“You want something to happen, you have to make it happen,” said Margaret Milano, who has organized the first Elm City Folk Festival, a three-day, multiple-venue extravaganza of music that features over 20 acts from New Haven and beyond.
The festival begins this Friday night at Anna Liffey’s, Cafe Nine, Neverending Books, and Three Sheets and runs through Sunday.
Milano.
The idea for the festival first came to Milano and musician Greg Perault in January. They imagined the festival as “a big party, a celebration.” But the concept quickly grew. The list of acts Milano wanted to involve “came to me just as others things do.” She knew “there was no way it was going to be one day, or one night.”
Milano has been booking shows at Cafe Nine for over 10 years and has worked with other venues in town. She reached out to Anna Liffey’s and Three Sheets, who were quickly on board. Then she contacted the bands on her list, and the rosters for each night filled — from Goodnight Blue Moon and No Line North to Elison Jackson and Daphne Lee Martin.
To hear Milano describe it, it sounds easy to organize. It’s a testament to the work she’s done over the years booking acts and getting to know musicians in New Haven and across the state. Even after years of working in the local music scene, she still goes out all the time to hear live music.
“I can’t stay in,” she said. “I’m too curious about things.”
The Elm City lineup is eclectic, encompassing An Historic, Kevin MF King, Frank Critelli, Lys Guillorn, Kath Bloom, and Milksop: Unsung — all acts that draw from the well of folk music from America and elsewhere, yet take it in directions that can make categorization a little tricky.
“The fact that you can have Milksop and these other kinds of bands that can’t be tightly packaged is great,” said Sam Perduta, of Elison Jackson, which plays at Three Sheets on Saturday. “It’s a good venue for people who are doing another kind of thing.”
At the same time, though, the Elm City Folk Festival is true to its name. Like Ideat Village before it, by pulling so much from the city itself, it’s a sampling of what the city — or at least a certain aspect of the city — sounds like.
“I think that more and more people are thinking about things that way,” said Daphne Lee Martin of the festival’s city, and by extension, regional focus. She’s coming in from New London to play at Three Sheets on Sunday.
The regional focus goes well with folk music — a label that gets broader and harder to define as it gathers energy and enthusiasm.
“I think the culture is course-correcting itself,” Martin said. “Everything became so commercialized and so corporate for a while. But you can tell there’s a spiritual void in that, and so people are coming back to folk music. They want something real and they want something with substance, and that’s pretty refreshing. They’re going back to older ways that feel better to them.”
Milano is already talking about organizing a bigger festival for next year. She’s thinking about T‑shirts and tote bags, more bands, more sponsors.
But it’s really all about the music, about “bands getting psyched, bands getting more excited to play,” she said. “Because they’re bands that I believe in.”
The Elm City Folk Festival runs Apr. 10 to Apr. 12 at multiple venues throughout New Haven.
