As a teaser for the upcoming show, Puntarelli and Bustin came to The Venue Fine Art & Gifts last night for a ?private preview.
The jam session, which was open only to media, family and friends, provided the opportunity to practice some of the pieces they hope to play at the larger show, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.
Dave Colman, curator of The Venue, said Puntarelli was once a student in the Jacob’s School of Music. The life of the traveling musician called to him, so he left his studies temporarily to pursue his calling.
“He’s a bit of a bard,” Dave said. “He’s traveled the country playing his original music and recently toured the West Coast. He kind of took off in the middle of his college career. A lot of us think that he’s a real special talent both in terms of his writing and ?performing.”
Michelle Martin-Colman, Colman’s wife, said Puntarelli’s music has an uncommon style.
“It’s very unusual music Travis plays, it’s almost like wandering minstrel kind of music,” Martin-Colman said. “It’s not music I had heard in America, ever.”
“It runs the range of Irish Sea shanties to rap,” Colman added.
Bustin, Colman said, is an older musician who left Bloomington over 30 years ago. Upon urging from Marc Haggerty, another musician and local activist, Bustin was added onto the entourage of musicians performing with Puntarelli.
Colman said the show promises to try and unite two distinct demographics within the town’s music scene.
“Travis has written basically the entire show,” Colman said. “Dillon will play a set within it, combining those two audiences just to try to create mutual appreciation between the older by the younger and the younger by the older.”
The show preview started with another musician, Marya Stark, singing and playing a few songs with her ukulele.
The atmosphere was one of mutual appreciation and collaboration with Puntarelli and other musician friends jumping in on the songs clearly familiar to them.
Between performances, the musicians up front would engage in dialogue, adding to the theatrics of the performance. After introducing Stark near the beginning of the show, Puntarelli took a moment to appreciate her as a musician.
“I’m so glad she’s here, I just wanted to show her off because she’s one of my favorite singers,” Puntarelli said. “We’re going to do a bunch of songs tonight.”
“Do you want to play the bodhrán?” Stark asked before the next song began. “We just figured out that Travis and I both kind of have a love for the bodhrán. Do you guys know this instrument? This Irish drum here?”
The musicians also engaged the audience throughout the show. Aaron Comforty, who plays the double bass, joked at one point that he brought with him “new technology,” thinner than a smart phone, that could control the reverberations in the room.
The musicians harmonized alone for a little while and then asked the audience members to join in the harmony alongside them.
Later, Bustin joined Puntarelli onstage. Bustin, an IU alumnus, prefaced his first song by telling the audience a little bit about his son, the inspiration behind the piece.
“I would like to begin my little presentation here by singing a poem I wrote for him, not for his graduation but for his birthday, a month later, when he turned 22,” Bustin said.
While he was a student, Bustin said, he spent a lot of time as an assistant in the zoology department. He was in charge of finding birds in what were called the “experimental woods,” bringing them back to the lab and releasing them once tests were done.
In the middle of that experience, Bustin said he had an internal crisis because of some of the more disturbing parts of his job dealing with the birds.
“I was very upset and I said, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’” Bustin recalled.
He added that his advisor told him, “Dillon, I don’t think you want to be a 20th-century biologist. I think you want to be a 19th-century naturalist, and it’s too late ?for that.”
Though the experience ended up not falling in line with his present career, he said the work helped inspire a lot of his music today.
“I want to try and demonstrate Wednesday that everything I learned and all that coursework was not wasted,” Bustin said.
