After a two-year Covid hiatus, CT Folk returns this year with a changed Folk Festival and Green Expo. It’s still at Edgerton Park, and it still combines a music festival with a dedication to furthering environmental causes. But it’s now a two-day event — Sept. 10 and 11 — featuring its most diverse lineup yet, from solo singer-songwriters to R&B and jam bands to hip hop artists. If the shift seems abrupt, it shouldn’t; rather, it’s the fruition of an intention CT Folk stated years ago to expand its musical boundaries, exploring what folk music means and what it can be in 2022. For its organizers, the hope is that the festival can reach more and more people, in New Haven and beyond, and help turn the festival into a larger regional tentpole end-of-summer event.
McGurk and Heriot-Mikula.
Reassembling the festival “has really been an opportunity to reimagine it,” said Nicole Heriot-Mikula, the festival’s director. “We were all so anxious and hopeful coming out of 2021. ‘Folk at the Edge’ ” — the series of outdoor summer concerts CT Folk threw at Edgewood Park — “was lovely, and we really enjoyed being at Edgewood Park.” But Heriot-Mikula and the board members of CT Folk realized that with the festival and expo, “everything that we’d said we’d wanted to do before, now is the time to do it.… Two days? The board approved it. Two stages? Moving forward.”
The larger festival is partially the result of an expanded budget. “We have a very active board that solidified grants this year,” including from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the National Endowment for the Arts. “They leveled us up in a big way,” Heriot-Mikula said. The organization also “has a donor who believes in our mission, which is a really awesome confidence boost in knowing that the direction that I lead us in” will balance “creative growth” with “the necessary growth.”
Booking more diverse acts — in terms of both the demographics of the performers and the styles of music represented — had been part of CT Folk’s vision for its future for several years. Actually implementing that vision required an extra push. For starters, the festival organizers faced a complex booking environment. “Everybody was rebooking from 2020,” from before the pandemic began, Heriot-Mikula said.
CT Folk responded by getting more aggressive about its booking. Staff and board members had a wish list of about 200 acts they were interested in bringing to New Haven to create the diverse festival they had in mind. “Creating an impactful, diverse, talented, fun, and inclusive lineup — all of those things, it’s a puzzle. It’s making sure sound and vibe and structure and routing works for the overall fest, and the overall flow of the day. That makes a difference if you have a solo artist at three, or a trio at four, or the big band comes on at six,” Heriot-Mikula said. And “you have to be thoughtful, and you have to make a conscious decision to book diversely.”
That also meant adopting an expansive definition of folk music that was less about song structures and instrumentation and more about storytelling or making a point. “Was Woody Guthrie folk music because he played an acoustic guitar, or because he was a rabble rouser?” said CT Folk board member Dan McGurk. “Which definition do you want to choose? If you’re going to do an Americana fest, do an Americana fest. But for us, 100 percent, we’re looking at diversity, every way we can split it, from a solo act to bands, from White to Black, female to male, from six-string to whatever it is. And honestly, I think we have the magical unicorn of a diverse lineup.”
The organization worked with talent buyer to find acts. Heriot-Mikula and McGurk did the booking. “The biggest elements are time and patience,” McGurk said. Sometimes, he said, when “you get told no by one person you were shooting for, you quickly fill in with someone you know and are comfortable with. But we held to ‘this is what we’re looking for. This is our vision.’ And we refused to settle. If we got shot down, we came back with another five names, and what would fit to match our vision, and we kept plugging away.”
It helped that they had two days and two stages to work with. “Being able to do two bands and two stages meant we’re able to hit parts of the folk world we would never hit,” McGurk said — including, say, the New Jersey-based Kuf Knotz and Christine Elise, who combine hip hop and harp. It meant booking a rising act like Raye Zaragoza. Overall, this year the festival’s performers will be 50 percent BIPOC and 55 percent women-led groups. The lineup also mixes touring and Connecticut-based talent, including New Haven-based acts Manny James, Goodnight Moonshine, and Stephen Peter Rodgers. They’re also including the choir from Educational Center of the Arts, which will be collaborating with Kuf Knotz and Elise.
The enhanced budget also meant they could book headliners like Valerie June, Oliver Wood (of the Wood Brothers) and Vance Gilbert. To make the festival more accessible to more New Haveners, shuttle service every hour will be provided from Stetson Library on Dixwell Avenue and the Newhallville Learning Corridor, thanks to support from Connecticut Sea Grant, Long Island Sound Study. “We know we can’t be everything to everyone, but we want to get as close as we can, because we have something for everyone” at the festival, Heriot-Mikula said.
The green expo features a tree ambassador program with Urban Resources Initiative — “they really want to plant more trees,” Heriot-Mikula said — as well as the organization Reimagining New Haven in the Era of Climate Change.
Connecticut Cornhole, an adult cornhole league, is going to hold its state championship tournament during the festival and set up places for folks to play. The festival is also expanding its programming for kids, with workshops from Eli Whitney Center and Eco Works, hula hooping, drum circles, magic shows, and circus and art projects. Theater maker Toto Kisaku will offer a spoken-word workshop.
In the end, it’s simply about creating a festival that can reach and bring together as many people as possible. “For an organization like CT Folk that is dedicated to bringing out the people, you can’t focus on one set of people,” McGurk said.
“Our mission is to engage, entertain, and inspire,” Heriot-Mikula said, and “the work is not done. There are no pats on the back for the lineup we have created.” But “with what we were given and what we strived to do, that we achieved.… If we’re growing, and being inclusive, and expanding reach, and becoming something that maybe you didn’t think we were 10 years ago, then I’m for it.”
But the festival hasn’t forgotten its roots either. “Being in this team, you can see that they do a lot of relationship building, which is why they’ve been so successful,” said event assistant Typhanae Williams. “Even the volunteers from years before, they want to come back and volunteer again. That shows what kind of organization they are and what kind of team this is.”
The Folk Festival and Green Expo happens 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sept. 10 and 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sept. 11 in Edgerton Park. Visit CT Folk’s website for details and more information.
