Bromberg's Big Noise coming back, seven years later
Six years after Bromberg's Big Noise in the Neighborhood music festival drew 3,000 to Wilmington's Riverfront, it looks like the WXPN-approved fest is coming back.
Not much is yet known about a second Big Noise, which is only a few weeks into the planning stages.
The venue, acts, date and other details are still to come. But this is what we do know: Bromberg will perform alongside with a roster of fellow national acts, just like the festival's 2010 debut. And a spring date is currently being targeted.
Nancy Josephson, Bromberg's wife, says downtown Wilmington social media consultant and brand strategist Matt Van Belle will organize the festival, which was aired live in its entirety on WXPN 88.5-FM last time.
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Van Belle is coming off his work helping revitalize the People's Festival, which was held last month in the city's Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park with a new beer garden, new food vendors and new VIP areas. He proposed a Big Noise comeback recently and Bromberg and Josephson gave their blessing.
But unlike the first festival, which Josephson exhaustively planned with then-Light Up the Queen Foundation head Bill Taylor with input from Bromberg, this one will be largely run by Van Belle and his team.
"I told Matt, 'I would like to be an elder who tells people what to do and then goes back to the teepee to take a nap," says Josephson, who also performed at the first 'Big Noise' with her act Angel Band.
"David added, 'I'm staying in the teepee,'" she says with a laugh.
The inaugural Big Noise may not have known it at the time, but the festival was leading the charge for what has become a music festival renaissance in Delaware.
Two years after Big Noise, Firefly Music Festival set up camp in Dover, spawning a pair of short-lived country fests – Big Barrel and Delaware Junction. On Sept. 17, Milton-based brewery Dogfish Head will host its biggest event ever and it will come in the form of a music festival. Their Analog-A-Go-Go could draw up to 5,000 to Bellevue for a day of music and beer with acts like rockers Built to Spill and hip-hop artist Talib Kweli.
The first Big Noise was packed with musicians and acts that are either friends, collaborators or fans of Bromberg, leaning heavily on Americana – folk, rock, blues and bluegrass. And that is the plan for the festival's second act.
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"We want it to be a whole roster of people who fit together – artists who would normally, under any circumstances, be sitting in with each other. That makes it specific and special – something you're not going to get pretty much any place else or at any other time. A one-time-only event," Josephson says.
In addition to Bromberg and his big band, the festival's line-up in 2010 included singer/songwriter John Hiatt, newgrass leader Sam Bush Band, jam band Railroad Earth, Jefferson Airplane's Jorma Kaukonen and Josephson's Angel Band. The festival closed with all of the acts together on stage for a closing jam.
The original festival was a fundraiser for the Light Up The Queen Foundation, coming a year before World Cafe Live at the Queen would open its doors on Market Street for the first time. It had many sponsors, keeping ticket prices for the eight-hour festival at a low $32.
Big Noise was held at Justison Landing Park, which is now home to the Constitution Yards Beer Garden during the summer and the Riverfront Rink for ice skaters in the winter. The same spot is among locations being scouted for the festival.
Van Belle says the second coming of Big Noise will most likely be in Wilmington, but other locations north of the city are also a possibility, including Bellevue State Park, where Analog-A-Go-Go will be held.
It won't be Van Belle's first encounter with Big Noise project. He worked as a promoter for the first festival, along with all the other Light Up the Queen fundraising concerts that led up to the Queen's re-opening, including a Trombone Shorty show atop the city's ShopRite supermarket.
After experiencing firsthand the amount of work it took to pull off the first Big Noise, Josephson thought the festival was surely dead and buried. But then Van Belle came calling after the 22nd annual Bob Marley tribute festival, which was held July 30.
"This came out of the blue. I had no desire whatsoever to go down this road again. It looks all shiny at the end, but the slog going through it has so many layers," she says. "There's a ton to do before we even start inviting people and putting a roster together. I'm cautiously optimistic."
A website for the festival went live Tuesday at bignoisefestival.com, following the appearance of the festival social media pages on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram a day before.
The festival news caps a busy month for the Grammy-nominated Bromberg, who moved to Wilmington from Chicago nearly 15 years ago.
The influential multi-instrumentalist also recently announced both a big sale and a big new album.
Bromberg's extensive collection of 250-plus American-made violins will be sold to the Library of Congress for $1.5 million. It is there where they will be preserved with a new center for the study of American violins built around the collection.
The 70-year-old, who has collaborated with everyone from Bob Dylan and Dr. John to George Harrison and The Band's Levon Helm over the years, also unveiled his latest album, "The Blues, The Whole Blues and Nothing But The Blues," which will be released Oct. 14.
"I think he's underappreciated and that genre has a lot of spring/summer vibes," says Van Belle. "The festival is a way to sort of honor David. And it's weird saying that because he's alive and I'm coming off doing a festival for a guy who's been dead for 35 years,"
Contact Ryan Cormier of The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier), Twitter (@ryancormier) and Instagram (@ryancormier).