If music were food, Seattle's annual Bumbershoot festival would represent a bizarre buffet of disparate styles, a multi-course feeding frenzy that samples both sophisticated and frivolous tastes. While specialized gatherings like Lilith, Lollapalooza and Ozzfest have lost steam and, in many cases, gone away, Bumbershoot is a unique place where you can hear something new, different and worthwhile, but move on quickly if something doesn't capture your interest.

"I was blown away by the diversity," said drum wizard Michael Shrieve of his first Bumbershoot ten years ago. "There were out-of-the-ordinary performers in a variety of areas. It reminded me of the early days of the Fillmore, where you would see combinations like Miles Davis and the Grateful Dead on the same stage." (Shrieve, who led a percussionfest called Bumberdrum, is the only performer on this year's schedule to have played at the first Woodstock Festival.)

Any Type A music fan would approach this weekend with a calendar and a plan, calculating exact travel time between the stages. Some decisions were easy, like leaving the Urban Bush Women in time to see Tracy Chapman. Other decisions were tougher, like having to leave Kristen Hersh right when she hit her stride in order to get a decent seat for Ben Harper.

Monday headliners Harper and Joan Osborne both played smaller Bumbershoot stages when they were bubbling under. This year they took command. Osborne, who looked intensely serious while singing, couldn't stop smiling between songs. Playing a generous portion of her upcoming album, she ran back and forth to please the eager crowd. But by the time she kicked into the "One of Us" encore it was time to see what else was on the menu.

While Bumbershoots featured multiple stages from the beginning, it is only recently that modern festivals have gone non-linear. It's as if the concert-going audience has watched too much TV and spent too much time online. They always crave change. So this is perfect for anyone with musically inclined attention deficit syndrome.

Consider this voyage, on Saturday afternoon:

Australian bopper band Savage Garden filled a soccer stadium with girls hardly old enough to drive. Lead singer Darren Hays went through all the predictable motions -- pounding his chest loud enough to hear through the PA, playing to each side of the stage, starting a sing-a-long of the chorus -- and the kids ate it up. A lot of people didn't get it: At stage right, a pair of fresh-faced emergency medical technicians (there mostly to distribute earplugs) mouthed every word as their bemused supervisor looked on.

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Poet Brett Axel pushed animated recitations of several poems, including a stunningly personal account of how his mother never told him she was gay, something that was common knowledge to the entire town. "You beat the hell out of your children, but that wasn't you exactly. You were never yourself around me."

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Chris Ballew, who filled the main stage three years ago as part of the Presidents of the United States of America , performed a series of warped growing-up songs from a hillside known as the Children's Stage. Particularly skewed was "You Could Put Your Eye Out," which managed to turn childhood's most serious warning into something funny and weird.

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In a long dark room masquerading as a dance club, a pig-tailed, fresh-faced Heather Duby led a strong four-piece through some darkly beautiful, atmospheric tunes. Duby's ethereal voice crashed against the fuzz-toned backdrops, mostly original aside from a cover of Tim Buckley 's "I Must Have Been Blind." Joyful and loud, the band had to restart a song (appropriately) called "Falter" when they realized that the guitar wasn't plugged in. Up to then, the audience and the band were so wrapped up in the sound they didn't notice.

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Admittedly, these clicks aren't quite as smooth as on your average cable system, you need to factor in travel time. Still, none of these trips -- from stadium to classroom to hill to club -- took more than ten minutes.

It would be ridiculous for any one observer to say that any single act defined Bumbershoot -- mainly because it would be impossible to see everything. Still, Tony Levin's band came pretty close. Supported by synth artist Larry Fast, drummer Jerry Marotta and guitarist Jesse Gress -- a Todd Rundgren doppelganger dressed in really bad pajamas -- Levin's indefinable sound had elements of pop, classical, jazz and everything in between; genre-bending music that encapsulated the festival and its purpose.

The weather held all weekend, which is always a question in Seattle (oddly enough, the umbrella reference in the festival's title isn't just about the rain, but was intended to indicate its stature as an "umbrella" festival that included smaller gatherings). People had their fill of new, unusual music and didn't get any heavier -- aside from the weight of the CDs they may have picked up at the convenient little kiosks outside each hall.

When you come away from Bumbershoot it's like leaving a really good restaurant," Shrieve said. "It was worth the wait, and the food was good."

CHARLES BERMANT
(September 5, 2000)