Somerville Porchfest was a lot of fun this year, and we got a great crowd:

Showing some pictures to Claude it guesses there might have been 600 people. Very glad the city gave us permission to close the street! [1]

It would have been good not having cars parked in the main dance area, since this ended up making us need to spread out a lot more than would be ideal. Next time I'm going to see if I can get friends to park in the four main spots in the ~day leading up to the dance and then move their cars just as we're starting.

Harris did a great job leading the dancing, calling a mix of simple dances for everyone and standard contras for experienced dancers. This is also how he did it last year, and I think this does a good job covering the somewhat incompatible things people are looking for out of the event. For the standard contras we had one ~130ft line, while for the simple dances we had two lines of similar length.

I played with Rohan and Charlie, with Weiwei and Rick sitting in. I think we sounded pretty good; a bit of a pickup band, but still fun! Sam sat in for one dance on piano and Weiwei and I got to play trumpet and baritone together. At the end I convinced Sam to try playing the kick drum while I played hi-hat—part of my long-term plan to hook more people on foot drumming.

Sound was a bit chaotic. I was running sound while also playing, and this is never ideal. I got a few people (thanks Rick and Cecily) to give me feedback on the mix, but next year we should line up a dedicated volunteer for sound.

Speaker placement also matters a lot: we started with the speakers on the porch because it hadn't quite stopped raining, but it wasn't possible to get them anywhere near loud enough for the crowd without feedback. As soon as the rain let us we moved them well in front of the band, which let us run them a lot louder without feedback and give better coverage over the crowd. But it was awkwardly loud right in front of the speakers, even though they were ~10ft up. Next time I'd like to try fills: a pair of K10s in the center, and then a pair of K10.2s (with built-in delays) ~30ft up and down the street to help even out the sound.

With so many people it would also be helpful to have additional volunteers on crowd control, beyond just Harris at the mic: sometimes it's clearer to show than tell. Another thing to think about for next time!

This was the first year where this was officially a BIDA event. This mostly was a publicity thing: BIDA announced the dance in advance and then we advertised BIDA during the dance. Possibly it should keep being a BIDA event? I'll need to see what the board thinks.

I don't envy the situation the organizers were in with rain dates: delaying it to Mother's Day, which was also a day with a road race shutting down major streets, wouldn't have been good. But it was also not great that the 12-2 slot was pretty rained out. Perhaps next year ensuring that the rain date is a day without major conflicts could help? Though given the size of the crowds we saw with todays somewhat wet weather, if 2026 is dry it might be really quite a large festival.

My impression is that the new system where a grid of major streets were off-limits for playing helped a lot with allowing people to move around the city if they needed to?

Looking forward to 2026!

[1] I messed this up and almost didn't get permission: I applied to play (first year with applications) and was thinking that if we did get in then I'd apply for a block party permit. What I didn't realize was that for 2025 they were also changing things so the deadline for Porchfest block party permits was the same day as the application deadline! I applied late and was initially denied, but then I wrote to SAC to explain the situation and they very nicely allowed my late application to go through.