Mo’town music

Two years ago, Morrisville built a permanent stage in Oxbow Park, a little peninsula that looks like a thumbs-up.

Last year, Nick DeNoia and friends hosted a music festival there. It was so successful that this weekend the Oxbow Music Festival is back, and this time, it goes to 11.

DeNoia, a seasoned concert-goer, knows something happens to the music when the sun goes down — finger-pluckin’ bluegrass and country in the heat of the day, followed by a little heavier, spacier, groovier fare when the kids have gone to bed.

“During the day, for some reason, it’s always time for banjo music,” DeNoia said. “During the evening, it’ll be more of a straight-up concert vibe.”

Sure, there will be plenty of things for the kids to do at Oxbow Music Fest (no bouncy house; that was a logistical nightmare last year). There will be food — from local places like Pizza on Main, Nepali Cuisine, the Blue Donkey Truck, and others. There will be drink — Switchback Brewery is sponsoring the event and will have its wares on tap, and Tom Moog and crew from Moog’s Place will be mixing cocktails.

But this isn’t one of those events “where there’s also music,” DeNoia said. This is all about the bands, about a half-dozen of them.

This year’s lineup builds a head of steam toward a tie-dyed paean to some of live touring music’s greatest acts, culminating with Cats Under the Stars, a tribute to the Jerry Garcia Band featuring Zach Nugent, a local guitarist who recently joined the real thing. Nugent was asked by JGB — it’s the Jerry Garcia Band without Jerry — to tour with the band this summer.

Complementing the music will be what DeNoia calls “some real Fillmore-esque lighting.” Heavy Light, a Northeast Kingdom outfit, will bring its custom light projections to bathe the pavilion and audience in bright and colorful swirls and blobs, images and abstractions.

DJ Nickel B isn’t holding down a scheduled standalone set, but he’ll be spinning. He’s kind of like a Lebowski living room rug: The dub flow coming from B’s turntables really ties it all together. He’ll be spinning during set breaks after the sun goes down.

The lineup

Lesley Grant opening the festival is about as logical a choice as noon following the morning and starting the other half of the day.

The red-haired singer-songwriter is a go-to for places that need one person to fill the room or open-air bazaar, or restaurants looking to brighten their brunches and après-ski places that serve as many Shirley Temples as they do adult beverages.

Some gigs she’ll play just for youngsters, sets full of kid-friendly tunes. But she and her guitar are just as likely to spit out cold and mournful country music for rural folk who have to get through each winter to relish the summer.

Beg, Steal or Borrow is a mish-mash of local old-timey players that bills itself as “New England’s only Old and in the Way tribute band.” Old and In the Way was a mid-1970s super group with Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan and Vassar Clements; it recorded one of the best-selling bluegrass albums of all time.

Beg, Steal or Borrow are all local pluckers, half of whom come from the Mud City Ramblers, who were always good for some on-stage heckling and good foot-tapping tunes. One of that group’s leaders, Neal Dean, died just before this summer started.

“I’m sure they’ll be missing him,” DeNoia said.

The Shady Trees are becoming the band to book for people and businesses who want an in-between band — to fill a space bigger than a garage, but smaller than an amphitheater. With noodly guitars and dexterous keyboard fills, the Trees can take a standard and breathe a new dance into it or make an original that fits right into their generous catalog.

Holding down the slot between late afternoon and Sunday night is Lamoille County’s hardest-working bluesman, Seth Yacovone and his band. How prolific is Yacovone? Those weeklong pill dispensers that display the days as SMTWTFS would have at least three doses of Seth in there, if music were the cure for our ills.

Seriously, Yacovone was the first musician named to the hall of fame at Nectar’s, the Burlington nightclub/gravy-fry mecca, even though Phish got its start there 20 years earlier. Yacovone has held down Fridays there for most of the current century, his beard getting longer while the University of Vermont freshmen remain the same age.

The Peacheaters start with the Allman Brothers Band repertoire and gobble up like-minded musicians along the way. Government Mule and Grateful Dead, Phish and Pink Floyd, Boz Scaggs and the Black Crowes — their songs could get pulled onto stage at any time.

DeNoia discovered the Peacheaters earlier this summer at Jerry Jam, a Bath, N.H., music festival with more than two dozen bands playing over four days. He was there scouting Cats Under the Stars and managed to land two bands for the Oxbow.

Cats Under the Stars is big in the greater New England jam and roots music scene, especially the summertime festival circuit. It plays the music of the Jerry Garcia Band, an outfit that has kept on trucking more than 20 years after the acclaimed guitarist died.

Cats bandleader Zach Nugent got an invitation from Melvin Seals, current head of the Garcia Band, to sit in on some gigs this summer, and has wound up joining the band for the whole season.

That adds an interesting twist to the whole tribute-band existence: playing homage to a band you’re actually in now, the band founded and named after a man who died in 1995.

The music never stopped. But he’d already been saying it for decades, hadn’t he?

DeNoia hopes to keep the Oxbow Music Fest on Morrisville’s late summer calendar for years to come, and to make it a draw for regional and national touring acts.

“We just wanted to get our toes wet last year,” he said. “Now we’re walking the line between what’s viable and testing the waters to see what the community wants.”