Next Level Park St. Music Fest, a signature Madison event now in its 7th year, will be held on Saturday, Aug. 3, 3-8 p.m. on the Labor Temple grounds in the heart of Madison’s South Side.
The event has grown in popularity since it started seven years ago and now has become a Madison favorite. Performers this year will include Orquesta Salsoul Del Mad, V Funk, Makahya Drake, DJ Van Go, and C Dawson Soul, featuring CJ Parker.
“On top of all of the great music, we will have food vendors and retail vendors there, as well,” Park Street Music Fest organizer Clyde Gaines tells Madison365.
Next Level Park St. Music Fest will also have a 5K walk/run and preventative health screenings as the festival continues to also have a focus on health and wellness. “The walk/run is geared towards Black men’s health. We feel like that is important to highlight for our community,” Gaines says.
“We’ll have medical students there doing blood pressure checks and hosting screenings like we’ve had in the past. We know how important it is to have a health focus at this event,” says Carola Gaines, wife of Clyde Gaines, who helps to organize the event. “It’s a good opportunity for the med students to be out in the community and be engaged with that community.
“I really love this event because of the great fellowship that goes on and watching the community come together,” she adds. “Listening to our music … on the South Side, Park Street. There’s really nothing like it in Madison.”
Park Street Music Fest originated in 2017 as a free one-day outdoor live music event designed to bring people together from a cross-section of music genres featuring local and regional artists.
“What prompted me to start this seven years ago was to bring something different to the South Side of Madison. I know that there were music festivals and a lot of other spaces in the city, but there was none in particular that had music as the main focus on the South Side,” Clyde Gaines says. “We’ve had some other things happening on the South Side, but they weren’t geared toward live music as being the drawing card.”
Over the years, Gaines has watched some of the residents of the South Side get older and younger families move in to create a mix.
“A lot of young folks moving to Madison that want to know what there is to do in Madison will come to the event. So we feel as though this event provides an opportunity for them to experience live entertainment, to experience community fellowship, to experience some camaraderie and just grow as a person being involved in what Madison has to offer,” Gaines says. “We think that this event kind of brings a lot of people together who may not normally see one another often during the regular course of the summer … or even the year.”
In just the seven years that the Park St. Music Fest has existed, Madison’s South Side has gone through a bit of a transformation with a new Black Business Hub, a new Centro Hispano, a new Madison College Building and, coming soon, a new Center for Black Excellence and Culture.
“In the seven years of our existence as a music festival, South Madison has become a major hub,” Gaines says. “It looks a little different with all these building projects taking place, all these people getting to come to South Madison. This side of town is under a tremendous growth period right now. We’re happy that we still can be a part of the South Madison corridor.
“There will be a lot of southsiders at the Park Street Music Fest, but we stress that this is an event for everybody everywhere. We welcome everybody.”
