PENINSULA PROFILE: This pair promotes music across Peninsula

SEQUIM — The long list of bands, from big-name to home-town, would not fit onto the poster.

So what do you do, when you’re designing the iconic image for a music festival, and space is too tight to include the local bands?

If you’re Anna Yates, you find a way. In wild colors.

Anna, the creator of the 2014 Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts poster — now a T-shirt too — has figured out how to fit lists onto fliers, artfully. She does the same thing in her life, a jammed one balanced on community and artistic expression.

“I like multi-tasking. I feel really blessed to be doing all that I’m doing,” said Anna, who is wife to Bill Yates and mother to Zoe, 11, Loudon, 6, and Roo, 4.

She also works as community outreach and volunteer coordinator at Five Acre School in Dungeness.

Bill, a sound engineer and music producer, runs Dungeness Community Studios, where bands including FarmStrong and the Old Sidekicks have recorded albums in front of live audiences. Anna’s art lair is part of the studios, which are behind the Yateses’ home.

Zoe helped her mother choose the hues for the Juan de Fuca Festival poster, while Bill dubbed them “Dr. Seuss colors.” These are “Green Eggs and Ham blue and Fox in Socks green,” he says.

“I like the hand-drawn stuff,” Anna adds, showing a visitor the artwork she drew for Sugar Beet Baby, the new line of lavender products for children at Jardin du Soleil, the organic farm just up the road.

Yes, it’s hard to put hand-drawn posters and labels into production, but Anna notes that Lynda Perry at In Graphic Detail in Sequim “has taken care of me every step of the way.”

Anna didn’t think her design would be the chosen one for the 21st annual Juan de Fuca Festival.

“It’s so different from anything we’ve had before,” said Carol Pope, a longtime staffer with the Memorial Day weekend event. But “those really colors pop.”

And it helped that Anna fit some three dozen festival acts onto the thing, including eight local groups.

Behind the scenes, Anna and Bill both support and add to the local music community. This summer will bring the second annual Jungible Festival, a day of music, food and play at Jardin du Soleil.

The Yateses joined the lavender farm’s relatively new owners, Paul and Jordan Schiefen, last year to produce the festival. Envisioning an outdoor, kid-friendly party, Anna and Jordan formed Come Together Productions, and chose the 17th-century word jungible for its connotations of, well, coming together.

Which is what happened when the two couples put the word out. Patty McManus Huber of Nash’s Organic Produce, the McCartheys at Dungeness Valley Creamery and Ellie Schmidt of Sunny Farms Country Store came forward with a “We’re in,” Anna said, and soon there were healthful foods and children’s activities to go with the lineup of bands.

The first Jungible Festival didn’t turn a big profit. But “we did well enough to do it again. And the bands had a good time,” said Anna.

Bill described the moment when, for him, the fest was a success. His best friend, a guy who does not dance, did. He was out there by the lavender, fully engaged with Polyrhythmics, the eight-piece Seattle band specializing in African rhythms.

Polyrhythmics will be back for the 2014 Jungible Festival, set for Saturday, Sept. 13, at Jardin du Soleil, 3932 Sequim-Dungeness Way about 4 miles north of town.

The band Br’er Rabbit from Bellingham and Armstrong Lawton Katz, a group blending players from Dungeness and Seattle, are also on the list. Another three or four bands will be added. But the event will retain its grass-roots feeling, Bill said.

“This is where we live. We’re not at The Gorge,” he quipped, referring to the Columbia River-side amphitheater where the giant Sasquatch! festival happens Memorial Day weekend.

Cort Armstrong is the Dungeness player in Armstrong Lawton Katz — and an array of other bands including Blue Rooster and FarmStrong. The latter recorded a CD, “Live in Dungeness: The Summer Sessions” in Bill and Anna’s studios in 2013. The year before that, Cort, his wife Kia and a small flock of guest musicians made an album, also called “Live in Dungeness,” with Bill at the helm.

The experience “was kind of magical,” said Kia.

“The studio is so beautiful and cozy. In our case, the musicians were not amplified. The audience was hearing the raw music,” she added.

Anna created the artwork for both CDs, giving them a country-folk look befitting the music inside.

Cort, for his part, hails Bill Yates as one of the best recording engineers he’s worked with.

“Bill promotes the idea of recording live because of the interaction with the audience,” Cort said. “It’s a challenge to do any kind of live thing,” but the result, while not without its imperfections, was what the musicians hoped for.

Cort has worked with producers who had differing ideas of what the recording should sound like. And when musicians and producer don’t — in Cort’s

word — resonate, it hurts

the performance.

Bill, in high contrast, seeks to bring out the band’s essence. That’s more important than making a technically flawless record, Cort believes.

Bill is himself a songwriter, singer and guitarist. He used to appear with other local musicians at the Buzz, the Sequim cafe that held open-mic night every Wednesday for years before closing in 2012.

Anna and Bill met in Nashville while both were students at David Lipscomb College, now Lipscomb University. They eloped to New Orleans in April 1991, then moved around some before coming to Seattle. They would go camping on the Olympic Peninsula — until they found a house, surrounded by farm fields, that they could make their home.

Bill’s musician-building contractor friends have helped him construct and expand Dungeness Community Studios. And like Anna, Bill wants to use his skills to bring other local artists into the light.

Making a record, he said, is like putting up a big, open piece of butcher paper and finger-painting on it together.

A music festival, be it Juan de Fuca in May or Jungible in September, can be like that too. When you’re an artist, when you play music, it spills over naturally into the rest of your life.

With the Jungible Festival, it was “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” says Bill. Then, “OK, let’s try it.”

“He’s incorrigible,” Anna says of her husband of 23 years.

“We’re peas in a pod.”