Folk Fest Offers Shelter From The Storm

Headlining the festival will be Martin Sexton.

The festival is ​“really excited to have Martin joining us this year,” said Charles Rothenberger, CT Folk board member, on a recent episode of WNHH’s ​“Northern Remedy.”

“In addition to being such a wonderful performer, I think Martin really fits in well with the theme of what we try to do with both the festival and the Green Expo,” Rothenberger added, ​“because he’s also well known for his charity work,” a series of fundraising concerts for nonprofits including Connecticut’s own Hole in the Wall Gang, a summer camp for kids dealing with cancer.

Overall the festival and Green Expo is ​“very much about social awareness, raising our collective consciousness, and encouraging people to engage and become active,” Rothenberger said. In keeping with this, the vendors at the expo range from Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound to Aegis Solar to Sarah Hope Handcrafts — though the roster also includes food vendors like Lalibela Ethiopian, P&M Orange Street Market, and Ben & Jerry’s.

“We really did start more as a straight music festival and the Green Expo component was added after the music festival itself had begun — recognizing the natural connection between folk music and social activism. It’s been there from the beginning, it continues to this day, and it just made all the sense in the world,” Rothenberger said.

As always, in programming the festival, the CT Folk board found itself with a wide array of acts to choose from, whether through invitation or audition. ​“It’s all folk music. But it all sound very different from one another,” Rothenberger said. There are jazz and blues elements to some acts, as in the sound of the Hudson Valley-based Upstate Rubdown. Meanwhile, the Bridgeport-based Alternate Routes, which got its start at Fairfield University in 2002 and is still going strong 12 recordings later, leans into the poppier side of the folk spectrum.

New Haven’s own Goodnight Blue Moon, meanwhile, finds itself combining pop and folk with R&B elements. ​“Indie folk — I think that term has been tossed around by us and about us a little bit,” said Dan Liparini, guitarist for Goodnight Blue Moon.

“We have a lot of traditional folk instruments,” he continued — a banjo, a mandolin, and a cello, which has established itself as a folk instrument in the past several years — and ​“a lot of vocal harmonies. I think they’re very nice harmonies. I don’t actually sing them, so I’m a little biased.” As a guitar player, he said, ​“I just sit back and let them wash over me.”

But Liparini didn’t start out as a folk musician. He started off at 13 years old playing AC/DC songs. Later in his teens he got into jazz. He went to University of Hartford and graduated in 2013, majoring in jazz studies. ​“I’ve been plugging away ever since,” he said, as a performer and teacher.

One person he worked with was Sean Rubin, who plays bass in Goodnight Blue Moon. He also played in a big band with Erik Elligers, who in addition to singing and playing guitar in Goodnight Blue Moon, plays saxophone. Liparini’s first experience with the band was playing lap steel on one of the songs on Goodnight Blue Moon’s new record, Dawning Dream. Then he recorded some guitar parts. He did a session with the band at Telefunken Studio in South Windsor, and ​“then they made the band proposal to me. Everyone went down on one knee and collectively held up a ring,” he joked.

Liparini was quick to see the links between folk, jazz, blues, and other kinds of music — and quick to see how folk was a big enough tent to encompass them all.

“I think I see a connection between what I do in the band and what I learned to do outside of the band, in terms of music I listened to and music I learned about,” Liparini said. ​“You have to treat it with the integrity that you would play anything.”

The expansive definition of folk plays into the variety of performers that CT Folk can put on. ​“There really is an effort to provide some balance to the performances” at the festival, Rothenberger said. But the definition can also prove slippery.

“It’s hard to self-identify” with folk sometimes, Rothenberger said — even for some of the performers. Rothenberger reported that when Livingston Taylor, who headlined the festival last year, got the invitation from CT Folk to play, it made him wonder if he had to learn a lot of very old songs from a songbook. ​“I’m not a folk artist, I’m a pop artist,” Rothenberger recounted Taylor as thinking.

“But he fit in perfectly with the festival and people loved him,” Rothenberger said.

The definition of folk also takes in the label of Americana, which then reaches even experimental artists like guitarist Nels Cline, who bends forms and techniques to his own ends. Cline is an inspiration to Liparini, along with jazz guitarists Jim Hall and Lenny Breau. But he pulls from country and western swing as well. With Goodnight Blue Moon, then, he might bend the string a bit more, or use a bit of the chicken pickin’ style that country guitarists like Chet Atkins made famous.

CT Folk finds itself weathering the financial storm battering arts organization across the state. ​“We’ve certainly been lucky that we have a lot of participation from our vendors, which sustains the festival,” Rothenberger said. CT Folk applies for grants to help fund its activities as well, and volunteers play a big part. It also benefits from ticketed events like its ongoing Folk Fridays concert series that happen throughout the year in addition to the festival, CT Folk’s marquee event.

The CT Folk Fest is free, though there is a suggested donation ​“as a good compromise,” Rothenberger said. ​“No one is obligated to provide any money, but we certainly gratefully accept it.”

Mostly, however, Rothenberger is gearing up for Saturday. ​“Every year it’s always a surprise. You never know what the best moment is going to be,” he said. He works the festival all day, though takes time out to visit the vendors — and catch a little folk music, whatever flavor it may be.

“It’s all just music after a certain point,” Liparini said.

The CT Folk Fest and Green Expo happens at Edgerton Park, 75 Cliff St. Doors open at 11 a.m. Vendors will be there until 5 p.m. Music continues until 10 p.m. Visit the festival’s website for schedule and much more information. Click below to hear the full interview with Charles Rothenberger and Dan Liparini.