Hi HONK! supporters-

As we get closer and closer to HONK! weekend details are starting to come in fast and furious! I thought you might like to hear about three of the shows we have planned for you.

Pre-HONK! musical performances (Thursday, 10/4)

Come see Chaotic Noise Marching Corps (Seattle, WA), Dirty Water Brass Band (Somerville, MA), Church Marching Band (Sonoma, CA), Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band (Somerville, MA) and Environmental Encroachment (Chicago, IL) play for free right in the heart of Union Square. 7p-11p

HONK! Kick-Off (Friday, 10/5)

Church Marching Band (Sonoma, CA), Brass Messengers (Minneapolis, MN),  Veveritse (Brooklyn, NY), Young Fellaz Brass Band (New Orleans, LA) and Pink Puffers Brass Band (Rome, Italy) play in an intimate club setting at Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant & Music Club in Davis Square, Somerville from 7:30p-1am. This is a 21+ show, tickets are $12 at the door.

And I've saved the biggest show for last. Remember last year's boat cruise? Hmm, how to top that? Well, this year we'll be in a place that looks like this:

ALL-BAND BLOWOUT CONCERT (Sunday 10/7)

The final blowout concert will feature almost every band (over 30 of them!) raising sweet HONK! music up to the roof inside the spectacular Sanders Theatre in Harvard Square. Tickets: $15 general admission, $10 for students, available at the HONK! merchandise booth during the festival (cash only), and at the door (credit cards accepted). Advance tickets can be purchased at the Harvard Box Office by calling 617.496.2222 (TTY 617.495.1642), online at www.boxoffice.harvard.edu/Online, or in person at the Holyoke Center: 1350 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 [hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 12:00-6:00 pm]

Full schedule details can be found at honkfest.org/schedule.

Hope to see you at all of them!

Wow.

The wonderful thing about being able to post updates here is the news just keeps on getting better and better. Today I'm overjoyed to say that we have hit our goal. In fact, we've now gone over the goal and are funded at 110%! This is up from last year where we hit 105% by the end of the campaign.

Thanks to you, the 260+ backers of this Kickstarter project, we will receive the funds that will help bring some truly great bands to HONK! this year. We will endeavor to make this festival bigger and better than it has ever been. Close to 35 bands will be here, some 600 musicians strong, because you made it possible. 

This campaign has (according to the Kickstarter widget) just about a day to go so people who want to show their support still have some time left to push the funding amount further into the stratosphere. Anything above our goal helps us further offset the cost of bringing bands to our streets. We are grateful for everyone's contribution.

We on the HONK! organizing committee are touched and humbled by your support. Thank you from the bottom of our collective hearts.

Two updates in one evening, who woulda thunk it? 

Well, in this update I get to talk about just how cool our Kickstarter backers are. As of this writing, we are just about $1,500 short of making our goal. As per the usual Kickstarter rules, if we make our goal we get to use the funds you have pledged to help us fund travel for the 35 bands who want to come to the festival (and if we don't, we get bubkes). 

We have just three more days left in this campaign so if you know anyone who can help put us over the line with a contribution (or a raised contribution) pretty please let them know just how close we are via email, Facebook, Twitter, carrier pigeon, etc. 

Ok, on to the update. We at HONK! talk a lot about how you are helping us bringing bands together from near and far to play in our streets. I thought it might be interesting to give you an idea of exactly what we mean when we say that. 

The Nearest Bands

Somerville is really fortunate to have some awesome bands in its midst like AfroBrazil, Dirty Water Brass Band, Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band (the host band for the festival), and Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band. Here's a video from ENSMB:

I wanted to mention these bands so you know we don't take them for granted. The local bands (these and the others from around our area) contribute to our festival in so many ways. You don't hear as much about them in a Kickstarter campaign like this because we don't need to raise funds for their travel. They come and give freely of their time, their homes, their music and their spirit and for this we love them dearly.

The Farthest Band

The band from the farthest away that you are helping to bring to our streets is one we often get asked about when they are not here. This is a band that brings us the funk all the way from Rome, Italy. Yes, we're talking about the Pink Puffers Drum & Bass Phunk Band. We're delighted that the Pink Puffers have agreed to return to HONK! in 2012. 

Thanks for your help in bringing them here and thanks for getting the word out so we can make our goal in the next 72 hours or so.

We sure do. Each year we put together a parade with the bands who have played at HONK! and bunches of neighborhood groups and march from Davis Square, right up Mass Ave to Harvard Square "reclaiming the streets for horns, bikes and feet" (as we like to say). Here's a few videos from last year's parade courtesy of the fine folks at Indymedia to give you a flavor of the magic that happens right outside your door:

To see more, check out the Boston IndyMedia site where more videos of last year's parade can be found. 

One of the fun things about the third video that may not be immediately apparent is that it shows the "pickup band" marching at the beginning. This is a band that forms just for HONK! weekend. Anyone who wants to can bring their instrument, attend a rehearsal, and then play and march in the parade. That's the kind of parade we want to have.

We're definitely going to have this parade again (bigger and better even!), but we got to thinking--if one parade is good, maybe more parades would be better! The idea of having some sort of night parade has always been artistically really attractive to us (and others, for example our friends in Providence at PRONK! always do some night parading). 

So this year, we've been working on plans to see if we can create a smaller family-friendly lantern parade on Friday night. These will be sidewalk processions accompanied by various brass bands and paraders with bike lights, paper lanterns, flashlights, and other forms of DIY lighting. We will organize lantern-making workshops beforehand for kids and adults, to help parade participants create their own lanterns. If you are interested in participating in these, contact us at parade@honkfest.org.

Cool, eh? Hope you can come!