After the passing of the city’s Old Port Festival and two quiet pandemic years, Portland’s music and cultural scene rose again on Sunday as more than 60 performing groups played loud and proud for an estimated crowd of 5,000 at the Resurgam Music and Arts Festival held on Thompson’s Point.
“Portland is known as a beer town, a food town. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a town the size of Portland that has as many amazing cultural attractions for kids and families,” said Jeff Shaw, executive director of the Maine Academy of Modern Music, which organized the festival, prompted in part by the annual Old Port Festival ending in 2019 after 46 years. The Maine Academy of Modern Music had sponsored a stage at the Old Port Festival in years past, but at Resurgam – named after the city’s Latin motto, meaning, I shall rise again – the kids took center stage for an all-ages audience.
“Portland has been wanting this. Let’s celebrate these kids. It’s about the opportunity to be seen and heard. And to see and hear. It’s very inspiring for all the kids watching,” Shaw said.
Maine Academy of Modern Music student groups and performers made up about half of the musical acts at the festival. Concertgoers spread out on blankets on the grass to take in the show at the Academy Stage, with various food trucks set up around the perimeter.
As the five-piece band Up in the Air jammed out a catchy cover of a Weezer song, the three members of Cherryfield Goatmen – who take their name from an old Maine legend – waited, calm and cool, to take the stage next. “We’ve played big crowds before. We’re not nervous,” said drummer Henry Grohman, 14, of Biddeford, a refrain heard from many of the academy’s young musicians on Sunday.
“I’ve done a lot of performing. I just got used to it, I guess,” said Molly Fitzpatrick, 11, bassist for the all-girl pop and rock group Shadows. But Fitzpatrick’s Shadows bandmate, Isla Murdoch, 12, said she felt a flutter or two going on stage at first.
“It was kind of scary. There are more people here and it’s the biggest stage we’ve played on,” said Murdoch, exhilarated nonetheless by the electric rush of their strong performance. Meanwhile, Cherryfield Goatmen, now on stage, ripped through an amped-up cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” with Grohman’s driving drumbeat supplying the band’s core power.
One of the first groups to greet concertgoers Sunday was Batimbo United, a Portland-based percussion and vocals group, playing at the festival’s International Stage outside the Children’s Museum & Theater of Maine. Decked out in vivid red and green ceremonial costumes, Batimbo’s nine members hammered on waist-high conga-style drums, laying down infectious rhythms as they sang and danced traditional Burundi songs.
Over on the community stage outside Brick South, the all-ukulele band The Flukes worked their way through Bach and Beatles covers to an older and more intimate but fully appreciative crowd. Various artists and craftspeople were set up at kiosks inside Brick South to sell their wares. On the other side of Brick South, music lovers sat at tables sipping beer as Coyote Island – one of about eight bands to take the festival’s Rock Stage Sunday – offered up danceable grooves in their psychedelic indie style.
Festival goers appeared more than happy to enjoy outdoor music and culture on a glorious June day. As for comparisons to the Old Port Festival, the outlook was just as sunny.
“I think the festival concept will work better here,” said Jacob Thich, 37, of Freeport. Thich used to bartend at the Old Port Festival, and said that event felt cramped by comparison to the open space at Thompson’s Point. He added that inebriated people made the Old Port event less than family-friendly at times.
“It ruined it for the young kids,” Thich said. “If this festival takes off like it seems it will, it could blow the Old Port Festival out of the water.”
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