Robin Rapuzzi has been busted for playing the washboard.
It happened in New Orleans, in the years after Hurricane Katrina, when cops were cracking down hard on street musicians and “tumultuous behavior” apparently applied to performing in a jug band. Rapuzzi, washboard player for Tuba Skinny, didn’t let the infraction stop him. And on Saturday, Aug. 1, he brought that tumultuous behavior to Lewistown, kicking off Centerfest 2026.
The temperature hit triple digits, which felt appropriate given the festival’s New Orleans theme. But heat never stopped a party in the Crescent City, and it wasn’t going to stop one at Creekside Marketplace and Pavilion either. Volunteers roamed the crowd with ice packs and spray bottles. Volunteer and safety coordinator Cathy Barta made it her personal mission to keep people comfortable and safe, her careful planning the main reason everyone stayed cool on an uncomfortable day — smiling and laughing as she went, bringing joy to a crowd already brimming with it. And when the heat became too much, people wandered down to the creek, dunked their heads, and came back baptized, ready for more.
The fifth annual was founder and organizer Renee Rummans and Sarah Smith’s most ambitious Centerfest yet. What started with around 40 volunteers now draws 130. Ticket buyers represented 15 states, from Hawaii to Florida to New York, as well as all over the state. Locals also turned out in droves, grateful to see such an extraordinary lineup come to their backyard.
The buy-in, Renee said, is really what made this happen.
“Centerfest has never been something I could build by myself, and honestly, I don’t think I’d want it to be,” Renee said. “Every year it takes an army of volunteers, sponsors who believe in the vision, vendors who bring their own energy and creativity and ticket buyers who make the decision to say, ‘Yes, I want this to exist here.’”
Street music comes to the High Plains
“Part of that vision is intentionally bringing music to Central Montana that people might never expect to hear in Lewistown,” Renee added. “New Orleans brass, street jazz, ukulele virtuosos, brass-house, Scottish rock, funk, world music — sometimes our lineup makes people say, ‘You’re bringing who to where?’ And I love that.”
Tuba Skinny kicked things off the right way — playing songs from their 2024 album Hot Town. “Hot’s going around,” Rapuzzi said, surveying the scorched crowd with a grin. Music director Shaye Cohn led the band through originals and classics alike — “Nobody’s Business,” “Mississippi Sheets,” “Pyramid Strut” — authentic early jazz and ragtime and blues that felt like it belonged on a French Quarter corner. Because it did. They brought the street to Lewistown, and Lewistown received it gratefully.
Hawaiian ukulele virtuoso Taimane followed. Part Samoan, part Arizonan, all fire, Taimane — whose name means “Diamond” — brought her trio, a percussionist from Puerto Rico, a guitarist who is also an engineer and her dancer Li’o, who performed the Haka and more. She blended Beethoven’s 5th Symphony into “Aerials” by System of a Down into “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin. She mashed Stairway to Heaven with Für Elise. She got out into the crowd, weaving between lawn chairs, playing immaculate solos while moving the whole time.
She also asked the crowd what she should eat while she was in Montana. Someone suggested walleye.
“Fish?” she said. “Girls from Hawaii love fish.”
In gratitude, she launched into Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and earned one of the loudest ovations of the day. “Yee-ha!” she yelled, grinning. Despite the heat, she kept on. “I feel like I’m in a hot pilates class,” she joked, launching into a haunting cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games.”
Then came Too Many Zooz — Leo Pellegrino on saxophone, Matt “Doe” Muirhead on trumpet and keys, David “King of Sludge” Parks on drums — a brass-house trio that got their start in the New York City subway system and turned that sidewalk energy into genre-bending jazz fusion mixed with club music and pop: Chemical Brothers meets Herbie Hancock. Leo really puts on a show, dancing all the way. He even twerked and moonwalked. Like Taimane, he went into the crowd and grooved, playing ferociously fast. It was less a concert and more an athletic spectacle — “saxual” healing for a crowd that didn’t know it needed it.
Between sets, people drifted to the creek. They dunked their heads. They refueled at Antoinette’s food truck, where the jambalaya was spicy, the catfish was fresh and the gator bites — well, they really fit the theme. Vendors lined the grounds. The smell of Poky Smoky BBQ drifted through the heat. Cold beer from Big Spring Brewing helped everyone keep the faith, as did cold brews from the Rising Trout booth.
KT Tunstall: ‘Our focus makes our reality’
KT Tunstall returned to Centerfest for the second straight year, and she made clear she’d keep coming back as long as they’ll have her. A Scotland native, she told me she considers Montana “Scotland’s big brother.” She loved the drive in from Bozeman. The antelope. The bison. The big sky. Made her feel at home.
Playing solo with her looper, KT was all over the map in the best possible way — telling stories, making fun of herself and the industry, doing a spot-on Louis Armstrong mouth horn impression, launching into the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” seemingly on a whim. She covered Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down” and the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” (“they are a weird band, and I love that a song like that became so popular,” she said afterward). She mashed “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” with Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” and The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” She shared the story of her song “Look At Me Now” not making it into the sequel for “Devil Wears Prada.” She went for it, considering her song “Suddenly I See” became a smash hit after appearing in the original. She took this as an opportunity to encourage the crowd to try and fail — because the attempt is always worth it.
This is a motto of hers, and it bleeds into what she chooses to write about and how she goes about each performance, no matter where in the world she might be. “Our focus makes our reality,” she said.
Fortunately for KT, and for the crowd, we stopped focusing so much on the heat at this time, as clouds came to the rescue. KT dedicated her set to those clouds, thanking them for providing “sweet, sweet relief.”
Trombone Shorty: Get Down, Lewistown
The sun was finally losing its grip on Lewistown. The temperature had dropped a few merciful degrees, the creek had done its work, and somewhere between the jambalaya and the cold beer, the crowd had found its second wind. The stage was set — literally and figuratively — for what everyone had been waiting for: Trombone Shorty.
I saw him once before — at Tipitina’s in New Orleans, first Mardi Gras after Katrina, when a city was pulling itself back together through the only means it knew how. He marched through the crowd playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and I felt something I didn’t have words for. Music as resurrection. A culture refusing to be extinguished.
He brought that same spirit to Lewistown, and the response was similar. People got up. People got down. They were smiling and grooving and blown away by what was happening in their little town at the geographic center of the state. Shorty played trombone, trumpet, sang, danced and was everywhere at once — Dr. John grooves mixed with modern hip-hop and rock, his guitarist John Maestas laying in Latin flavors, some Santana-like licks in the mix. Dave Rummans, Renee’s other half (who said he could have never envisioned a music festival like this in his hometown), was shaking his head. “Trombone might be in his name, but he does everything,” Dave said. “It’s not fair.” Dave could tell Trombone Shorty learned a thing or two from his years touring with Lenny Kravitz, and we wondered if Lenny felt the same way: “Hey, Trombone, stay in your lane!”
But Trombone Shorty is gonna do what he’s gonna do. In Lewistown, he came to do one thing: get down. And that he did. So did we.
I’m not sure what Trombone Shorty expected exactly, but at the end of the night, he gave Renee a big hug and told her he wants to come back. That hug says everything about what Centerfest has become. Five years in, Renee has built something that world-class artists want to return to — not because Lewistown is easy to get to, but because of what they find when they arrive. A community that shows up. Volunteers who care. A crowd that listens and dances and dunks its head in a creek and comes back for more.
There are still people in town who don’t quite get it. That’s alright. Renee is going to keep it growing.
“I want a kid to hear an instrument they’ve never heard before, or someone to walk away with a new favorite artist,” she said. “Every ticket purchased and every person who shows up is really a vote for bringing extraordinary experiences to a place like Central Montana. That’s what keeps me building it.”
The late John Lewis called it “good trouble.” That tumultuous behavior Robin Rapuzzi once got busted for was on full display by the wide array of artists, each bringing their own flavor and culture with them, making for a magical day in the middle of Montana.
As published in Montana Adams Multi Media publications, including the Lewistown News-Argus and the Stillwater County News, with some alternate photos and a few additions.
charliebigsky.com 
Leave a comment