Residents populated the streets, and musicians performed across the porches of Brookline on Saturday in celebration of the ninth annual Brookline Porchfest.
“Porchfests” have taken over the Greater Boston-area all summer long, with local bands transforming neighborhood porches into community celebrations with live music.
Brookline residents loaned their porches or front lawns to musicians for performances all afternoon long. The bands played a range of genres including blues, folk, rock and jazz, with around 30 concerts taking place at any given time across the city, Brookline Porchfest Committee Member David Tierney said.
The Brookline Porchfest aims to provide a space that “brings people out into the world to do their art, but also engage people in a real-world, physical way with both art and the people who live in their neighborhoods,” said Alex Schaffner, community engagement coordinator for Brookline Booksmith, which sponsored Brookline Porchfest.
“Live music engages your creativity and your emotions in a way that very little else does,” Schaffner said.
With this goal in mind, the Porchfest Committee worked tirelessly to organize this event for the community, Porchfest Committee Member Gillian Jackson wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press. Tierney, Jackson and fellow committee members Jin Suk and Jason Leonhard have been planning this event since last October.
“Porchfest means a lot to some Brookliners, and it’s evident when you see the amount of hosts that put out lawn chairs for their guests and have snacks available to pedestrians,” Leonhard wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press.
Tierney is also the executive director of the Brookline Music School. The school is a principal sponsor of Brookline Porchfest alongside the Brookline Commission for the Arts. Tierney said these organizers “facilitate all the logistics, from lining up porches and lining up bands to paying bills.”
Schaffner said Brookline Booksmith’s sponsorship “feels like a really good fit” for the bookstore.
“It’s a great community event that showcases a lot of the artistic and creative talent in our community,” Schaffner said.
Michael Noble is a Brookline resident and returnee to Porchfest who said the event “brings everyone together.” He said the locality of the event makes it more accessible for residents to participate.
“We had a performer right outside my own house, so I just had to walk outside and there was a party there,” Noble said.
Another Porchfest attendee, Massimo Bertelli, who is from Italy, said he lives near Coolidge Corner and came across the festivities while waiting for his daughter to be let out of class.
“It’s a good way to be stuck in the neighborhood,” Bertelli said. “I didn’t expect so many instruments in the bands, so it’s very well-organized.”
The musicians themselves also enjoyed the festivities. Tom Williamson, frontman of Steeples & Satellites, a band composed of local school teachers, said the experience of listening was as rewarding as playing.
“My favorite thing is walking around,” Williamson said. “Playing is fun, but I like seeing everybody watching music.”
The Porchfest Committee cares about creating a blossoming community with an outlet for music and the arts, Tierney said.
Each year, the committee strives to see more neighbors walking around, “checking out some of the music [and] hearing things they didn’t know about before,” Tierney said.
Tierney said he hopes “some young kids [get] the idea that they might like to play one of those instruments” one day.
Local students also took a break from their studies to enjoy Porchfest, including Poppy Livingstone, a junior at Boston University.
“I got to meet some neighbors, and then it encouraged me to come all the way out of my street and into other parts of Brookline,” Livingstone said. “It brought such a good way to connect with my community.”