Arts & Entertainment
VIDEO: Berklee JazzFest Takes Over the South End
Berklee transformed Columbus Avenue into a music festival on Saturday.
Good food and good music - in the South End, musicians and chefs transformed Columbus Avenue into a street party this weekend for the eleventh annual Beantown Jazz Festival.
The festival was sponsored by and featured outdoor stages and food from all over the world.
"The purpose of the festival is really to give back to the community," said Rob Rose, the vice-president of special programs at Berklee. "The person who started the festival - his name is Darryl Settles and he actually has a . - and he started the festival 10 years ago sort of as a way to give other people in the community some fun.
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"And we started to get involved. We had bands coming down and playing stuff like that and then we became a partnership and we took over the festival from Darryl and it's really a way for us to give back to the community of Boston and for the people in the South End."
Despite the forecasted rain, Saturday's showers didn't seem to prevent anyone from celebrating and one artist even spoke to Patch about the festival from a musician's point of view.
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"It's really awesome first of all," said Patriq Moody, a member of the band Rajdulari. "I went to Berklee three years ago so it's a thing that happens every single year and, as a student, I always came down to watch all the people play so it's my first time playing here. It's great to be performing for all my teachers and former students - all my peers and everything. It's pretty awesome."
The organizers tried to take environmentally-friendly measures by printing less paper and the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA) provided portable tap water fountains for attendees to fill their water bottles. Rose explained a bit about those initiatives:
"The environment is like very important to Berklee," he explained. "At the college, we've got all sorts of ways of using paper, using electricity, using oil and all that kind of stuff. So it's really important.
"At the festival, we wanted to carry that on to the people. So we use these special rice cups that disolve after you use them and stuff like that. We have special trash bins. We're composting. We're doing a variety of different things to help the ecology."