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Blue Flame to blend genres Wednesday for Greencastle Summer Music Festival
The Greencastle Summer Music Festival continues Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church with Blue Flame, a trio of three friends and young musicians from Spencer who play a unique combination of bluegrass, country, swing and jazz music with an improvisational flair.
The group’s members are Ethan Batan on mandolin, his sister Savanna Batan on fiddle and the lead vocal and Luke Lovejoy on guitar.
There is no admission charge for the weekly concerts, which present top-level professional musicians through Aug. 17.
The festival is funded by a growing family of individual donors, as well as an endowment through the Putnam County Community Foundation, a grant from the Putnam County Convention and Visitors Bureau and by The Inn at DePauw.
Lovejoy, winner of numerous national guitar competitions, Ethan Batan, a finalist in many mandolin competitions, and Savanna Batan met in 2016 at their local music store in Greencastle. They have performed multiple times at Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Festival and play their music for many public and private events across the state.
“We love all genres of music at the Greencastle Summer Music Festival, and each of these young performers have an amazing level of instrumental skill that is the equivalent of young prodigies in the classical world,” said Eric Edberg, the festival’s founding artistic director. “Musicians often say, ‘If you click, you click,’ and they click in a way that is rare in any genre of music.”
The Greencastle Summer Music Festival continues next week with We-B-3, which brings together three top jazz musicians in Brannen Temple from Austin, Texas, on drums, Greencastle native Steve Snyder on the Hammond B3/keyboards and Clay Moore from Louisville, Ky., on guitar.