Yet another new, outdoor festival featuring local bands is preparing to debut in Denver’s Baker neighborhood along South Broadway, the longtime home of The Underground Music Showcase and the current spot for the upstart Blucifer’s First Rodeo.
PorchFest, a concept that’s found success in cities across the country, is coming to Denver with a simple pitch that’s familiar to many music fans from the COVID pandemic: bands playing on porches and temporary stages, socially distanced from listeners, in a walkable format.
Of course, there’s no social distancing in effect now, so people can get closer to the music during the event, scheduled to take place from noon to 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3, with about 50 acts playing 15 or so neighborhood sites.
Organizer and Capitol Hill resident Bradley Schwartz, who plays bass in the indie rock band Five Minutes Out, hopes to draw between 5,000 and 10,000 people to the festival, which is not officially connected to other PorchFests in cities such as Atlanta and Seattle, he said. Rather, the independent events copy each other’s formats and operate as a grassroots ecosystem that supports local music.
His band played Atlanta’s PorchFest once, given that his lead singer is from there, which planted the seed for Denver.
“We were joking around: ‘What if this was a real thing?’ and then it eventually became reality,” Schwartz, 28, said. “By mid-March, I was poking around to see what other cities did it. I’m a doer person, and I like to make stuff happen, because I love the music community around here.”
Schwartz is working with five other volunteer supervisors to run the fest, with 50 more people having already applied for various duties via Denver PorchFest’s website (). Given the grassroots format and slim production costs, tickets will largely be donation-based, Schwartz said. He’ll canvas the neighborhood, making sure folks are in the know, and warn residents before any street closures or other disruptions the festival may cause.
Fees for this “great opportunity to meet your neighbors, discover local artists and spend the day outside,” will support artist pay, neighborhood operations, and event-day logistics, according to Denver PorchFest’s site. The goal is to pay each member of a band $100 — meaning a 4-member band would make $400 total.
They’ll also be donating any money on top of that to , a nonprofit that helps children with autism by providing art and music therapy, Schwartz said.
Nearly 350 bands have already applied to play the event, which means Schwartz and his organizers have a lot of listening to do. PorchFest also happens to be debuting a few months after the first iteration of Blucifer’s First Rodeo, a July 23-26 event that’s taking place on South Broadway. It’s also the same weekend as The UMS, the 25-year-old local-and-national music fest that’s mounting its first RiNo-based event this year, having held its final South Broadway event in 2025.
Can Denver support three large, local-music festivals — or specifically two, brand new ones that overlap in their footprints?
“Blucifer’s and The UMS are on the same weekend, so people might be choosing between them, but I would hope we’re not competition for either of them,” Schwartz said, adding that he’s been in touch with the Blucifer’s organizers and is drafting their strategy in some ways. He hopes to rope in local businesses as sponsors and hold other promotional events with organizations that share his enthusiasm for supporting the neighborhood.
“I think we have the same mission as Blucifer’s, which is to lift up the local music community and get people to see that, ‘Hey, you can go to a show and it doesn’t have to cost a ton of money and be a big thing. It’s not only Taylor Swift,'” he said.
Schwartz wants to get as many bands on the bill as possible, with a wide variety of genres represented, from bluegrass and punk to cumbia and Afrobeat — all genres of bands that have already applied.
“The short answer is: it’s going to be impossible to choose,” he said with a laugh. “The longer answer is that we’ll probably sit in my backyard on a Sunday afternoon and get a 12-pack and just sit and listen to all the music.”
Schwartz expects to release the first wave of bands in mid-July, with more to follow in rolling announcements that continue until the festival, and sponsored lead-up shows around the metro area. He’ll provide perks and branded merchandise to people who donate.
“If it were up to me, we’d have 50 houses, but I don’t know if thatap a realistic thing,” he said. “We just want to include as much as we can.”
