July 12, 2024: Roots and porches return

Summer brings wicked fun festivals with it, and this weekend brings the return of two extra fun ones. 

There's Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival, the main portion of which happens July 12 & 13th. The free music celebration has been going on for 10 years, driven and created by the Blues to Green non-profit, and has been getting bigger and better every year. We sit with Bianca Jimenez, project manager at Blues to Green, about the specific growth this year has seen. We hear live music from local hip-hop artists T'Swan and Talynt who'll be performing at the festival, and get to totally fangirl out with one of the headliners of the festival, Grammy award winning artist Lisa Fischer.

A little further north an idyllic stop in Franklin County brings us the Fifth Shelburne Falls Porch Festival. There's around 50 locations at porches, lawns, and business fronts that will feature music, art, and performances of all sorts, and we're joined by a pair of locals who can help us wade through the plethora of activities the town will be sharing with everyone on Sunday, July 14th. Poets Lauren Schmidt and Martín Espada will both be reading as part of the events of the festival, so we hear work from each of them, as well as a little history for the festival itself.

And it's been a minute since we've had a Tina Turner Memorial Wine Thunderdome, so we head back to the location where all our uenophile adventures began: State Street Fruit Store, Deli, Wine & Spirits. We bring along an extra taster: NEPM reporter Nirvani Williams, to help us make sure that this contest between two wines with grapes we can't pronounce, from places we can't locate* has a clear winner. 

* Shot out to the Montague Bookmill for having such a good motto we had to contort it to our own purposes.