Old friends, new faces descend on Tucson for 16th Gem & Jam music festival

Gem & Jam celebrates its sweet 16 this weekend with a lineup of more than 50 acts on four stages over three days.

This year’s festival Friday, Feb. 2-Sunday, Feb. 4, at the Pima County Fairgrounds features a wide mix of musical genres, from the Colorado-based electronica DJ Of the Trees headlining opening night to the Philadelphia trance fusion electronica jam band Disco Biscuits on Saturday and the New York funk band Lettuce closing things out Sunday.

“That’s kind of one of the things that Gem and Jam has come to represent, a wide array of genres with connective tissues including jam music, funk and bluegrass, folk, singer and songwriter and electronica,” said Josh Pollack, a talent buyer and principal with the festival. “Really just looking for certain acts that have some element of fusion or crossover where they are all kind of a cohesive group of artists. We really approach this in a holistic fashion … to build the energy on stage night to night so that it flows aesthetically.”

Gem & Jam, which is not affiliated with the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show but is a complement to that event, will have live music on its stages from noon to midnight before the late-night stage fires up until 4 a.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 a.m. Sunday. Electronica music largely dominates the Emerald Stage, the fairgrounds main stage where it hosts its concerts during the county fair. Shows on the secondary stages will run simultaneous, giving the 5,000 or so people expected to attend each day different options. Pollack said that if someone wants to skip a main stage set, they can slip off to the Quartz Stage or the Opal, where you’ll find Arizona and Tucson bands including the progressive/electronic rock band The Bennu; the Jerry Garcia tribute band Legion of Mario; DJ Soundscrybe; and DJ Siv.

The Onyx stage is the secondary main stage that becomes the late night main stage once the Emerald lineup finishes.

“We definitely make a concerted effort to involve a lot of local talent including DJs and musicians and live painters and vendors,” Pollack said.

Long-awaited returns

The 2024 festival features the long-awaited return of Spafford, the Prescott jam band whose fans are fondly referred to as “Spaffnerds.” Pollack said it’s been seven or eight years since the band played Gem & Jam and when they did, they were on the early opening lineup. Since then, Spafford has gone on to record six studio albums and nine live albums, as well as appear in a number of big-name festivals including Atlanta’s Sweetwater 420 Fest alongside String Cheese Incident and Tedeschi Trucks Band.

They’ve also appeared at festivals with several of this year’s Gem & Jam bands including Disco Biscuits and Lettuce.

Disco Biscuits is another band making a long-awaited return to an Arizona stage. The jamtronica pioneers, who took their psychedelic rock, electronica, soul, blues, jazz and classical music influences into the jam band arena, haven’t released an album since 2011’s “Otherwise Law Abiding Citizens.”

In March, they will release “Revolution In Motion,” which they previewed with the release last year of “Revolution in Motion, Pt. 1,” the first of the album’s four parts.

“This is a cool opportunity for them to play. They are a stalwart in the jam band community,” Pollack said.

Lettuce, which played Gem & Jam several years ago, just finished its new album, which drummer Adam Deitch said should be released later this year. The album, whose title, Deitch said, hasn’t been determined, is a follow up to the band’s 2022 studio album “Unify.”

Deitch and his Lettuce bandmates — bass player Erick “Jesus” Coomes, Adam Smirnoff on guitar, saxophonist Ryan Zoidis, keyboardist and vocalist Nigel Hall and Eric “Benny” Bloom on trumpet and horns — have been playing together since they met while attending Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1992. Thirty-two years later, the bandmates still have fun.

“It is beyond fun. It is getting more and more fun every show,” said Deitch. “We’re calling each other: ‘I can’t wait to see you guys. I can’t wait to be on tour.’ After 30 years to still be saying that, and everyone is excited at the thought of going out, is the most beautiful thing.”

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Lettuce’s music leans more funk and soul with hip-hop vibes. Taking some cues from Earth, Wind & Fire when it comes to the prominence of horns in their music, the band is known to “improvise and stretch songs and have jammy moments,” Deitch said, “but I would put us more in the funk-soul-hip-hop category.”

“We just enjoy bringing that James Brown feel with some hip-hop beats and powerful horn section. There’s really not any other band out there that does what we do,” he said, adding that in Gem & Jam’s “totally eclectic lineup” with a strong emphasis on electronic dance, “I think we fit right in with that.”

Deitch’s other band on the Gem & Jam lineup is solidly in the electronica category, but Deitch said what he and keyboardist Borahm Lee do with their longtime project Break Science is a hybrid they call “livetronica” — a fusion of pre-recorded sampling with live music. Break Science, which is an opening act for Lettuce at 6:30 p.m. Sunday, has been around since 2008, when Deitch and Lee got together during a slow time for Lettuce.

The pair last February released their latest album “Mecha Flora,” recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown era. EDM.com praised the album’s “dreamy amalgam of funk fusion and jamtronica, featuring dancing keys, warping synths and irresistible rhythms.” Colorado’s 303 Magazine said the album is proof that the duo “are the perfect drivers to steer hip-hop and jamtronica into new horizons,” while the Daily Frequency calls the album a “profoundly meditative experience that’s inspiring and transformative.”

Break Science, one of the early pioneers of livetronica, is a different animal from Lettuce.

“We never quite fit into the EDM thing really, but now it’s a whole hybrid genre,” Deitch said. “So we’re very psyched to perform at Gem & Jam.”

Beyond concerts

For its 16th event, Gem & Jam is reuniting with the environmental festival organization Green Disco to introduce Eco-Bands, made from 100% hemp. The bands, which are an additional cost to the ticket price, offers special discounts to on-site vendors.

Green Disco is ramping up the Eco-Band program this year to support Tucson Million Trees Project and Tucson Clean & Beautiful. According to festival organizers, Green Disco hopes to raise enough money to plant 250 trees in the Tucson area.

According to its website, Green Disco has planted more than 93,000 trees in communities around the world through its efforts.

In addition to the return of Disco Biscuit and Break Science, other Gem & Jam repeat offenders include Denver DJ Maddy O’Neal and Polish-born DJ Michal Menert, and festival newcomers LA blues rockers Andy Frasco and the U.N., Indiana funk outfit The Main Squeeze, Americana-folk band Gone Gone Beyond, DJ Yheti, the German house music duo Booka Shade and electronica/hip-hop DJ Mr. Carmack.

The festival at the Pima County Fairgrounds, 11300 S. Houghton Road, will feature art and gem and mineral exhibits, as well as a number of workshops including the Topaz Healing Sanctuary with Adrian Adams-Reikim, who works with crystal healing; daily self-help Amethyst Workshops covering everything from stress reduction to self-love; and daily performances by the family-friendly Starseed Rainbow Family Circus, which will do several shows a day throughout the festival.

There also are daily drumming workshops and live painters in the art gallery, which will feature works by a number of local and national artists.

Three-day Gem & Jam passes start at $204.95 plus a $59.40 service fee; single day admission starts at $75 plus a $15 service fee through gemandjamfestival.com.