Expect More Than 200 Bands at This Year’s Jamaica Plain Porchfest

Damn Tall Buildings, photo by Joni Lohr

One-part block party, one-part music festival—Porchfest is a special breed of event, popping up in more than 40 neighborhoods across the United States and Canada. And while Somerville has already had its turn this year, the fourth annual Jamaica Plain Porchfest will bring 206 bands to 95 porches this weekend.

The neighborhood event enables community members to get to know their neighbors while discovering new, local bands across a vast range of musical genres, all of whom perform on porches, patios, and whatever other spaces constitute stages.

JP Porchfest also features “Special Arts” porches, which include comedy, intergenerational poetry, storytelling, and dance and theatre. Members of the Commonwealth Circus will also perform on their own porch—as will local politicians, who are expected to play music, dance, or present poetry.

Festivities sprawl about two miles from east to west and about three miles from north to south. To get from porch-to-porch, community members can walk or bike—or they can take the free trolley, which will, according to the site, have “entertaining hosts.” The trolley will run throughout all six hours of Porchfest on a continuous loop. 

Saturday, July 8, 11:30 a.m.-6 p.m., jpporchfest.org.