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TheHONK! Festival. The worldwide activist street band movement. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Or perhaps, if not, you can catch-up by first checking out this wiki, since yes, HONK! does warrant its own wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HONK! While there, you will also discover that, yes, this movement all began right here in Somerville, Mass.

Instigated in October 2006, the very first ever HONK! Festival is now seventeen years strong, prevailing annually in early October, even in spite of the very recent tough years. HONK! has always been clear on its most basic premise, to literally blast out, musically loud and rhythmically direct, a call to come together. To gather outside in celebrating the many positive aspects of life – while also delivering a heads up if those positives take a negative turn.

During those aforementioned tough recent years, specifically 2020 and 2021, the local Somerville-based HONK! organizers just pivoted to present those particular annual HONK!s in ways that made sense given the obvious obstacles. In 2020, HONK! United was born, a very spirited international online collaboration. Through that endeavor, HONK! became increasingly aware of kindred spirit bands who are very active within their home fronts, some bands located as far afield as Antarctica, Nicaragua, and Brazil. It is a fact that HONK! is indeed a movement that keeps growing worldwide. At last count, there are now over 21 large HONK! gatherings that have been held throughout the world, several of which are held annually.

In 2021, Somerville-based HONK! turned its eye to championing very hyperlocal neighborhood causes, narrowing its programming date to a specific day, and within that, branching out to support even more Boston-area communities, which often encompass neighborhoods that are only a few city blocks wide. The bands who participated in 2021 also harkened from more local areas. In other words, bands who were able to head back and sleep in their own respective beds at the end of the HONK! 2021 day.

For 2022, the band participation will continue to include many local HONK!-related bands who have sprouted up over the years, inspired by the original HONK! efforts that all began in Somerville. But this year, there will also be a few bands coming in, as in physically coming in, from far outside New England, with Banda Rim Bam Bum traveling in from Santiago, Chile, and the NOLA-based Young Fellaz Brass Band returning to HONK! after a hiatus of several years.

This year the HONK! bands total 20 at current count, with many returning bands who have participated pretty regularly in HONK!, since it was propelled into motion by the Somerville-based HONK! founder and organizer Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, who this year will be joined by:
aNova Brazil (Boston, MA),
La Banda Internacional de Chelsea (Chelsea, MA),
Banda Rim Bam Bum (Santiago, Chile),
The Brass Balagan (Burlington, VT),
Bread and Puppet Circus Band (Glover, VT),
Dirty Water Brass Band (Boston, MA),
Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band (Somerville, MA),
Expandable Brass Band (Northampton, MA),
Extraordinary Rendition Band (Providence, RI),
Hartford Hot Several (Hartford, CT),
Ideal Maine Social Aid and Sanctuary Band (Portland, ME),
The Jamaica Plain Honk Band (Jamaica Plain, MA),
Leftist Marching Band (Portsmouth, NH),
The Party Band (Lowell, MA),
Rara Bel Poze (Boston, MA),
Rude Mechanical Orchestra (NYC, NY),
School of Honk (Somerville, MA),
Undertow Brass Band [FKA What Cheer? Brigade] (Providence, RI),
Young Fellaz Brass Band (New Orleans, LA).
The current list of band participants can also be found at honkfest.org/2022-festival/bands-2022.

This year’s HONK! also includes HONK! features that have compelled many to return year after year:
Friday early evening, Lantern Parades will light the way throughout Davis Square neighborhoods.

Saturday afternoon to evening, continuous HONK! band performances willhappenin Davis Square.
Sunday early afternoon, the venerable HONK! Parade willwend its waydown Massachusetts Avenue from Davis Square to Harvard Square, making HONK!’s formidable presence known at the Square’s Oktoberfest. The Parade’s mission is to “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes, and Feet” and will include this year’s participating bands, plus many activist community groups. Interested community groups are welcome to contact parade@honkfest.org if they’d like to participate in the parade.
Sunday afternoon, the Parade will be followed by a HONK! mainstage in Harvard Square, featuring quick sets performed by many of the participating bands. Several HONK! bands will also have short sets taking place throughout the Square as well.

Sunday afternoon after the Parade, HONK! will give special focus to the good work that HONK!’s local community partners are doing. HONK! participants will gather in Harvard Square’s Winthrop Park, with band/community group discussions, public information sharing, art-making, and amplifying overall their social justice messages.
Sunday early evening, a collective HONK! call-to-action by visiting and local HONK! musicians will take place outside a local correctional facility in the Boston-area, to raise awareness about those who are being detained there, and to remind the detainees with music, that they have not been forgotten by many in the outside world.

Held outdoors rain or shine.

The HONK! Festival, a music fest originally conceived and presented in 2006 right here in Somerville, caught on immediately in the local area. Since then HONK! has also become an international phenomenon. Full details on how HONK! came to be, the philosophical and pragmatic approaches behind the HONK! movement, and what differentiates a HONK! band from other music-makers in the streets, can all be found at honkfest.org/about. Taking a deep dive into the HONK! Wiki can also reveal the far-reaching aspects of this particular progressive musical movement.

HONK! is a not-for-profit, all-volunteer project where many hands lighten the impressive list of festival to-dos. Visit honkfest.org/help for more information on volunteer opportunities and also to make a tax-deductible donation. No donation is too small, or too large!

For complete information and continuous updates on this year’s HONK! Festival, visit .honkfest.org, facebook.com/honkfestival, and twitter.com/honkfest.

On Sunday, October 9th, the last day of the Boston HONK! Festival, the parade of tenants, small owners, and allies will debut their support for rent control as elections approach in the state of Massachusetts and march from Davis Square, down Mass Ave, and into Harvard Square from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. 

The 17th annual HONK! Festival returns for Indigenous People’s Day weekend with 20 marching bands convening in Cambridge to promote music, community, and a sprinkle of local activism. Musical groups such as the Jamaica Plain Honk Band, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and Bread and Puppet Circus Band will partner with local nonprofit organizations to get the word out about various causes, from voter registration to gentrification.

The festival will kick off on Oct. 6 with Chilean band Rim Bam Bum, which will perform at the Main Branch of the Cambridge Public Library at 6:30 p.m., with a lantern parade through the streets of Davis Square the following evening. Most band performances will commence on Oct. 8, with the 20 brass bands performing at six locations around Davis Square. A concert featuring four performance venues around Harvard Square on Oct. 9 will coincide with the Harvard Square Business Association’s annual Oktoberfest celebration.

The festivities will take place Sunday, October 9th, 2022.

The Harvard Square Business Association has announced the return of the 43rd Annual Oktoberfest and slightly irrepressible and fabulously madcap 17th Annual HONK! Parade on Sunday, October 9th, 2022. Come be a part of this unique, irreverent, family-friendly annual tradition where musicians and spectators “reclaim the streets for horns, bikes and feet”!

New this year: The Filipino American Festival and The Grolier Poetry Book Shop 95th Anniversary Festival!

Harvard Square’s Oktoberfest features food from all over the world, arts, crafts, vintage goods, free samples, sidewalk sales and one-of-a-kind gifts. In addition, Oktoberfest boasts beer gardens hosted by Alden & Harlow and Wusong Road and a first this year, a wine garden hosted by Commonwealth Wine School.

This annual celebration of fall features live music, including a Passim stage and an all HONK! Review on the main stage. Dancing in the streets is encouraged!

One of the highlights of the festival is the HONK! Parade which arrives in the Square at approximately 1pm. In its 17th year, the HONK! movement has become a global phenomenon. This year, more than 20 HONK! bands from around the country will march from Davis Square to Harvard Square. Spectators will be treated to a horn-tooting, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, mind-blowing spectacle and everyone is welcome to join the back of the parade and make their way to Oktoberfest.

Brooklyn-based Home Studios has filled an Italian restaurant close to Harvard University with plush booths and banquettes to introduce colour and texture to the space.

Bar Enza is situated in a prime spot on Harvard Square next to the Ivy League college in Cambridge, Massachusetts – just across the Charles River from Boston.

Home Studios revamped Bar Enza to include a variety of soft seating

The project involved the revamp of an existing restaurant on the ground floor of The Charles Hotel.

To complement chef Mark Ladner’s menu, Home Studios pulled references from a range of regions and styles across Italy – from Rome’s trattorias to Milanese villas – and combined them to create interiors that feel elevated yet cosy.

The seasons and the shops may change, but the spirit and streets are ever-exciting

How to describe Harvard Square? Busy and bustling with bikes and buses, cars and crowds, trucks and kick-scooters fighting for space on streets and crossways. Intimate with its hidden alleys and entryways, venerable (quirky tobacconist Leavitt and Peirce), modern (a fine wine shop, a cannabis boutique), upscale (Harvest Restaurant), and working-class (late-night standby Charlie’s Kitchen). Preppies in polo shirts and grunge punks in ragged jeans, coffee-table books and counter-culture comics, tweedy professors and four-year drop-ins and the drop-outs who never left … in short, the Square epitomizes all that’s eclectic, and that is precisely why we like it. With stylistic contrasts at every corner, the energy here is catching, challenging us to understand how the pieces all fit.

Seven individuals — including basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and actress Laverne Cox — will be awarded the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies, next month.

The awards will be handed down by Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, which announced the recipients last Wednesday.

Five others will receive the honor at an award ceremony next month: Award-winning author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, arts patron and philanthropist Agnes Gund, Citigroup executive Raymond J. McGuire ’79, former Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78, and pioneering artist Betye Saar. The ceremony will be held on Oct. 6 in Sanders Theatre.

Abdul-Jabbar is the National Basketball Association’s all-time leading scorer and the only six-time Most Valued Player in league history. Since retiring from the court, Abdul-Jabbar has been a prolific cultural critic, writing several books on African-American history and serving as a U.S. Cultural ambassador under President Barack Obama. In 2016, former President Obama awarded Abdul-Jabbar the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Cox, the first transgender actress to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award, is a prominent LGBTQ+ rights activist. Since rising to fame for her performance in Netflix’s hit show “Orange is the New Black,” Cox has been nominated for Emmys in four of the last eight years.

Hutchins Center director Henry Louis Gates Jr. praised the honorees for “their unyielding commitment to pushing the boundaries of representation and creating opportunities for advancement and participation for people who have been too often shut out from the great promise of our times.”

This year’s slate of honorees is the first since 2019. The Hutchins Center did not award the medal during the pandemic.

The Du Bois Medal, first presented in 2000, honors its namesake, the pre-eminent African American scholar and civil rights activist. Du Bois graduated from Harvard College in 1890 and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895.

Past honorees include Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, former U.S. Congressman John R. Lewis, author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, talk show host and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey, and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Smart design moves (not to mention a killer lasagna) make date night at Bar Enza a must.

If there’s one image diners at Bar Enza tend to flaunt on social media, it’s photo evidence of the Harvard Square trattoria’s 100-layer lasagna, a dish whose densely packed sheets of noodles (go ahead, count them) and bubbles of molten mozzarella would bring a Whole30 adherent to tears.

The artfully layered pasta isn’t the only draw at Bar Enza; the soft, Italian-inspired interiors of the restaurant, helmed by Brooklyn firm Home Studios, are also proof that simple ingredients can come together to create a thing of beautiful simplicity. The vibe? “It kinda feels like a great living room,” says firm founder and creative director Oliver Haslegrave.

At 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 7, Mt. Auburn Street lost a beloved giant of popular Harvard Square chains. The iconic, delectable El Jefe’s moved from its original spot by Tasty Burger to a larger, more expansive location a tad closer to the Yard (and their rival Felipe’s) on JFK Street. The move came with an upgraded interior as well, with two stories of seating and a larger space for eating, talking, and general loitering. Although nearly everything new about the popular Mexican joint was changed for the better, the memory of old El Jefe’s — cozy, familiar, and grimy — still lingers. So, let’s see how the new location measures up, piece by piece.

The Space – 8/10

At first glance, the space is an intoxicated college student’s dream. There are two stories of seating, more room for the food line (which can grow to snake all the way up the stairs), and more space to socialize. While this expanded capacity is great business for El Jefe’s, attracting even more customers, it has also led to increased wait times and foot traffic within the Mexican joint. However long the wait may be, at least El Jefe’s has the space to support it. As a prime spot of late-night eats for college students, the restaurant’s choice to expand their square footage and capacity was a smart idea and will only bring in more business for them.