Playmakers: An intimate festival for everyone

In a time when long-established music festivals are falling like flies, it takes courage to embark on a new festival adventure, but that is just what Playmakers WA have done. Their inaugural stand-alone event will be held at Fairbridge Farm Pinjarra between Friday, April 11, and Sunday, April 13, this year.

Playmakers is not like any other music festival, and, to be honest, it is not coming completely out of the blue—the essential formula has been honed over many years as a component within Albany’s Harboursound Festival and Perth Festival’s Great Southern program.

Moreover, although the new venture is to be held in an established music festival site with acts familiar to many lovers of acoustic music, it is not aimed at a large audience out for a sardine-packed program. Instead it is a boutique festival with a twist, aimed at an almost intimate attendance.

The reasons for this are mainly intentional but partly imposed.

The brainchild of guitarist/artistic director Rod Vervest (pictured above), the twist to Playmakers is that it has two equal components: performances and workshops. The acts include a selection of high-profile acoustic artists, while the workshops are presented by master instrument makers, many of whom also perform. Players + makers = Playmakers. As Vervest puts it: “The intention is to speak to audiences through the voice of the instruments, not the ego of the performers.”

The imposed part is the ageing infrastructure at Fairbridge Farm. The stress placed on these century-old buildings by thousands of festivalgoers is considerable. Hence, camping on site is not an option at present, and attendance at Playmakers is limited to those who can be accommodated in the heritage cottages. We are talking about less than 300 people, not the 3,000 that used to crowd the earthen walkways and green fields in the heyday of the FolkWorld Fairbridge Festival. On the upside, this means that everyone gets a bed while each cottage has its own bathrooms. (Yes, toilets at music festivals are a big deal!)

Vervest is a former artistic director of the Fairbridge Festival, the last AD to present a full program at the Farm (or anywhere for that matter). He delivered seven outstanding programs before COVID shut everything down. He left the organisation in frustration in 2022 after the last-minute cancellation of the second festival in three years. Later that year, the infrastructure issue saw the festival abandon its namesake site. A big part of Vervest’s motivation now to set up Playmakers is to keep the spirit of music alive in that iconic location with a smaller program more suitable to both this time and that space.

The genesis of the Playmakers concept goes back to Vervest’s youth and his classical guitarist uncle George. George owned a de Jager guitar, which he hung on his sitting room wall. (Andries de Jager was a legendary Perth luthier whose instruments were the prized possessions of Perth’s classical guitar community from the 1950s to the 1970s.) One visit, as young Vervest was looking up at the magnificent instrument, George declared that it was “the epitome of form and function.” The phrase stuck and came to symbolise Vervest’s passion for the acoustic guitar.

Playmakers first manifestation was as a workshop component within Albany’s Harboursound Festival. Primarily focused on the acoustic guitar, it started small but grew each year as more WA-based luthiers became involved.

Under Shelagh Magadza’s tenure at Perth Festival, Playmakers transferred to the Festival’s Great Southern program. Still based in Albany, each year a different instrument would be featured—the mandolin, harmonica, or ukulele—and the program expanded to include both international and WA-based instrument makers.

Vervest credits Shelagh Magadza for allowing the program to grow. Like Vervest, Magadza believes strongly in the intimate aspect of the artistic experience. Art is not just about stadium and grand touring shows but can be most powerful and profound on the intimate level. In that realm, works of art can effect deep change in an individual’s life.

Given the changes in the way audiences interact with music and music festivals in recent years, the theory now runs that small is the new big, the bespoke the new beautiful. To quote Vervest: “A matrix of small things is more vibrant, viable and sustainable.” He likes the analogy of Indigenous burning. To renew and regenerate the land, the Indigenous caretakers set a number of small fires in discrete areas. They don’t light up the whole lot in one go but keep it small and under control.

Playmakers reached a national audience when ABC broadcaster Robyn Johnston and sound engineer David Le May produced several long-form documentaries for Radio National from recordings captured at Playmakers events in Albany in the 2000s. Johnston remarks, “The process of instrument making is endlessly fascinating. It has it all: physics, engineering, acoustics, aesthetics, the fine decorative elements, those precious timbers. The genius of the Playmakers concept is the focus on the instrument itself and on the relationship between maker and player. What the musician wants directly informs the craft of the maker. And when the maker builds an instrument that functions beautifully, with the capacity to produce the range of sounds the musician needs, that allows the player to soar. So, they inspire and influence each other.”

Playmakers would not have had such a strong impact had WA not had such a rich heritage of instrument making. Andries De Jager is but one of our many outstanding luthiers from WA. There is a plethora of internationally renowned craftsmen working here, largely under the public radar: Paul Duff, Andrew Tait, Andrew Ellis, Trevor West, Simon Rovis-Hermann and Scott Wise. Playmakers has become a forum for such makers to share their knowledge, both with each other and an audience.

To take but one, Paul Duff’s mandolins are regarded as among the finest in the world. So in demand are they that the wait time for an order is some two to three years.

Duff is running a workshop at Playmakers this year as well as performing with his long-standing band, Bluegrass Parkway.

Other artist/makers in the program include, among others, guitarist Andrew Winton; UK/WA accordion/vocal duo Eddy and Josephine Jay; Queensland-based guitar, banjo, and mandolin trio The Inadequates; American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Kristina Olsen; Vervest’s own bi-coastal Piedmont blues duo The Paper Collar Pickers; and the contemporary jazz and gypsy string quartet Sign of Four.

The workshop program also includes Andrew Ellis (guitar), Andrew Tait (double bass, violone, viola de gamba), Mark Cain (idiosyncratic wind instruments), and a scaled-down Albany Shantymen (singing).

For full program details, see the Playmakers WA website.

If you think this all sounds too specialist, of interest only to potential instrument makers and associated nerds, think again. You can easily fill the three days taking in the acts. But if you want to go further, the workshops and talks are pitched to a general audience and are not so much about pure making as showing how instruments make the sounds they do. Some presentations will improve your singing or show you how to make simple instruments out of everyday objects, but others will be purely informative.

As a taster, there is Andrew Tait’s presentation about the seventeenth-century viola da gamba he recently restored. Tait will bring it to Playmakers, speak about its restoration, and his trips to the UK to get advice on how to do it. The audience won’t come away knowing how to make a viola de gamba, but they will hear about a hidden gem in the history of West Australian lutherie and know a little more about how this fascinating instrument fits into the grand scheme of music.

Playmakers is being presented under the auspices of the Albany Folk’n’Shanty Festival and Little Folk, a Perth-based children’s cancer charity that focuses its fundraising efforts in music and the arts.

Tickets are now on sale through Try Booking. The basic ticket price of $200 covers entry only. Accommodation and meals can be booked to suit individual needs and schedules.

Bespoke, boutique, and small, Playmakers promises to be an important new star in the WA music festival firmament, something to look forward to once the dust of FringeWorld and Perth Festival has settled.

IAN LILBURNE