The South Coast community was rocked last February when the Zeiterion Theatre announced the cancellation of the New Bedford Folk Festival. In existence for 25 years, the event was one of the most popular and successful of its kind in the Northeast, a cultural and economic engine that attracted fans and performers from throughout North America for a two-day event that was a highlight of summer in New Bedford.
But if every crisis is an opportunity, local musician and organizer Jeff Angeley had a vision that would help keep summertime music flourishing downtown — the New Bedford Roots & Branches Festival, a one-day event dedicated to acoustic music, boasting the slogan, “Everything Acoustic By and For the People.”
Stressing that the event is decidedly different from the festival that preceded it, Angeley said his vision is one of a diversity of genres and instrumentation, relying on musicians from throughout the South Coast and the southeastern New England region. Taking place from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 22, the festival will feature six different stages with 30 acts in downtown businesses and other public locations, with each stage devoted to a specific strain of acoustic music. Ranging from singer/songwriters to folk rock, traditional to experimental, this free event has a something-for-everyone approach that provides visitors with opportunities to discover new styles and artists in addition to acts they are already familiar with.
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As Angeley’s brainchild, the festival combines his experiences as a concert organizer while building on connections he has made as a musician in the New Bedford area since moving here in the early 2000s.
But Angeley’s vision is not coming to fruition alone. He is teamed with three other local musicians who are bandmates of his in the indie folk band, Pebbles of Rain — Christian Camarao, Sam Babineau and Steven Brum. Together the foursome is handling the array of logistics and business-related tasks that the festival requires.
A city-sponsored event, the project began taking shape in early March, shortly after the Zeiterion’s announcement. It will not include vendors and merchants like the New Bedford Folk Festival, but Angeley said he sees the event as a long-term contributor to the city and is already envisioning elements for future festivals.
A native of Taunton and a graduate of UMass-Lowell with a degree in American studies, Angeley plays multiple stringed instruments in addition to keyboards. A Mattapoisett resident, he is currently a music instructor at Southcoast Lessons.
Angeley’s booking career got its start as a Taunton teen, putting together shows of local bands at area halls and social clubs, and he continued booking shows during his time in Lowell. Over the years he organized acoustic bluegrass and traditional-oriented bands that grew to ticketed events. In his 30s, he and ex-wife Benares Finan Eshelman were booking the Whaling Country Showcase, a bi-annual event that featured local and touring bands. At the age of 35, he was responsible for presenting events at Hatch Street Studios in New Bedford that included traditional music and dance on multiple stages with an emphasis on cultural diversity. He has also hosted open mic events at the Mattapoisett Museum. Since 2017, he has been at the helm of the monthly “Old Time Fiddle Session and Community Gathering,” which takes place in South Coast locations on the fourth Sunday of each month.
The New Bedford Light sat down with Angeley to talk about the rewards and challenges of organizing such an undertaking, how it is similar and different from the New Bedford Folk Festival, and his thoughts on the future of the event.
New Bedford Light: When did the idea for the festival come to you and how did it evolve? What was the genesis of the idea?
Jeff Angeley: When the announcement came in mid-February that there wasn’t going to be a Folk Festival, I said to Sam, Christian and Steve, there’s an opportunity. If we do this, it’s going to be an awfully large amount of work and it’s going to be very difficult to pull off. But if it works and we put the time in then this is something that we can kind of oversee the creative vision of for years to come. And we could build something that we think is really, really great. And if we didn’t take the opportunity now somebody else is going to do that.
I had no expectations to overtake an existing festival. I’m not crazy. I did hope, because they had suggestion boxes, that [the New Bedford Folk Festival] would be awesome if it had some Cape Verdean, Portuguese and Guatemalan music and more participatory stuff, because those are my thing. This is a place where I think it’s really important to iterate what my understanding of what goes on with this is — I’m an event organizer, I organize events. And when I organize them I organize events that I think will be awesome. What my vision is is altruistic, and I want to build something that I think is good for everybody. And I fully believe that Alan and Helene Korolenko (organizers of the New Bedford Folk Festival) were exactly the same in that way, they had a different vision. There were things that they were passionate about, that they loved, and they made a friggin’ awesome thing happen. … They busted their ass for 25 years and they made killer stuff happen on their vision. I can tell you, I’m sure there will be people on July 23 who will be like, “I loved that — I wish you had this here too.”
I put all of the time that I could into this festival. I built what I thought I could. It’s nice to have the input. There will not be an ounce of time left when we’re done organizing this thing — your time and your sweat into something you think is beautiful. I believe in their vision because it bore beautiful fruit, and ours is a lot different.
NBL: How did you choose the venues?
JA: We knew that we wanted venues that were places that functioned as businesses downtown to begin with. And we also knew that we wanted an outdoor space in Wings Court, and we were hoping to have the venues be a close walking distance to them. So that was the starting point.
It was a consideration which rooms seemed like they would be decent setups for music rooms, but there was also the other consideration of people that I was excited to work with who had spaces over there too. One of the rooms we have, Destination Soups, is not a particularly large room but I love Devin (Byrnes, owner), I love working with Devin. He’s also a music guy who puts on events, and I knew that if he was interested in being a part of it that it would work very well.
The Pour Farm is right next to Wings Court as well, and that just seemed like an ideal setup as well. We have one stage of bands that are of the folk rock kind of persuasion that are more likely to have a drum set or an electric bass player, bands that are a little bit louder in general. And so having a bar, pub-like restaurant would be a really good fit. And honestly, the last two venues came together the slowest. We had the same general premise — looking for something close and walkable to Wings Court.
The first is the hallway of the Bristol building, which is an awesome venue. The hallway adjoins Calico, and the Green Bean, and Hewn, and First Edition Collectibles. And then the last venue came together last for us — April Evans’ Beauty Lounge, which is really interesting.
NBL: How did your experience as a local musician benefit you when you were trying to put this event together?
JA: This would be impossible if I wasn’t, I think, both a local musician and an event organizer in the past. One of the things that happened with what we’re doing is that we found ourselves in a position, just the way that this played out, of trying to put this thing together quickly. So we didn’t get started until essentially the first week of March. And the first three things to do were to get musicians to actually be booked for the festival and to find a way to make it feasible to pay these musicians to have a festival. And to find venues to have a festival in. When we initially went looking for people we didn’t know what we had for money. We knew that we were planning on having money and we knew that we would do fundraising, but we had no idea exactly what the scope of that was going to look like. We knew what our plans were, but we didn’t know where our money was coming from.
The first thing we did was we made a list of musicians that we knew regionally who would be interested in doing something like this and we whittled it down to the 30 people that we were going to ask because, one, we liked their music, but two, we had a previous working or playing or personal relationship with them. And it wouldn’t be weird to call them, text them or email them, and then say, “Would you be interested in this festival? We would love to have you there, this is a very real thing and you will get paid and we’ll do right by you.”
That was all we were able to send at first. We told people in early March when we sent that out, “We’ll be able to give you a static number of what that looks like within the month,” even if that means that we’re putting our necks on the line for what we think we can do.
NBL: How did you select the performers? What was the criteria?
JA: Three things. … One, we really wanted local and regional stuff. We wanted bands that represented the community. That was something that we felt was, in a lot of ways, lacking in other large-scale festivals around here, and so we went after that right away.
Another thing was what people need. There was the discussion that “What if a band is local or regional but is a larger-scale band that is typically doing touring shows?” The standard that we came up with is that anybody who needs a “green room” is probably not going to be a fit for us. If you need a “green room” you’re calling the wrong people. It was smaller-scale kind of stuff.
Our target region is that we have people from as far north as Boston, we have some Cape Codders, we’ve got people from as far out as Providence, that’s kind of our circle right now. I could see in the future getting people from Worcester and stuff like that.
It got booked very quickly the way that we did it, and then we had people inquiring that we wish we had thought of. But there were only 30 slots in this festival. We all had different things that we were excited about, we all had a vision for things that we wanted to have beyond the scope of our contacts. We did a lot of work.
At the beginning, we sat down and we said, “Let’s not make a festival that is full of people from the exact same European-American playing an acoustic guitar demographic. Let’s get Cape Verdean music, let’s get Guatemalan music, let’s get Portuguese music, let’s get stuff that is representative of the city.
In the end, that was partially successful. We were striving for a festival that’s appealing to everybody who lives here, and that is diverse. So we want a festival that is representative. We’re going to be putting on a festival that is a few blocks from the Cape Verdean Band Club. There’s an active Cape Verdean music community here, there’s a gigantic Cape Verdean community across the entire South Coast, so we wanted Cape Verdean music.
The hardest thing with setting up a festival that has community representation that’s outside the community that’s easy for us to reach is that once these connections are made they’re there. Contacts lead to other contacts. Our main goal was to get Cape Verdean music, Guatemalan music, and then some of the ethno-centric music of the area that is prevalent like Portuguese music. It’s something that has not been represented in folk music circles in the past. We’ve got two of the three genres we wanted and we’re hoping in future years that we can get all three. We worked really, really hard to make the festival diverse and we’re happy with the amount of work that we did for it.
NBL: The New Bedford Folk Festival had visitors from around the country. What will the geographical range be for visitors for this event?
JA: I don’t know. I have no idea who is coming. The nice thing is that’s not my measuring stick. If we’ve got people there who enjoy music and we’ve got musicians there who are happy to play it, and at the end of the day I can say there were a bunch of people here and we had a great event that’s all I care about.
As far as how many people are coming and where they’re coming from, I think that there’s a possibility that some people will come because there’s a parallel here between this and folk festival events of the past. We’re a pretty different event.
NBL: Compare and contrast with the Folk Festival. How is NB Roots & Branches different and similar?
JA: I think that there are more differences than similarities.
Similarities — it’s nice to be able to build off of a standing tradition of having acoustic music in the streets of downtown New Bedford, and I think that the Korolenkos and the Zeiterion, but largely the Korolenkos, poured their heart and soul into it for 25 years, and they made it so that people think of summer in New Bedford as something synonymous with music in the streets. And in that we really benefit from the similarities and from the passion and the time that was poured into it by those individuals who made it happen. It’s beneficial to us that that existed before.
There will probably be people who arrive at our festival by way of the fact that they see it and they think, “I usually go to New Bedford in the summer for an acoustic music festival and here’s another acoustic music festival that looks similar.”
And admittedly there is a big overlap in the programming. Places where we overlap — there are singer/songwriter performances on our bill. There are even people on our bill that would have been on the last few years of the New Bedford Folk Festival. A lot of them are South Coast Stage folks, people who were on the local stage at the Folk Festival. And also, some of the stuff that they would have done on early mornings on a Saturday or a Sunday, like the Sea Shanty Choir and Sharp Note Singing kind of stuff. We have both of those acts.
But we have more traditional programming, more participatory programming. We also have an Old Tyme jam, and a bluegrass jam, and an Irish session, things that were not part of the previous festival. We have traditional Portuguese music and dance, traditional Cape Verdean music, and a bunch of jams. Early years of the New Bedford Folk Festival had more traditional stuff, more so than in the last decade or so.
We have a broader definition of what we’re doing. We’re not a folk festival as such. We have folk music at our festival, but we have a stage that’s dedicated to experimental music. We have a stage that has a trio that’s working with a cello, a viola, and a clarinet. We have a drummer whose performance will be more percussion-based. We have Carl Simmons, and I really don’t know what he’ll be doing. Carl might go up there and be the most traditional thing at the festival, but there’s a chance that he’ll go up there and do something the likes of which you’ve never heard before. And that’s the awesome thing about Carl. It’s a free-form stage.
There’s another stage that’s kind of like — and I hate labels and genres because they come to mean nothing — more of an Indie folk stage that’s got chamber music components, acoustic music with Indie components. Then there is a stage with what you might expect from a folk festival. The stage at Destination Soups is largely solo and duo performers singing songs that they wrote on acoustic instruments. And then the Pour Farm stage is more of a dance stage, so you’ll get bands like The Jethros, Hot Club Cheese Roll, a bluegrass band, 14 Strings. It’s more dance bands and roots rock, folk rock, whatever you want to call it.
I think that we have a pretty broad palette that we’re working with as far as acoustic music and I would like it to be broader. That’s the goal. We have things that are definitely jazz, we have things that are experimental, we have things that are very rooted in traditional, we have singer/songwriter stuff, we have chamber-y Indie stuff. And I would love to see it expand from there. It’s an acoustic music festival with folk elements, but with other bands.
NBL: You keep mentioning that this is only your ‘first year.’ What is this the start of in your mind? What’s your vision?
JA: Well, the nice and easy answer is, what we’d all like is to have this thing grow in a way that is self-sustainable and organic where there is a central festival that we organize, but that’s not the only thing going on. …
There’s a festival in Tennessee, on the Virginia/Tennessee border, called the Bristol Border Bash, in the town of Bristol, which is in both states. The reason for the festival is that was the first place where a lot of the founding fathers of country music were first recorded. RCA Records went into Bristol and said, “We’ll give $50 to anybody who wants to come down here and sing songs.” But what they do now is, you go down there to the festival and they have a central area but most of what goes on is that every laundromat, every Chinese restaurant, every boutique has people playing at it. So when you go, the entire town is active. The show is not a show, it’s that the entire town has music.
The same thing happens with the Lowell Folk Festival, to a lesser extent. It has a lot of stages. It’s very well organized. It’s the largest free folk festival in North America. Every coffee shop, every little business has music. The idea of creating something that doesn’t become a production juggernaut, where the thing is sustained from local businesses having local musicians in a small area of the city that expands outward in a way that’s kind of natural and sustainable.
Sean McCarthy is a freelance writer and frequent correspondent for The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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