Music Festival

A Festival of Carols in Brass
$7.99
Through all the years, this still remains the best Christmas brass album available. The playing is wonderful and the arrangements great. You cannot go wrong here and there are lots of carols. It is very affordable and great to listen to. Highest recommendation.

Live At Mile High Music Festival
$12.99
This album really gets me going, much like all DMB music does. However, this one in particular is special. I have all the popular live albums (Central Park, Chicago, Red Rocks, Luther College, etc.) but the professionalism combined with authenticity in Live at Mile High just does it for me. Listen to Two-Step, Jimi Thing, and Ants Marching on this album, and I know you'll understand. Everything is just so well executed!

The Music Festival Guide: For Music Lovers and Musicians
$18.95
Hark the the authors of gentlenaught! Quite a fanciful book indeed, but for where art thine Druid Folk Festival? Missing? Aye, missing indeed. Where lutes are lusty, women busty, and the bards do belt with drunk advance, you'll find me and mine singing and dancing with my boots outside my pants.

Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair (American History Through Music)
$72.95
I have been a collector of books and info on Woodstock for many years. This encyclopedia is best suited for those who are learning about Woodstock for the first time, or who want an introduction to what can be further understood on the internet or through some other stellar books that can be found used. It is written in a research paper style and prose, with 40 pages of Bibliography and Index and is all formally annotated. The only ones who should spend the considerable cash on this book should be either libraries or wealthy research paper-assigned students. Books on Woodstock do not tend to go beyond 1 softcover printing, so in 2005, this may be the only book currently in print on the subject. Woodstock69.com has links to fantastic sources of info within and outside it's site for those who want a really passionate and robust information from those who were there producing it and attending it (yes, really). The author mostly refers to info from established press sources like Rolling Stone, etc. I keep going back to Joel Makower's book 'Woodstock: the oral history' as the best book on the subject, that can still be found used.

The encyclopedia includes short essays on other well-known festivals that led up to Woodstock and followed it for a few years. The essays basically expain some basic info on them and then differentiate them from Woodstock.
The next set of essays differentiate the 3 official Woodstocks and Day In the Garden events. There is some good detail given to newbies, but offers thin insights for the bulk of reference it is culled from. The next set of essays attempt to describe Woodstock '69 in detail, but does a shameful job of detail when compared with other accounts. A full festival setlist is given, but it is based on outdated lists from thewoodstockproject.com. Next we have an A-Z list of Woodstock subjects that are mostly less than a paragraph and certainly incomplete.
I was expecting a book that would have hopefully compiled all the great knowledge on the festival into 1 tome with a fantastic collection of pictures-a virtual 1-stop Woodstock info shopping experience. Instead, we get very few photos, all of which are small, in B&W, most of which are poorly printed and not much that isn't found in other sources. After reading through this work, I was left with very little new information that I had probably just forgotten. Some of Woodstock's most interesting stuff of legend is left out altogether.
The rest of the encyclopedia is all Biblio & Index.

You make the call.