Montclair’s first Uptown Sound Festival hits Anderson Park September 26, and organizers are counting on the community to help pull it off. With less than two weeks to go, they’re filling three volunteer shifts, no experience required.
The festival runs free from 2 to 8 p.m., with a rain date set for Oct. 3. Behind six hours of live music, food and local businesses is an event built almost entirely by volunteer labor, and full disclosure, The Montclair Pod is a proud media partner.
How to Volunteer
The shifts break down into three windows. Setup runs 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Ushering, merch and raffle duty covers 1 to 5 p.m. The late shift, 5 to 9 p.m., includes breakdown, the work of packing up stages, tents and equipment once the last band finishes. Sign up at uptownsoundfest.org.
Organizers aren’t asking for festival experience, just good energy. The reward, at least food-wise, is real: every shift comes with a meal from Dan & Day’s, Farmhouse or Mercado, and staying for more than one shift means more than one meal.
From Summer Stage to Festival Day
Uptown Sound didn’t start with a stage. It started with an idea, floated this spring by Dan Campeas and Dayanna Ordonez, the couple behind Dan & Day’s Burger Place and Farmhouse Fried Chicken on Bellevue Avenue: bring the kind of music scene that usually lives downtown up to Upper Montclair. By summer, that idea had become Summer Stage, a free weekly concert series on the lawn of St. James Episcopal Church at 581 Valley Road, with a different local musician playing every Friday night. Sept. 26 is where those Fridays were building toward all along.
Waterbury Road headlines the festival, backed by The Bard Band (full disclosure, that’s Mike’s band, and yes, we already voted him best dressed on stage), El Ritmo and Rocking for Inclusion, a lineup running from rock to Latin rhythm to a band built around inclusion. None of it happens without the people running sound checks, pointing traffic and handing out raffle tickets between sets.
Sign up to volunteer at uptownsoundfest.org, or clear your afternoon for Sept. 26 and see the result in Anderson Park. Uptown Sound runs 2 to 8 p.m., rain date Oct. 3.
