Richmond Folk Festival will have international flare

This story was a class assignment for one of my graduate classes and also ran in a slightly different version in Style Weekly

Organizers of the first annual Richmond Folk Festival plan to gradually release the names of the 25 musical artists performing—just as soon as they sign their contracts. The festival, which hopes to draw on the popular success of the National Folk Festival during its recent three-year stint in Richmond, is being held along the city’s riverfront on the weekend of Oct. 10-12.

The National Folk Festival, the oldest multicultural arts celebration in the nation, changes venues every three years. The festival will be held this year in Butte, Montana.
Anxious to keep the ball rolling, Richmond organizers have already announced the first six acts which range from Cajun and Irish music to Hawaiian slack key guitar and Philadelphia soul legend, Howard Tate.
Jim Wark, chairman of the festival’s programming committee, said that the festival is committed to keeping the same format as the National Folk Festival, and the event will remain free to the public. He adds that his goal is to at least match attendance from last year, which drew 175,000 people.
“Weather conditions could not have been better last year, so it was sort of a harmonic convergence,” Wark says. “The weather will make the difference between 50,000 people coming either way.”

The festival is funded by corporate sponsors and subsidized by grants of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which curates The National Folk Festival. The current budget for the Richmond festival is $1.39 million and major local sponsors include Philip Morris, Dominion and Ukrop’s. There will be seven event stages and no one dominant sponsor.
Wark explains that his committee, which consists of local artists and music experts, composed a wish list of diverse performers and submitted it to the NCTA, which was retained by Venture Richmond, a local umbrella group of city promoters and businesses. Wark says his committee focused on choosing exotic and diverse acts that would not usually play Richmond.
“I always look most forward to the strangest acts,” Wark says, adding that the festival is decidedly uncommercial. “People should know sponsorship dollars had zero influence on programming.”

One of the committee’s goals was to hire “purists,” or performers in a direct lineage to traditional music genres, meaning they likely come from its birthplace.
Grammy winning sound engineer and producer Christopher King of Nelson County says the event will have an international flair. King attended the programming meetings and worked to have traditional bluegrass represented.
“It’s all about compromise. If I get the old time group or person that I think fits the bill the best, I can roll over and ignore decisions made about other music,” he says.
In the future, King says he hopes the festival will add traditional hip-hop, which he feels is a legitimate folk art expression.
Programming member Zarina Fazaldin, a Kenyan who worked the last three years with the National Folk Festival, says she is working on bringing more music from Africa, such as Swahili music.
“Richmond is so international now,” she says. “We have many African-Americans who are interested in teaching and learning Swahili.”

There will also be plenty of crafts and food for the crowds to enjoy.
Chris Williams, who lives in Arlington County and has worked with the National Festival for 15 years, volunteered to coordinate crafts for the Richmond event. The theme this year will be finding common ground between communities of immigrants in Virginia and longtime Americans, he says.
“We’ve all learned to eat Indian, Thai, and Pakastani food in Virginia—we didn’t know that 20 years ago,” Williams says, adding that there should be 15 to 18 traditional craft demonstrations. “We’ll have everything from Mongolia to Mexico to Cambodia to Czechs, Slovaks, Danes … but we’re still working on it.”
The programming committee will likely have one more meeting, Wark says. The next annoucement on signed musical acts is expected within a month, according to Lisa Sims, director of events with Venture Richmond.