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.
TH3 RECIPE (JUNE 18, 7:45 p.m., Festival Stage)
Th3 Recipe’s trio of MCs— Smash Boogie, Resonomics and SA Lopez—proves that just like in the kitchen, music made in the studio and performed on stage is best when it has marinated long enough to come together and find natural harmony. Even when the ‘creative ingredients’ come from individuals who already were comfortable within their own Hip Hop niches.
The trio came together after pandemic restrictions eased and by 2025, they released their first eponymous titled album, amid a growing list of performances. Two years ago, they made their first Festival appearance and this year, Th3 Recipe will be the opener on the Festival Stage for the first day headliner, Digable Planets.
Indeed, in an interview with The Utah Review, it was evident how each MC sees their collective role as guardians of Hip Hop’s essential integrity, which assured the genre’s longevity as a timeless vessel of songs.
During his school days, Resonomics migrated from rock to R&B before connecting with the passion and energy of Tupac Shakur’s music. Later, he tapped into the East Coast style and Nas—making for intriguing comparisons with Tupac, who was much more visceral and raw than Nas who mastered precise rhyming schemes and who layered his lyrics with his skills of playing on metaphors and idioms to punch up the storytelling in his songs. Resonomics said, “I came up with my own style, by mixing everything that was my influence.”
Smash Boogie, who was born in Detroit and moved to Ogden during his adult years, came from a family with a strong musical background. His mother and sister were singers and his brother was an avid record collector. Smash Boogie enjoyed Golden Age artists such as Rakim, who pioneered much of the technique of rhyming patterns. He also was a fan of Tupac. “I never wanted to be a rapper,” he recalled. “I was just a fan and then in 1995 when my cousin came over and he introduced freestyle and it lit a fire in me and ever since then I’ve just been on it.” Radio was a major player in the proving grounds for freestyle during the 1990s, with the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, Mos Def, Nas, Big L., Method Man and The Notorious B.I.G.,among others.
SA Lopez tucked into artists who audaciously pushed the envelope, such as David Bowie and Prince. As the trio’s primary music maker, he said, “If it sounds like something I’ve already heard, I’ll just start all over.” For inspiration on fusion, SA Lopez is drawn to Marvin Gaye, whose Midnight Love album, for example, which dropped in the early 1980s, gave us a glimpse of part of the future of funk and R&B. As for rappers, Snoop Dogg, Devin The Dude and André 3000 are on his list.
With such a comprehensive range of musical influences converging, the trio is blossoming at the right time, finding room for Hip Hop’s Golden Age to be as relevant and more so in a time when we are vulnerable to amnesia and the forgetting of our historical roots. In the kitchen, recipes passed down through generations are enlightening artifacts of family heritage and cultural roots. Likewise, Th3 Recipe fills a parallel role in preserving the music of a Golden Age in Hip Hop which they personally experienced in their formative years.
Doing it properly, they have the wisdom and experience to effectively fuse it into a form that sounds fresh but also pays sincere respect to the empowering origins which made it possible in the first place.
As part of their Festival set, Th3 Recipe will feature local guest artist DJ Juggy.