Acoustic music fest to launch

Renee Bodie, the driving force behind the Los Angeles Acoustic Music Festival, managed to snare an impressive roster of classic folk music artists for the inaugural event, taking place Saturday and Sunday on the Santa Monica Pier.

Nanci Griffith, Richard Thompson, Bruce Cockburn, David Lindley, David Bromberg and Eliza Gilkyson are slated to perform this weekend at what Bodie hopes will become an annual celebration of music from the heart.

“Los Angeles doesn’t have a true folk festival,” said Bodie, a board member of Folk Alliance International, an organization committed to preserving and promoting folk music, dance and performing arts. “It’s a wonderful genre, a basic genre, and there are many offshoots from it. It has a lot of roots in our history.”

The lineup also features the Kingston Trio, fiddler Natalie MacMaster, Jimmy LaFave, Slaid Cleaves, Joel Rafael, the Refugees, Stonehoney and a tribute to the godfather of American folk music, Woody Guthrie, whose granddaughter, Sarah Lee Guthrie, will play with Johnny Irion.

One challenge in attempting to create a Southland equivalent to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas or the Kate Wolf Festival going on later this month in Laytonville in Northern California is that “it’s really diverse here,” says multi-instrumentalist Lindley, who will be bringing a full arsenal of stringed instruments with which he typically dazzles audiences. He’ll perform solo with Irish and Romanian bouzoukis, Greek oud, Turkish saz and Hawaiian koa wood guitars.

He’d love to see a festival take root here and is particularly looking to the chance it presents to cross paths with other participants.

“It’s really good to be able to do that,” he said from his home in Claremont, “especially with David Bromberg, who I haven’t seen in a long time. He’s an old friend. And have you ever seen Natalie MacMaster? She’s pretty scary, and that kind of thing is great for a festival.”

Agoura Hills resident Bodie is hoping that the festival will serve to do more than spotlight the genre’s top talents. She’s optimistic that its success -- Bodie says the event needs to draw about 1,200 attendees per day -- will raise money for programs designed to introduce folk to a broader, and younger, audience.

Bodie plans to use some of the proceeds to create a California branch of the Americana Project, a community outreach effort started by the Sisters Folk Festival in Sisters, Ore. The project provides musical instruments and instruction to students who otherwise don’t have access to either.

She also is pushing to get the California Acoustic Music Project rolling in the L.A. area, after seeing the 8-year-old Oregon project in action.

“Its power is incredible,” she said. “You go up there and the entire community is so turned on to it. You go in stores and hear people talking about their kids being in the project and how it changed them. It’s very community-oriented.”

She said there’s some interest from officials she’s contacted at L.A. Unified School District, but they first want to see how it works in an urban setting, in contrast to the more rural environment of what’s happening in Oregon.

The state’s budget problems, which recently have resulted in cancellation of all summer school programs in L.A. schools, could actually be an advantage for this idea.

“The idea is we would fund artists-in-residence who could come into a school, and we’d also provide instruments,” Bodie said. “We want the school system itself to be healthy, but in some ways this is a good time, because schools are looking for anybody who can walk in and say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to do anything.’ ”

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randy.lewis@latimes.com

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Los Angeles Acoustic Music Festival

Where: Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica

When: noon to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Price: $45 to $85 per day; $80 to $140 for fest passes

Contact: (818) 621-8309 or www.laacousticmusic festival.com