRUM BOOGIE 2013 comes to Woodstock, NY
DRUM BOOGIE 2013 is a Booming Success, Again!
I don’t have to tell anyone who attended the festival this time what a complete gas it was. Many thousands of people showed up for a picture perfect day of amazing performances, food and fun. The day started in the artist’s cemetery in Woodstock, NY for a memorial tribute to the late great xylophonist / composer George Hamilton Green. Green family members attended along with a large crowd of G.H. Green fans. From the opening ceremony of Jack DeJohnette reading a poem of peace with improvised accompaniment to the closing act of Levon Helm Studio’s Midnight Ramble Band kicking off their set with Gene Krupa’s 1941 Drum Boogie tune, we were all captivated and moved by an enormous variety and super high quality of music, dance and song. Return to our site often and be sure to “Like Us” on Facebook to see the photos and videos as they become available. Thanks go out to all our performers, sponsors, food vendors, staff and volunteers (all listed on this site)!
Garry Kvistad
Executive Producer
Drum Boogie Festival
Check out Ulster Magazine’s video on The Power of Drumming
It features several musicians who will perform at DBF on 9/7, including:
Garry Kvistad (Woodstock Chimes, NEXUS), Karl Berger (Creative Music Studio), Harvey Sorgen (Paul Simon, Hot Tuna), Nick Attanasio (Great American Fife and Drum Band), Justin Guip (Dirt Farmer Band, Midnight Ramble Band), Evry Mann, Gopal Harrington and Malik Andrews (POOK)
Drum Boogie Festival 2013 Preview Video
2012 - Fabulous Drum Boogie In Woodstock, NY
The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild presented the first ever Byrdcliffe Festival of the Arts in Woodstock, NY (Colony of the Arts) from Friday, July 13th to Sunday, July 15th. The Drum Boogie Festival was one of nine Festival Presenting Partners that Byrdcliffe joined creative forces with. The schedule was jam-packed with a diverse selection of artistically rich presentations: story-telling (the spoken and written word), film, dance, music (and the sung word).
On Saturday, the DRUM BOOGIE FESTIVAL® offered a concert called “Garry and Friends,” which was a mini-version of our biennial, all-day-long DRUM BOOGIE FESTIVAL. The “Garry and Friends” concert exemplified the Drum Boogie theme, it was definitely -A Celebration of World Drums and Drummers- with performances in the first set by: Matoaka Little Eagle and Powhatan Swift Eagle, Valerie Naranjo and Barry Olsen, POOK and Evry Mann and the Energy Dance Company, and in the second set by: NEXUS members yours truly and Russell Hartenberger with guest Chris Earley. The audience participated in numerous ways: clapping, singing, toe-tapping – heads were bopping and I saw a few jaws drop in amazement too. The audience was turned on and responded wildly to the eclectic mix of world-class drummers and dancers. The instruments were acoustic but the feeling in the Byrdcliffe Barn was electric. In fact, I built a set of three acoustic instruments for the Steve Reich piece we did, Mallet Phase. The three instruments, tuned in the ancient system of ‘just intonation’, were a large African style xylophone, a very large metallophone made of Woodstock Chimes tubes and a cool sounding instrument made of resonators on which the openings are “slapped” with flip-flop like mallets.
On Sunday, the DRUM BOOGIE FESTIVAL offered a workshop for children ages 5-12 led by musician and music educator Dave Laks. The workshop called, “Open Ears” taught participants how to build an instrument –in this case a tambourine with a personal story or design depicted on the drum head! Dave paced his workshop with the seasoned wisdom of an educator; there were periods of concentration mixed with break-out sessions of participation and movement. The great selections of music that accompanied his lesson helped focus and energize the participants accordingly. Each child was accompanied by a parent, friend or guardian -they seemed to enjoy the workshop as much as their young attendee.
We’re happy that the Woodstock Chimes Fund produced the Drum Boogie Festival element of the Byrdcliffe Festival of the Arts event. All in all we had a great time and we feel this ‘festival of festivals’ ignited anticipation for our next all-day-long, Free DRUM BOOGIE FESTIVAL - in Fall 2013. Keep posted and poised to boogie with us again! A big thank you goes out to all that made that weekend of amazing events happen.
Drum Boogie Festival 2011 Photos By Ruth Rich and Steven Silberstein
The 2011 Drum Boogie Festival was a huge success thanks to the wonderful performers, sponsors and volunteers.
We were able to give $3000 to Family of Woodstock for the Kathy Janeczek Memorial Fund which will benefit Breast Cancer Tre
atment in the Hudson Valley as a result of the fundraising effort organized by the Woodstock Chimes Fund which produced the free festival.
Bread Alone, Walters-Storyk Design Group, Precision Flow Technologies, Markertek.com, Woodstock Chimes and Two Boogie Friends were the major sponsors while additional support came from Stewart’s Shops, Steve Weiss Music, First Niagara Bank, the Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley, Ulster Publishing, Herzog’s Home Center, Arthur Anderson, Miller/Howard Investments and many more.
Local restaurants and distributors supplied food and beverages for the performers throughout the day. Interage Mediaworks sponsored the website and provided beautiful graphics for marketing the festival. Family of Woodstock supplied volunteers, SUNY Ulster students and Woodstock Percussion employees served as stage hands and Nancy Donskoj opened her house to the performers and staff. Live Sound, Inc. of Troy provided a brilliant sound to the festival. The president of the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce Ward Todd was the perfect emcee with his mellifluous voice. Many thanks go out to all of these individuals, businesses and groups, without which, great community events like this would not be possible.
Cornell Park is an absolute gem of a venue for concerts with its amphitheater like setting, great acoustics, view of the Hudson River and access to wonderful shops and restaurants. I hope the powers to be decide to build a permanent stage to encourage more events.
Check out our website for photos and updates of the festival: www.drumboogiefestival.com. We welcome continued financial support to help with the cost of the festival. Thanks again Hudson Valley for your enthusiasm and support.
Boogie On!,
Garry Kvistad, executive director of the Drum Boogie Festival® and CEO of Woodstock Chimes®
