Photo credit: Virginia Maria Meeks
One day, over 140 acts, all within venues spread across Downtown Kingston, HomeGrown Live Music Festival has been managing this chaos since 2008, and this year’s event, occurring on May 2, is no exception. I had the chance to sit down with the Festival Coordinator, Chris Morris, just after the release of this year's lineup, to discuss the upcoming festival and the excitement leading up to the busy Saturday in the first weekend of May.
Partnering with 17 venues across the city for the 18th year of the festival, audiences will see a lot of similarities to past years, albeit with a loss of one major venue: “We lost the Mansion just a couple weeks ago,” Morris explains, “and we've worked with them since our very first year. So that was not only a logistical blow, but also just that every year, it's always an easy place for us to work.”
We share our sadness about the bar’s sudden closing, a hub for musicians across the city, especially in relation to the festival. He tells me about Kingston’s music scene in the early 2000s, which was in dire need of a resurgence, when the Mansion appeared just as HomeGrown held their first ever festival. “It felt like they were a part of our story, and us of theirs.”
Photo credit: Bernard Clark
We then turn to discuss another venue that was set to return to the festival in the absence of the Mansion. “We were able to get the Grad Club on board pretty quickly. We worked with them early on and then we didn’t for a long time for whatever reason, so it's nice to bring them back into the fold.”
Following our conversation, it was announced that the Grad Club would be closed until further notice, prompting yet another probable change in the festival’s lineup, in the wake of various venue closures across the downtown core. Despite the complications, the plethora of venues across the city are quintessential to the festival itself. They help introduce new venues to audiences, as “ultimately, we're about supporting the musicians of the scene, but the venues are a part of that. So we can introduce new places to go see music. That's really important.”
As someone who hasn’t been around when HomeGrown takes place, I wanted to hear from the source what the energy is like during the buzz of scheduling so many performances in such a contained area. In his role as Festival Coordinator, Morris is busy throughout the day, making his way around all the venues to check in on the performances and to support the wider festival team as needed.
“I love downtown Kingston,” Chris tells me, “and when you add in 140 musicians playing and all these places, if you're way downtown, you can see people walking from Musiikki or The Toucan over to the RCHA Club with guitars in their hands. I remember somebody said to me one day, ‘It looks like everyone's using Market Square to get their gear from one place to another.’ So there's musicians that are playing three or four shows that day, right? So they might just be bouncing around different places… there's music at one o'clock in the afternoon. But then you're walking around the market, and there's guitars going all over the place. It's like, what's going on here today? Pick a venue, and there's something happening.”
Photo credit: Bernard Clark
The music aside, HomeGrown is also a non-profit organization, run entirely by volunteers like Morris, using the festival as a means to raise money for Joe’s Music Mill’s activities and instrument library. “I'm a musician as well, and musicians get asked to do a lot of charity gigs,” Chris says. “Some people are a little more into it than others, but as soon as you mention Joe's Mill, everyone is like, ‘hell yeah,’ especially the people that are old enough—who probably knew Joe or could have known Joe. There's that element too, of doing it for him. But also, he's been gone for a long time, sadly, so, there are tons of [musicians at the festival] that never knew him or were even born after he passed. And they're still like, ‘Joe's Mill is so cool’—people are borrowing instruments from there ahead of their shows at HomeGrown.”
We also discuss the team’s approach to fundraising, which prioritizes impact instead of numbers: “Our goal is to get as many people out as possible to do it, and to keep our overhead as low as possible—we've managed to do pretty well for Joe's Mill over the years. We're a pretty simple organization, because we just want to do the best we can and hope that everybody's happy once we're done.”
Photo credit: Bernard Clark
Ultimately, we finish our conversation by talking about the numerous volunteers running each part of the festival, from festival coordinators to board members and community sponsors, all working to make one busy festival day run smoothly.
"I'm really excited and really proud of the group that we have—just the organizers alone are [around] 22 people. That's not including the support we get from Downtown Kingston and Kingston Sound Works, and other places. People are really enthusiastic and doing it for the love of what HomeGrown is and what we're trying to build, adding more life to the Kingston music scene, even after 18 years."
Chris Morris has been the festival coordinator of HomeGrown Live Music Festival since 2019. He's been involved in the Kingston music scene for over 30 years as a performer, festival organizer, and concert promoter.
