The weather giveth and the weather taketh away. We’re currently navigating the outdoor music fest season, which is a wonderful way to discover music in your own city and surrounding territories provided the forecast plays nice. It’s hard to lure people out into the open when the rain in the gutter is flooding up to your ankles.
Medford Porchfest faced some tough calls this past weekend. Planned for Saturday, tricky weather patterns led the organizers to push back the event to Sunday. Sunday wasn’t blue skies either, but the threat of precipitation had diminished. In a perfect world all the participants would’ve simply slid their shows to the rain date. But these bands are composed of regular, everyday folks who probably had their Sunday booked up already with the usual chores: mowing the lawn, bathing the cat, manufacturing Karen Read content, etc.
Someday Festival debuted Saturday in Union Square and lived to tell the tale. Rain was coming down by the bucketful when the arts and music celebration kicked off in the early afternoon. Happily, the event, held at the Boston Figurative Arts Center, offered indoor and outdoor options. Acoustic acts performed indoors as locals browsed among the crafts and curios at the vintage market. Meanwhile, volunteers squeegeed water desperately from the covered outdoor stage to protect the electronics. Hats off to the volunteers, who salvaged the outdoor stage for performances later in the day, once the worst of the weather had passed.
No one can know what meteorological fate awaits the Cambridge Porchfest …
Whatever it is, it’s happening this summer. July, maybe 19 or 20? Could be one day or multiple days. Could be sunny or cloudy. Probably hot. Could be indoors or outdoors. Could include decks, plazas and sidewalks, along with porches. Could be a lot of things. Inaugural edition or not, there are a lot of open questions about this event with only one month until showtime.
I reached out to organizers for an update but I did not hear back as of press time. If you’re planning a community event, eventually you need to tip off the community, right? God bless the professional managerial class, but they sometimes take themselves to be both the cart and the horse. Until there’s more to report, I will have to assume that Cambridge Porchfest is an AI hallucination born from prompts by local government agencies and 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
Hit this
Saturday: Fresh Pond Day 2025 (Cambridge, Walter J. Sullivan Water Treatment Facility)
Long shot Boston mayoral candidate Alex Alex (Not a typo! And no longer appears to be in the race?) proposed in a recent candidate forum that schoolkids should get out into the community more with field trips to sites of interest in the municipal infrastructure. I remember visiting a sewage treatment plant when I was in sixth grade. I thought it was a rite of passage for everyone. I was just lucky, I guess. You can get lucky too at Fresh Pond Day 2025. No sewage involved at the water treatment facility, just the scenic backdrop of Fresh Pond. Plus free popcorn, live animal exhibits, activities for kids, and the music of Trailmix and Grüvmeiners. Bright and early, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Sunday: Nobro, Bad Waitress, Gen and the Degenerates, KO Queen (The Rockwell, Somerville)
Canada’s Nobro brought down the house the last time I saw them at New Colossus Fest in 2024. The young upstart pop punkers closed out the “M For Montreal” showcase with a bang. That’s saying a lot, because the bill included at least six acts, which can test the staying power of even the most inveterate lover of our neighbors up north. A year or so later, will we see an older and wiser Nobro? Older, at any rate. They’re still bringing the energy with devil-may-care singles such as “Let’s Do Drugs” and “Set That Pussy Free.” Go bring the energy with them.
Monday: Anna Moss, Jill McCracken (Club Passim, Cambridge)
Find your soulful southern R&B vibe with Anna Moss, who tours through Cambridge from her adopted home base of New Orleans. Her latest album “Amnesty” drifts like a leaf down a languid river on a hot and humid summer day. Local opener Jill McCracken makes for a fine pairing of two voices sultry enough to steam cook a party platter full of pork dumplings. Good thing Club Passim has air conditioning.
Live: Michael Figge Group at the Mad Monkfish
A club is always more than a club. It’s also the beginning of a thousand and one human stories of heartfelt yearning and grievous disappointment. On June 5 we got a “feel good” story at The Mad Monkfish in the form of a half dozen young jazz musicians, stretching their wings and learning how to fly.
The evening’s entertainment was the Michael Figge Group, a rangy bunch led by the namesake bandleader and bassist through a set of bracing arrangements and rearrangements of standards. Not one of them looked old enough to vote. A pair of trumpets and a pair of saxophones shined up front while the piano, bass and percussion set the pace in back.
The young musicians held the stage with a confidence and poise beyond their years. They were no strangers to the club, having cut their teeth at the open jam sessions held every weekend at the Central Square spot. In fact, the night’s emcee revealed in his windup before the show that Figge had been frequenting the club since he was 14, soaking in the atmosphere and learning by osmosis before he ever got a chance to perform. Fortunately, you don’t have to show ID to enjoy a plate of sushi at the club-cum-restaurant.
The emcee shared at least one other nugget (in addition to the shopworn, entirely believable and rarely disputed claim that the Mad Monkfish is neither a “church” nor a “library”): Namely, that the bassist Figge, who had come of age as a jazz musician in the club through his own efforts and the opportunities afforded him by their stage, was headed off to study at Juilliard at summer’s end. As he shared the news the emcee’s face lit up with a proud and paternal glow that announced to the whole room that “one of our own” was getting called up to the majors.
A club is always more than a club. Sometimes it’s an incubator waiting to hatch great things. I hear New York City is beautiful in the fall.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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