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July 12, 2024: Roots and porches return

Summer brings wicked fun festivals with it, and this weekend returns two extra fun ones.

Driven and created by nonprofit Blues to Green, the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival is a free music celebration that has been growing for 10 years and is returning July 12-13. We sit with Blues to Green project manager Bianca Jiménez about the festival’s expansion from last year, hear live music from local hip-hop artists T'Swan and Talynt before their performance at the festival, and totally fangirl out with one of the festival headliners, Grammy Award winning artist Ms. Lisa Fischer.

A little further north, an idyllic stop in Franklin County brings us to the fifth Shelburne Falls Porch Festival, where around 50 porches, lawns, and business fronts will feature music, art, and performances of all sorts. We're joined by a pair of local poets who can help us wade through the plethora of activities this Sunday, Lauren Schmidt and Martín Espada. They will both be reading as part of the festival so we hear works from each as well as a little history of the festival.

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 oenophile adventures began, State Street Fruit Store Deli, Wine & Spirits. We bring along an extra taster, NEPM reporter Nirvani Williams, to help us ensures a fair contest between two wines with grapes we can't pronounce, from places we can't locate.*

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

Kaliis Smith is a radio host and producer for NEPM's The Fabulous 413. She was most recently host and producer at The River 93.9/WRSI where she appeared on Mornings with Monte for the Nerdwatch segment and hosted weekday evenings.
Christopher “Monte'' Belmonte is host and executive producer of NEPM's The Fabulous 413. He was born and raised in Massachusetts and has been a radio host in western Massachusetts for the last 20 years — the last 17 of them as host of Mornings with Monte on The River 93.9/WRSI.