EDITOR’S NOTE: For preview coverage of the 50th Utah Arts Festival, which runs June 18-21, The Utah Review is presenting individual or group profiles of artists, performers, entertainers and some newcomers to the event. The curtain raiser highlights the history of the Festival which is marking its golden anniversary. BANDALOOP, among the most prominent pioneers of vertical dance, returns to UAF for the fourth time, having appeared in 2005. 2013 and 2018. Once again, the Oakland-based arts company will perform on the 240-foot-high curving glass façade of the City Library, as part of a June tour in four cities featuring a work with ecological roots that will resonate with collective concerns about the Great Salt Lake’s ecological crisis, as the dance artists perform FLOCK while integrating company repertoire pieces including Downstream and its new creation, life || lines, all with an original score featuring music by four composers. Salt Lake Acting Company will appear for the second time at the festival, offering a sample from its upcoming summer show, The Gaslight Zone. Make-and-take opportunities will be among the most extensive in history, with Make Salt Lake as well as Secondhand Salamander which is bringing back the classic Mad Hatter project, and, of course, the Kids’ Art Yard. Urban Arts is offering its largest live graffiti mural installation featuring eight artists in four Festival campus locations, while a row of several other artists will be demonstrating their creative process in real time. Holdman Studios, based in Lehi with an international portfolio of commissions to create stained glass in religious and civic buildings, including a recent update to the Utah State Capitol rotunda, is offering an unprecedented series of free workshops for participants to create their own stained glass artwork. The City Library auditorium will be the home to the 23rd edition of the international Fear No Film program, with 84 short films on a slate of 15 programs, the second largest in the event’s history. Of course, dance, who wears the empress jewels in performing arts, will be represented by Repertory Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Sock Opera Dance, and, of course, the ever-popular 1520 Arts, which will feature Trash Panda Drum Group and competitions featuring Sol Tribe as part of the Salt Open Styles Battle along with the Red Bull Dance Your Style battle and a collaboration with Utah Valley University’s ESPRIT in Rep Your Set Choreo Competition, with choreographers who specialize variously in hip hop, contemporary, salsa, reggaeton, afro, popping. Headliners this year include Digable Planets, well known among jazz musicians as well as hip hop artists (June 18); Yola, six-time Grammy-nominated artist, songwriter, and actor (June 19); Austin-based musician Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, who has been cited for creating new musical experiences tailored to each fan, ranging from Bandcamp-exclusive releases to hosting interactive scavenger hunts while on tour (June 20) and Rubblebucket, a band well known for its hybrid genre blend of psychedelia and electronic dance music (June 21). For tickets and more information, see the Utah Arts Festival website.
THE DISCOGRAPHERS (JUNE 21, 9:15 P.M., PARK STAGE)
Looking for ways to expand their reach beyond being a blues and rock group playing the typical bar circuit primarily for an older crowd demographic, The Discographers effectively put an innovative spin on the tribute band genre. “We started pondering different ideas and, at first, it was kind of a joke but we said let’s do a deep dive into the discography of a classic artist. Then we thought, well, we should do a show with projections of images and photography of them,” Randin Graves said in an interview with The Utah Review.
The first deep dive was Led Zeppelin, and word of mouth about the show was so good that the band was eventually invited to perform a full set featuring their songs which were synced to animation and lights in the Clark Planetarium Hansen Dome Theater at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City. The band also covered some Led Zeppelin songs not typically on similar tribute bands’ set lists such as Fool in the Rain, which was featured in the In Through The Out Door album (1979). Led Zeppelin never performed it live because it was the band’s final single before they disbanded in the wake of John Bonham’s death. Only in a 2005 benefit concert, Robert Plant performed it live with Pearl Jam, which was the first time for the song.
In the wake of the pandemic shutdown, it made sense that The Discographers’ next big project would take on Pink Floyd, with its catalog of songs which worked well with technical wizardry. Obviously, Dark Side of the Moon stood out, but Graves and his fellow band members also tucked into other Pink Floyd catalog gems. This opened the doors to incorporating nostalgic film elements and looping in the live performance to track with films, including The Wizard of Oz. The result was Dark Side of Oz, a two-hour show of Pink Floyd’s music, including the full Dark Side album, in sync with video celebrating the history of Pink Floyd and Wizard of Oz. Many comments indicated impressive reactions to how well the band synchronized the elements while preserving the artistic integrity of the film and Pink Floyd’s catalog.
The Discographers continued to branch out, pulling together shows, which touched on iconic pop culture themes, along with anniversary milestones of popular films such as The Breakfast Club. To celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary last year, the band performed songs from soundtracks that epitomized the Eighties Teen Movie genre, along with Breakfast Club film clips.
Graves said their 2025 Halloween show was so successful that the band will reprise it this year. That show included songs such as the Echo & the Bunnymen’s cover of The Doors’ People Are Strange which was featured in The Lost Boys (1987) and Blue Öyster Cult’s 1976 track (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, which was the only licensed song other than the original score to be featured in the 1978 original cult horror classic Halloween. The Discographers also have covered Zombies, which The Cranberries wrote in 1993 as an anti-terrorism song, and synced it with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Appropriate for the Utah Arts Festival’s anniversary theme this year, The Discographers is paying its innovative tribute to David Bowie, noting that it has been 10 years since one of classic rock’s greatest legends died. On January 10 earlier this year, precisely a decade after the date of Bowie’s passing, The Discographers joined, by the lead of Major Tom and the Moonboys, Salt Lake City’s definitive Bowie tribute band, offered a lifelong retrospective of his music stretching from his first days of stardom to his final album. The live performance, as part of The State Room Presents Series, was in sync with videos of Bowie himself singing the relevant tracks.
Utah Arts Festival patrons will see a shorter version of the original two-hour show. Graves said that while the Festival’s Park Stage is not set up for the projections which are used when they perform indoors, he added, “I am buying a bunch of old big flatscreen TVs to scatter on the stage so we can still have that visual element.” The multimedia element, indeed, accentuates Bowie’s unparalleled skills for emotional connecting to the music he performed.
While other tribute bands lean into dressing up and imitating the mannerisms of the musicians they celebrate, Graves explained The Discographers are focused on championing the historical significance of these artists and their enduring impact on pop culture, without mimicking them. Some bands lend themselves handily to the creative aesthetics driving The Discographers’ projects. That is why Led Zeppelin worked out so well and established the foundation of the band’s reputation. Graves would love to sync up Led Zeppelin’s music to footage from The Lord of the Rings movie franchise, which he admitted would be very challenging to pull off. However, the prospects also are compelling in their potential artistic reward.
Some bands lend themselves handily to the creative aesthetics driving The Discographers’ projects, which can be tied in with nostalgic looks at films and videos that magnified the music’s iconic nature. Graves said he was surprised about the local number of Fleetwood Mac tribute bands (for instance, one month had at least three such shows booked in various Salt Lake City venues featuring such bands). When he and his colleagues were happy with a set they mixed with songs by Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, he pitched the show to a venue, but, alas, a similar offering already was booked.
Others have suggested The Discographers should do a Talking Heads tribute show. “I’m a little intimidated by how iconic David Burns’ voice is so I don’t want to try too hard to imitate and risk becoming a mockery,” Graves explained. One appealing possibility is Bruce Springsteen’s catalog. Graves also likes the idea of celebrating the MTV Generation, which emphasizes the embarrassment of riches thr defined music in the 1980s. Also, the music video format became more elaborate and expanded into the territory of the short film’s capacity to carry a complete narrative concisely and cogently.
1 thought on “Utah Arts Festival at 50: Elevating the art of the tribute band, The Discographers set to pay multimedia tribute to David Bowie’s lifetime catalog of songs”