New Three-Day Elm City Folk Fest Showcases CT Talent

Food-and-drink people obsess over all things local. Restaurants and bars trumpet their regionally sourced cheeses, IPAs and grass-fed beef. But music grown and raised in our own backyards sometimes gets a little less loving attention. The Elm City Folk Festival is a three-day event taking place, Friday through Sunday, April 10 to 12, at four New Haven venues with more than 30 regional acts — including Seth Adam, Wise Old Moon, Milksop: Unsung, Krizta Moon, Slim Francis and dozens more.

A lot of music festivals stitch fancy non-musical extras on to the event to draw a wider, possibly less music-centric crowd — zip-lines, fried dough, street theater, knitting circles, whatever. But the Elm City Folk Festival is focused solely on the local music and the venues that help foster it. The festival rotates around four different venues: Anna Liffey’s, Never Ending Books, Cafe Nine and Three Sheets. This is the first year of the festival, the idea for which was hatched back in the late fall of 2014 by Margaret Milano, a long-time booker of local bands at Cafe Nine and elsewhere, and bassist Greg Perrault, who happens to play in a few of the acts playing the festival.

As with other folk festivals, like the big one in Newport, for instance, the nature of what is and what isn’t “folk” has gotten pretty loose and big-umbrella-ish over the years. One no longer needs to be wearing bib overalls and playing Dust Bowl ballads on a beat-up acoustic in order to qualify.

“We have such a wide spectrum,” says Perrault of the variety of bands in the festival, many of whom have “kind of loose folk Americana sound,” though they might plug in and write songs from a 21st-century lyrical perspective.

Milano, who did most of the actual booking and logistics for the festival, says the broad folk framework was one that made sense.

“It’s not super-traditional, but I like that,” says Milano. She says she hopes to expand the project next year if things go well.

Both Perrault and Milano felt the artists playing around Connecticut would help focus people’s attention on the quality of music being made here.

“Our festival is about bringing the scene up into the light,” says Perrault.

The Elm City Folk Festival isn’t the only CT-centric music festival out there. Events like the Meriden Daffodil Festival (April 25 and 26), the Emerge Fest, Fauxchella, (as of last year) the Glastonbury Apple Harvest Festival, and the CTNow-sponsored Grand Band Slam/CT Music Awards (the voting for which continues through April and features many of the homegrown artists who play these shows) all spotlight Connecticut music.

Perrault says that, with the short lead-up time, and the scope of the project, he and Milano ended up letting the planning of the festival take its own organic course.

“It’s like we put a kite into the air and the wind’s just taking it, and we’re just kind of pulling it, making sure it stays up,” says Perrault.

The Elm City Folk Festival is Friday through Sunday, April 10 to 12, at Anna Liffey’s, Never Ending Books, Cafe Nine and Three Sheets, with more than 30 regional acts.