Imagining Zero: Festival, Higher Ground series aim for music-industry sustainability
Avi Salloway was on tour years ago in the band of Nigerien guitarist Bombino when they played a show at a festival in Italy that also featured singer-songwriter Jack Johnson. Johnson had requested that no plastic water bottles be used at the festival.
That struck Salloway, who said he was already “hyper-aware of the footprints” Bombino’s tours left behind. He estimates he’s played 1,500 concerts on six continents. He had long been repelled at seeing how much trash was strewn on festival grounds.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is happening,’” Salloway said of Johnson’s no-plastics edict. “A light popped on – this does not have to be that way.”
Salloway, a 2007 University of Vermont graduate living in Burlington, is among the presenters of the Imagine Zero Music Festival, a day-long event taking place Saturday, Sept. 7. In its second year, Imagine Zero will run amplifiers, lights and microphones with a solar trailer delivered by electric vehicle. The festival will aim to power food vendors’ operations with electric vehicles.
Shuttle buses from Woodstock are available to deliver fans to the festival location at Fable Farm in Barnard. Those arriving in cars with three or more attendees are eligible to win prizes. Nearly all food and beverages provided by Fable Farm will be served with reusable cutlery, cups and plates. Wine and beer will be available from reusable kegs and bottles. Salloway said fans buying tickets can pay for a tree to be planted by the Shelburne-based organization One Tree Planted.
“The operation (of the festival) is very sustainable,” Salloway said following an Aug. 7 performance in City Hall Park by one of his groups, Avi Salloway & Friends. “We’re trying to create a paradigm shift in the music industry.”
Vermont’s most-prominent concert promoter is aiming for that, too. Higher Ground, the South Burlington-based music venue that books off-site shows throughout the Northeast, began powering its long-running Concerts on the Green series at the Shelburne Museum this year with battery-operated generators that replace the fossil-fuel-consuming diesel generators they had been using.
Higher Ground co-founder Alex Crothers believes the Shelburne Museum shows represent the first summer concert series in the country to be entirely battery powered.
“There just aren’t that many people who are using this technology yet. It’s changing very quickly,” said Crothers, who expects “a cascade of people” to move toward battery-powered concerts in the next 12 months. “It’s such a no-brainer in terms of making the switch.”
Battery-powered Guster show
Environmental awareness in the concert industry isn’t new. SolarFest began offering music 30 years ago in Vermont with the idea of, as its website says, showcasing “the power and possibilities of solar energy.” Salloway said Imagine Zero is renting a solar trailer from SolarFest while that long-standing event remains on hiatus.
Crothers pointed to a couple of recent high-profile musicians who’ve moved toward non-fossil-fuel energy at concerts. Billie Eilish performed a battery-powered set last year at the massive Chicago festival Lollapalooza and Willie Nelson has used that technology for shows at his Texas ranch.
Adam Gardner of the band Guster and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, created the organization REVERB. That group, as its website describes, works with venues, festivals and musicians to “green their concert events while engaging fans face-to-face at shows to take environmental and social action.”
Gardner witnessed Nelson’s battery tests in Texas and told Crothers what he saw. “I was like, ‘That’s amazing,’” Crothers said. “For 25 years I’ve been trying to solve our power issues at Shelburne Museum.”
Unlike other off-site locations where Higher Ground stages concerts – Waterfront Park in Burlington and the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction, for instance – the sloping field at Shelburne Museum does not have direct access to the electrical grid. Higher Ground has long powered its 3,000-capacity Concerts on the Green shows with diesel generators.
Crothers said the downsides of diesel generators include the noisy, smelly consumption of fossil fuel next to a performance space and the strain and breakdowns common with those engines. Battery generators, he said, avoid those pitfalls.
Higher Ground is leasing battery generators from NOMAD, a Waterbury company that normally works with utilities such as Green Mountain Power and municipalities including Little Rock, Arkansas.
“None of it’s particularly revolutionary,” Crothers said, as it takes time to affect change in a “myopic industry” such as the live-music business. “It’s not as if we’re introducing hydrogen fuel cells out there and people are like, ‘I can’t even get my arms around it.’ We’re taking a pretty standard technology and putting it to a new use.”
The battery-powered generator debuted this season at Guster’s concert in June at the Shelburne Museum. Crothers said the system has worked flawlessly.
“There’s not a big learning curve,” he said. “You turn it on and you’ve got power.” Unlike a diesel generator that runs for the duration of a show, Crothers said battery generators only pull power when needed.
“For the first time we’re learning our actual power needs. We can see what the power draws are across a show,” Crothers said. “There’s an efficiency to understanding what your needs are, and it allows us over time to right-size our power units to what we need.”
Higher Ground is using one central battery generator for now. Maybe as soon as next season, Crothers hopes to employ individual generators that specifically target areas of the concert grounds for even more efficient use of energy.
“That’s where we’re headed,” he said.
Lakou Mizik, Chad Hollister at Imagine Zero
Cliff Johnson and Ben Kogan founded Imagine Zero, which held its first festival last year in Brandon. Salloway, who played in the band Hey Mama with Kogan, joined to help this year.
“That was a really solid launch,” Salloway said of last year’s event, “and inspired us to want to grow the festival.” He said 650 people attended last year’s Imagine Zero Music Festival; organizers hope to reach the capacity of 750 this year.
Salloway’s current band, Billy Wylder, is among the headliners in this year’s lineup that includes Lakou Mizik, The Wolff Sisters, Chad Hollister, Saints & Liars. The Ben Kogan Band and Seth Glier. Salloway said he sees a music festival as the perfect fun setting to help with people’s “consciousness transformation” on the issue of climate change.
“It doesn’t have to be this dark space of ‘the world is ending,’” Salloway said, even if the message within the festival is a serious one. He said the devastating July floods the past two years show the high significance of the issue.
“It’s been tragically apparent that Vermont is not immune to the existential threat of climate change,” Salloway said.
Environmental toll of traveling to concerts
The concert industry continues to take a toll on the environment. Statistics from the website www.carboncredits.com posted on Imagine Zero’s website show that venues themselves account for 34% of a tour’s carbon footprint, with audience travel just behind that at 33%. (Band travel accounts for 9% of the total.)
“That’s honestly more of a societal question,” Crothers said of the carbon footprint of travel to concerts. He said public transportation is “not great” in the U.S. “Societally, hopefully, we continue to move toward electric vehicles.”
Salloway noted that many movements within the music industry – Imagine Zero, Higher Ground’s Concerts on the Green series and REVERB among them – are working to address the industry’s impact on the environment, often from different angles. Those efforts, he said, are not competing.
“We’re working together to save the planet,” Salloway said.
If you go
WHAT: Imagine Zero Music Festival
WHEN: 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 7
WHERE: Fable Farm, Barnard
INFORMATION: $25-$50 in advance, $75 at the door; free for ages 10 and under. www.imaginezerofestival.com
Concerts on the Green
The three remaining shows this year in the Concerts on the Green series presented by Higher Ground at the Shelburne Museum are:
7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 16, Rainbow Kitten Surprise with Medium Build. Sold out.
7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19-Friday, Sept. 20, Lake Street Dive with Katie Pruitt. Sold out.
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Higher Ground concert series, Vermont festival aim for sustainability
