What a great weekend in the park! Thank you to all of our supporters!

Attendance was up and we are counting our 35th annual festival a success! We hope to see you all again next year – we are already starting work on 2018! Stay tuned…

Rendezvous 2017 starts this Thursday: July 13! We are excited about our lineup and ready to celebrate our 35th year bringing quality music to East City Park!

We’ve brought back a couple of past crowd favorites – JJ Grey & Mofro and Paul Thorn – along with some new names to introduce to Rendezvous-ers: The Lack Family, The Bellrays, and Diego’s Umbrella! (Local fans may recognize Shiloh & the Young Guns from other local performances…) Check out the entire lineup, including our Showcase winners, and visit Bookpeople of Moscow to get your Festival Pass, or buy tickets at the gate.

Gritman Medical Center has been a proud sponsor of Rendezvous this year – and we have appreciated their support!

We are also excited to partner with the inaugural Fondo – bike ride on the Palouse this year. The Fondo is a fun event that is bringing some new people to our area – and we hope they will join us for some fun in the park before/after the Saturday ride!

We have sold tickets to folks from San Diego to Seattle to Montana! How exciting for us to bring people to Moscow and the Palouse! We look forward to sharing the beauty of the area, and the fun that is “Rendezvous” with our visitors!

Mark your calendars for the Rendezvous in the Park Showcase on Saturday, April 15!

Six local and regional bands will perform for the Showcase Audience with the hopes of earning an opening spot at this summer’s Festival! Two groups will be selected by audience vote, while the Rendezvous Board chooses a third act to perform in July.

Skinny the Kid entertained the Showcase 2016 audience.

Join us at the Kenworthy Theatre in Downtown Moscow to hear some really amazing live music and support Rendezvous in the Park! Doors open at 6:30; music starts at 7:00 p.m.

Tickets are $10 per person. Concessions will be available, along with no-host beer and wine bar with valid ID.

Questions? email info@rendezvousinthepark.com.

All the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted! We are thrilled to announce our Friday night headliner: JJ Grey & Mofro!

Here is some information about the band and their latest album:

From the days of playing greasy local juke joints to headlining major festivals, JJ Grey remains an unfettered, blissful performer, singing with a blue-collared spirit over the bone-deep grooves of his compositions. His presence before an audience is something startling and immediate, at times a funk rave-up, other times a sort of mass-absolution for the mortal weaknesses that make him and his audience human. When you see JJ Grey and his band Mofro live—and you truly, absolutely must—the man is fearless.

Onstage, Grey delivers his songs with compassion and a relentless honesty, but perhaps not until Ol’ Glory has a studio record captured the fierceness and intimacy that defines a Grey live performance. “I wanted that crucial lived-in feel,” Grey says of Ol’ Glory, and here he hits his mark. On the new album, Grey and his current Mofro lineup offer grace and groove in equal measure, with an easygoing quality to the production that makes those beautiful muscular drum-breaks sound as though the band has set up in your living room.

Despite a redoubtable stage presence, Grey does get performance anxiety—specifically, when he’s suspended 50 feet above the soil of his pecan grove, clearing moss from the upper trees.

“The tops of the trees are even worse,” he laughs, “say closer to 70, maybe even 80 feet. I’m not phobic about heights, but I don’t think anyone’s crazy about getting up in a bucket and swinging all around. I wanted to fertilize this year but didn’t get a chance. This February I will, about two tons—to feed the trees.”

When he isn’t touring, Grey exerts his prodigious energies on the family land, a former chicken-farm that was run by his maternal grandmother and grandfather. The farm boasts a recording studio, a warehouse that doubles as Grey’s gym, an open-air barn, and of course those 50-odd pecan trees that occasionally require Grey to go airborne with his sprayer.

For devoted listeners, there is something fitting, even affirmative in Grey’s commitment to the land of his north Florida home. The farms and eddying swamps of his youth are as much a part of Grey’s music as the Louisiana swamp-blues tradition, or the singer’s collection of old Stax records.

As a boy, Grey was drawn to country-rockers, including Jerry Reed, and to Otis Redding and the other luminaries of Memphis soul; Run-D.M.C., meanwhile, played on repeat in the parking lot of his high school (note the hip-hop inflections on “A Night to Remember”). Merging these traditions, and working with a blue-collar ethic that brooked no bullshit, Grey began touring as Mofro in the late ’90s, with backbeats that crossed Steve Cropper with George Clinton and a lyrical directness that made his debut LP Blackwater (2001) a calling-card among roots-rock aficionados. Soon, he was expanding his tours beyond America and the U.K., playing ever-larger clubs and eventually massive festivals, as his fan base grew from a modest group of loyal initiates into something resembling a national coalition.

We are excited to announce that Paul Thorn will be headlining our Saturday night concert!

Here is some info from his latest album bio:

Paul Thorn’s latest album Too Blessed To Be Stressed stakes out new territory for the popular roots-rock songwriter and performer. “In the past, I’ve told stories that were mostly inspired by my own life,” the former prizefighter and literal son of a preacher man offers. “This time, I’ve written 10 songs that express more universal truths, and I’ve done it with a purpose: to make people feel good.”

Paul Thorn will bring his talents to Rendezvous in the Park July 15, 2017

Which explains numbers like the acoustic-electric charmer “Rob You of Your Joy,” where Thorn’s warm peaches-and-molasses singing dispenses advice on avoiding the pitfalls of life. The title track borrows its tag from a familiar saying among the members of the African-American Baptist churches Thorn frequented in his childhood. “I’d ask, ‘How you doin’, sister?’ And what I’d often hear back was, ‘I’m too blessed to be stressed.’” In the hands of Thorn and his faithful band, who’ve been together 20 years, the tune applies its own funky balm, interlacing a percolating drum and keyboard rhythm with the slinky guitar lines beneath his playful banter.

It helps that those big vocal hooks on Too Blessed To Be Stressed are being reinforced by the sound of Thorn’s flexible and dynamic band, as they have been doing for years in concert. During their two decades in the club, theater and festival trenches, the four-piece and their frontman have garnered a reputation for shows that ricochet from humor to poignancy to knock-out rock ’n’ roll. Guitarist Bill Hinds is the perfect, edgy foil for Thorn’s warm, laconic salt o’ the earth delivery — a veritable living library of glowing tones, sultry slide and sonic invention. Keyboardist Michael “Dr. Love” Graham displays a gift for melody that reinforces Thorn’s hooks while creating his own impact, and helps expand the group’s rhythmic force. Meanwhile drummer Jeffrey Perkins and bassist Ralph Friedrichsen are a force, propelling every tune with just the right amount of up-tempo power or deep-in-the-groove restraint.

“These guys really bring my songs to life,” says Thorn. “A lot of albums sound like they’re made by a singer with bored studio musicians. My albums sound they’re played by a real blood-and-guts band because that’s what we are. And when we get up on stage, people hear and see that.”

Rendezvous in the Park 2017 will be July 13-15! Mark your calendars and join us for more art and music in East City Park!