This year’s Hooker Day Parade & Festival, which launches from Asylum Street in Hartford on May 13 at 11 a.m., offers wide-ranging sounds from across Connecticut’s musical landscape.
The parade, which previously took place in October, was moved to May this year as part of an effort to expand it into a festival with two stages of live music.
“Hartford is chock full of amazing cultural and artistic assets,” says Hartford Business Improvement District marketing director Chip McCabe. “We want to showcase that as much as possible through everything we do with Hooker Day, including the music and entertainment.”
This year’s Bushnell Park stage performers include hip-hop/rock hybrid Joey Batts & Them and the sprawling collective UZOO (of which Batts is a member); jazz musicians Orice Jenkins and Nicki Mathis’ Afrikan Amerikan Jazz; folk rockers Belle of the Fall, Robert Fullerton and the Professors of Sweet, Sweet Music (POSSM); the Hartford Opera Theater; Matt Falkowski, a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts; and others.
Additional groups — raucous marching band the Hartford Hot Several, the Hartford Proud Drill, Drum & Dance Corp.; Hartford’s Cultural Dance Troupe of the West Indies and Puerto Rican Bomba y Plena (with the Cepeda Family) — will perform stage sets and also march in the parade.
Hartford.com and the HBID produce the event, which is sponsored by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, the Connecticut Health Foundation and CTNOW.
