The Lake Erie Folk Fest has a new home and new partnerships for our Feb. 3, 2024 festival.
We’ve been looking for a few years now for the right space to allow the fest to grow, to make it accessible to our large and growing community, and to help us meet our goal of sharing the music we love with younger audiences. We think our new home will do all those things!
We hope you’ll come visit us in February, when LEFF moves to a new space in Case Western Reserve’s Thwing Center, in partnership with WRUW-FM, Case Western Reserve University’s college radio station.
In its first seven years, the Lake Erie Folk Festival grew to be a cornerstone of Northeast Ohio’s traditional music community, thanks to the support of people like you.
The festival has drawn visitors from five counties and three states to Greater Cleveland in the otherwise dark days of February, a bright spot in the cultural calendar and an important anchor in growing and sharing the riches of the region’s traditional music scene.
The Case Western Reserve University campus is in the heart of Northeast Ohio’s largest arts and culture hub, and WRUW is the preeminent college radio station in our region. We’re happy to be bringing all the resources of this new home and partnership to our traditional music community.
Plans for next year’s festival on February 3, 2024 include all the free daytime workshops, performances and jam sessions that you’ve grown to love, as well as an evening concert packed with local, regional and national talent.
We’ll make sure you have all the details you need for directions, parking, programs and more, so keep up with the Lake Erie Folk Fest website as we get closer to festival time – we’ll have lot of fun news to share.
We can’t wait to see you in February!
Contra Dancing at a previous Lake Erie Folk Fest. Photo by Jen Hearn
Carlos Jones and the P.L.U.S. Band
Carlos Jones and the P.L.U.S. Band
Saturday, February 11, 2023 was the seventh annual Lake Erie Folk Fest at the Shore Cultural Centre in Euclid, Ohio . . . another milestone for traditional music in Northeast Ohio.
Stay tuned for news on the eighth annual Lake Erie Folk Fest . . .
At Northeast Ohio Musical Heritage Association, we are dedicated to preserving and celebrating traditional music in its many wonderful forms, and we know you care about that musical heritage, too. We have been building our music community, expanding our programming and bringing music to new audiences and new spaces all year long. Now we’re busy planning our biggest event of the year, the Lake Erie Folk Fest, and we’re excited about all the great music we’re going to bring to share with you.
We’re incredibly grateful to serve such a talented and enthusiastic community. Whether it’s Lake Erie Folk Fest, music in the community, collaborations with other festivals, outreach to schools or educational offerings for students, your support helps to make it all possible.
For all you do to support traditional music, we here at NEOMHA are thankful, every day of the year. Thank you for supporting traditional music events in Northeast Ohio.
We had a small but enthusiastic gathering on Sunday, October 9, 2022 for the free concert and porch jams. The hope is to have it again next year at about the same time, though we have no firm plans yet.
This event was a musical collaboration between the Northeast Ohio Musical Heritage Association, Folknet, Roots of American Music, Raccoon County Music Festival, and the Hessler Neighborhood Assocation.
The original June 26 date was cancelled due to predictions of thunderstorms.
Performances by:
At 3:30 we brought you Coop Accordion, an ensemble hatched on a farm in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Every year, this adventurous group of accordion friends picks a new location to meet up and play, and this year it was our turn, Cleveland!
Frank Petrilli (Los Angeles, CA) is a renowned jazz player in several L.A.-area bands including the Idiomatiques, Strada Swing, and the Stardust Ensemble. Dave Magliozzi (Boston, MA) has been playing accordion since the age of ten — he’s forgotten more songs than the rest of the group ever learned! He performs as a soloist and with multiple groups in the Boston area. Jean Urry (Racine, WI) is a longtime student of Stas Venglevski. She’s played with several accordion orchestras, including the London Accordion Orchestra. James Gerke (Boston, MA) is a singer and chromatic button accordion player, he has performed in the Cambridge Christmas Revels and sings and plays accordion with the a cappella group Crooked Mowth. Karen Sokohl (Richmond, VA) is a writer and editor. She loves all things accordion and you can read about her accordion adventures in her blog, Accordion to Karen. Meredith Pangrace (Cleveland. OH) plays her shiny red accordion here in Cleveland, with Maura Rogers and the Bellows, The Boys From The County Hell, and Ohio City Singers.
On March 28, 2022, Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish announced that $3.3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds have been dedicated to arts and culture .
More information here. Applications open in mid-August.
Assembly for the Arts and Cuyahoga Arts & Culture is partnering to distribute these dollars directly to you through special relief funding programs for nonprofit organizations, individual artists and creative businesses.
Assembly will distribute $1.65 million of these funds to Artists and Creative For-Profit Businesses. In addition, nonprofit organizations can visit CAC’s website for more information on their ARPA funding program.
More information here. Applications open in mid-August.
H
Tune in from your classroom or home and discover a world of traditional music!
Carry On is a weekly, 30-minute YouTube Live program for 6th-12th grade students hosted by musical explorer and TikTok sensation Hal Walker. Each episode, Hal interviewed a musician who plays traditional music. Weekly programs were live on YouTube allowing students to interact with comments and questions. After the live broadcast, the programs were archived for later viewing and discussion. Study guides are provided with each program! Info
Adults welcome, too. Carry On episodes are educational and entertaining for all ages! Visit the Carry On YouTube Channel to watch programs, and for more info email carryontraditionalmusic@gmail.com.
Carry On launched its first program in September 2020 and ran throughout the school year.
Live Music from NEOMHA
Concert 6pm – Free
Old-Time Jam to Follow
Bring Your Instrument!
Enjoy traditional folk, old time, gypsy and gypsy jazz classics with Meredith Pangrace, accordion, and Chris Yohn, fiddle.
Waterloo Sculpture Garden
16006 Waterloo Rd. – Cleveland 44110
Live Music from NEOMHA
Concert 7:30pm – Doors Open at 7pm
Free Afternoon Events
Bring Your Instrument!
Music workshops, concerts, jam sessions, food & concessions. Come explore, learn, and share! Visit LakeErieFolkFest.com for complete schedule.
Shore Cultural Center
291 E. 222nd St., Euclid, Ohio
2020 and 2021 were hard! No festivals, no jams, no dances – and we really missed all that. But look at the great things that did happen here at NEOMHA!
Old Music for a New World
On the gorgeous lawn of First Baptist Church in Cleveland Heights, we put on a five-concert outdoor series from May 2021 to September 2021. The concerts were bring-your-own-picnic, socially distanced events and boy, was there some wonderful music in the evening air.
Music From the House on the Hill
In June 2020, we produced our first-ever livestream concert, to rave reviews. Thanks for tuning in, plus helping us employ local musicians. It was great to “see” everyone online – and we also developed new capacity and technology to reach new audiences, which will help us continue to spread the love for folk music through our mission. If you missed it, or just want to relive the moment, you can catch it all here.
Folk Community Summit
We hosted 49 enthusiastic and engaged people from every facet of our folk music community – musicians, dancers, venue owners, producers and fans – in an online folk summit that let us come together to dream, discuss and make some big plans. And we’re already acting on some of those plans, specifically ideas to help bring more youth into our community, diversify both our audiences and the music we present, and support education initiatives. Got more great ideas you want to share, while we’re in this process of dreaming and innovating? We want to hear from you! Send us an email.
Carry On
In August we launched this fantastic YouTube program, which brought live, FREE programs to students in grades 6-12 every week. Hosted by YouTube sensation Hal Walker, the series presented a new musical talent each episode. Best of all, the series is still available online, along with a free study guide for each episode.
We featured musicians from all around the world – and from right here in Northeast Ohio, with at least 25% of the musicians presented being local, and the entire series offering an exciting range of diversity. We’ve gotten great feedback from students. We paid lots of artists. And we went the extra mile to support our teachers, offering them free educational resources to pair with each episode. You can check it out here.
Nellie McKay Concert
We managed to have one COVID-friendly live event in 2020, when we presented our first socially distanced live concert with nationally acclaimed artist Nellie McKay. What a beautiful day for an outdoor performance, and what a wonderful audience. We also showcased a local opening act and got to introduce a nice group of newcomers to NEOMHA, in line with our mission of supporting musicians and building our folk music community.
COVID meant a big pause in so many things we love, like our festivals and concerts. But it also gave us opportunities to find new ways to support our folk music community. We’re so glad to be doing this work together! If you want to help us keep the music playing, we would welcome your gift to NEOMHA.
We know we can’t do any of this without you. Your support, your time, your energy and ideas – they have all helped to make this hard year possible, and even inspiring. We didn’t just get through this – we got better, paving the way for new and good things to come.
As our live music and concert events return – fingers crossed – we still need you. Your gift, in any amount that’s meaningful to you, would mean so much to our mission and our work this year. We have a lot to be proud of, and a lot to look forward to. Thank you for your generous support.
Your friends at NEOMHA
PS: If you prefer to send a check, it can be made payable to NEOMHA and mailed to 10848 Chillicothe Rd, Kirtland, OH 44094.
Sponsors
Please donate to Northeast Ohio Musical Heritage Association to help ensure the vitality of folk music in Northeast Ohio!
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