RED BANK: PORCHFEST ROCKS TOWN
Sunshine, cool weather, beach chairs, bikes and guitars… Red Bank’s first-ever Porchfest music festival “went off as flawlessly as it could” Sunday, said lone mayoral candidate Billy Portman.
The five-hour festival, which Portman organized with HABcore executive Marta Quinn as a fundraiser for the housing nonprofit, put more than 80 musical acts on 22 porches, lawns and driveways across the borough. Each drew an audience, some in the hundreds.
Traveling around to the various porches, yards and driveways, “I just watched it grow as the hours got later,” Portman told redbankgreen.
The event was nonpolitical, Portman said, though “it is completely aligned with what I hope to do more of as a mayor, and that is bring people together, and focus more on our similarities, and less on our differences.” He also hopes to make Porchfest as an annual occurrence, he said.
redbankgreen stopped in at all 22 venues. Here’s some of what we saw; click photos to enlarge.
Amid a booming market for six-stringed instruments, a boutique retailer of electric guitars has opened in downtown Red Bank.
Vocal majors who won placements in the Doris Lenz Musical Festival are, left to right: Catherine Creed, Jack Faccone-Stockwell, Jael Cross (all Red Bank), Claire Taylor, Little Silver; Sara Zerilli, Millstone; and Maddie Staudt, Neptune City.
Conductor Sameer Patel, below, leads the New Jersey Symphony in an open-air display of musical Americana overlooking the Navesink River from Marine Park Sunday night. (Click to enlarge.)
