Bonnie Vining will produce her final Tucson concert this weekend, a show Saturday night with the Minnesota bluegrass band Monroe Crossing.
By mid-summer, Vining, a longtime fixture in Tucson’s music community as one of its staunchest champions of indie-inclined, acoustic-centered, folk-leaning Americana musicians, will leave Tucson for a tropical retirement in Costa Rica.
“I’m going to let the wind take me for a while. I want to play on the beach with my husband (Joe) and dog. Go for walks in nature. I want to look up in the trees and enjoy the birds and the monkeys. I want to learn how to cook healthy meals,” the 61-year-old mused recently. “At some point, it could get boring. And then I’m going to see.”
Vining will leave her job as director of the 593-seat Vail Theatre of the Arts on Tucson’s far southeast side on June 30. She’s been with the theater, which is part of the Vail School District, since 2009.
Her career in music started five years earlier, and quite by happenstance. Vining, who studied accounting in college and worked as a software engineer, found herself in 2002 reapplying for her job when the company switched hands. The new owner was offering reduced wages for the same job she had been doing for 20 years, so Vining decided that maybe it was time to switch gears.
She opened the small Javalina’s Coffee and Friends shop in a Rita Ranch area strip mall in late 2003. Two weeks later, in early January 2004, she hosted the first of what became a popular intimate concert series that kicked off with Nashville-based Grammy-nominated musician Arvil Bird, a Celtic Indian whose instrumental repertoire includes fiddle, Native American flute and Irish whistles.
“It just kind of happened,” she said, explaining that she had invited Bird to perform when he was in town for the annual Rillito Park powwow. “The coffee shop was just a natural place to host music,” said Vining, who was friends with Bird’s wife.
The event was not exactly a success. “We had six people at the concert, and here’s someone who’s a multiple Grammy nominee, a Native American musician of the year,” Vining said.
Bird didn’t seem to mind the low turnout; he returned to Javelina’s — the name is pronounced with a hard “J” not “H” as in the peccary — every year.
Vining also was not discouraged. She invited Tucson duo Bright & Childers to be regulars and hosted a handful of Tucson acoustic musicians, most of them folkies. With each show, more people showed up. And more musicians started calling asking if they could play.
“It was not unusual for me to come home at 10 o’clock at night and have dozens of messages from artists wanting to play,” she said. “There wasn’t any kind of career path; it just kind of happened.”
About 750 concerts later, Vining sold Javelina’s in late 2008. Within two months, she had launched the second chapter of her music career — Live Acoustic Venue Association.
LAVA presented acoustic concerts at venues around town, including Abounding Grace Church on South Kolb Road, Civana and in Summerhaven on Mount Lemmon, which was arguably Vining’s most ambitious venture.
The summer “Music On the Mountain” concert series presented challenges on many fronts, not the least of which was to convince audiences and artists to make the trek up the mountain on Sunday afternoons. Vining ran the series for three summers. The series went on hiatus in 2012 and returned in 2013, its final year.
Vining left LAVA in spring 2013 so that she could devote her attention and energy to the Vail Theater. Among the highlights of her tenure there was hosting a concert in 2010 with Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founding member John McEuen. Audience demand forced the concert into the parking lot, she recalled.
Vining isn’t ruling out future chapters in her music career, but she is determined to keep her musical ambitions to hobby level.
“I don’t want to get back into doing it several nights a week. That’s not retirement,” she said, conceding that if a musician friend decides to take her up on her open invitation to visit in Costa Rica, she will round up an audience for an impromptu performance.
“Life took the path it was supposed to take. Music promoting for me was never anything I made a living at. It was just something that happened as it happened,” she said.
