Mark your calendars! The first annual Belfast Free Range Music Festival will take place on Saturday, April 24th. The all-day festival will feature over twenty bands and solo artists representing a wide range of genres. In addition to a wonderful local and statewide representation, musicians will be traveling into town from all over the East Coast and as far as Seattle and San Francisco.

Performances will take place across six venues in the downtown area: Roots & Tendrils, The Colonial Theatre, Waterfall Arts, Aarhus Gallery, the Belfast Free Library and the American Legion. After a long winter of being cooped up, festival-goers will get out and around downtown, ranging freely from venue to venue, taking in live music and the company of others.

A major highpoint on this year’s lineup is Burlington’s Jazz Mandolin Project. Since the nineties, Jamie Masefield's Jazz Mandolin Project has been offering an entirely new concept of what the mandolin can do. For his Free Range Music Festival set, Masefield will be joined by Jon Fishman (drummer for the mega cult band, Phish) and Peter Apfelbaum (keys, sax and percussion - known as the leader of the Hieroglyphics and collaborator with musicians ranging from Don Cherry to Cecil Taylor).

Lineup includes; THE JAZZ MANDOLIN PROJECT, David Wax Museum, Brown Bird, Tiger Saw, The Free Seedlings, David Dodson, Mary Ann Driscoll, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Travis Lloyd Band, Wesley Hartley and the Traveling Trees, The Fofers, Luna Madidus, South China, Lazarus, Unbunny, Shawn Mercer and the Boondock Blues Band, Uke of Spaces, Cinder Conk, Good Kids Sprouting Horns, Gully, Caethua, Travis Cyr and the Strings of Calamity, Class Machine, Mahdi Army Orkestars, Calvin and the Free Will Agents, Rural Electric

This inaugural music fest follows in the footsteps of Belfast’s multi-dimensional musical past and present, from the wild live scene downtown in the 1970s to our fair city’s contra dances, musicals, concerts and festivals of today.

The festival lineup, schedule, pass info and more can be found on the Free Range Music Festival website: www.freerangemusicfestival.com. Pass prices are as follows: all access passes are $20, general passes are $12 in advance and $15 the day of the event. Passes can currently be purchased online. Beginning April 2nd, passes can be purchased at the following downtown locations: Wild Rufus Records, The Green Store, and Roots & Tendrils. There are a limited number of passes so buy early!

This festival is made possible by the support of Presenting Sponsor, Bangor Savings Bank, and other local businesses. To view a full list of sponsors, visit the sponsor page on the festival’s website.