Turn It Up, Columbus

By Monica Jones

There is a particular kind of magic in discovering a band before everybody else.

Maybe it’s three songs into a set when you realize you haven’t checked your phone in an hour. Maybe it’s a band you’ve never heard of playing a song that suddenly catches you, and leaves you reaching for your phone to look up again later. Maybe it’s simply October in Columbus, the air finally behaving itself, music spilling across a Midtown neighborhood and several hundred people remembering that sometimes the best thing to do is just show up.

Now entering its fourth year, Jarfest returns to Jarfly on Saturday, October 24, celebrating eight years since the Midtown restaurant first opened its doors in 2018. What began as a homegrown music festival has been steadily getting bigger, stranger and better.

“I feel very confident this is the best one yet,” says Jarfly co-owner Chad Scrimpshire. 

At the top of the bill is Michigander, the indie-rock project led by singer-songwriter Jason Singer, and the biggest headliner Jarfest has landed to date. The band has appeared on stages at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and Shaky Knees, and this fall heads out to tour its new album, Over Before You Know It.

Among dates in Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Nashville and other decidedly larger dots on the touring map, something unusual happens.

Scrimpshire says. “There’s no Atlanta date, no Macon date. Columbus, Georgia, Jarfest is their only Georgia date.”

Columbus music lovers know the routine. Find a band you want to see. Check the tour dates. Atlanta. Birmingham. Athens. Nashville. Maybe even LaGrange. And right where Columbus ought to be: nothing.

We aren’t sitting conveniently along I-85 or I-75, and that geography has consequences. Routing a tour through Columbus requires intention. Bringing nationally touring independent artists here requires relationships, money, logistics, persistence and somebody willing to make the phone calls.

COME HANG

For Scrimpshire, live music isn’t some clever branding exercise – a punny excuse for an extra restaurant event dreamed up around a conference table. It’s one of his strongest passions to chase when he isn’t working.

“My number one hobby outside of restaurants is going to shows,” he says. “I love going to see live music, good or bad. It’s always good to see live music.”

He travels to festivals across the Southeast, goes to Bonnaroo every year and checks concert listings whenever he’s out of town, sometimes squeezing a show into a trip and sometimes building the trip around the show itself. Eventually, all that listening finds its way home.

This year’s Jarfest bill stretches from Michigander through Girlpuppy, Trash Panda, The Pink Stones, Tedo Stone, The Echolocations and The Band Honey, alongside How on Earth, Caroline Bowling and local songwriter Chris Johnston.

It is unmistakably indie, but not monotonously so. Country edges rub against pop-punk, indie rock wanders into singer-songwriter territory, and some of the names will be familiar while others probably won’t.

“Every year, I have people tell me that we put them on one of their new favorite bands,” Scrimpshire says. “That’s what we aim to do. That’s the goal. To put people on new music.”

There may be no better argument for Jarfest. You do not need to study the lineup before you arrive. You don’t need the correct band T-shirt. You don’t need to know which record came out first, have an opinion about somebody’s sophomore EP or prove your indie credentials at the gate.

Come because you love live music. Come because your friends are going. Come because you need a Saturday out of the house. Come because you might walk away loving something you didn’t know existed that morning.

“People in Columbus love to tell you there is never anything to do,” Scrimpshire says. “Here is something to do, man. Come hang.”

BUILT HERE

Sitting at 1358 13th Street, tucked between Lakebottom Park, Weracoba Heights and Overlook, Jarfly has spent eight years becoming the kind of neighborhood watering hole where families grab dinner, friends gather on the patio, somebody catches the game and live music has become part of the rhythm.

Once a year, they blow the whole thing open. The parking lot becomes festival grounds. A stage goes up. Bands roll in. Food and drinks start moving. Vendors arrive. People drift in from the surrounding neighborhood and across the city, and for a day this little corner of Midtown becomes its own ecosystem.

Jarfest itself has grown alongside the guys behind it. Over the years, Garrett Lawrence, Miles Greathouse, Robert Battle and Scrimpshire have built a growing collection of local concepts, from craft beer and neighborhood bars to restaurants and whatever they dream up next. But the thing underneath that growth has remained remarkably consistent: make places people actually want to be.

This year, even the festival’s visual identity got a new set of eyes. Designer Brian Manley of Fun With Robots created the artwork, carrying forward the aesthetic established in previous years while leaning into an old-school festival look that makes Jarfest seem like somebody unearthed a poster from 1978.

“It feels like a festival that’s been around longer than it has,” Scrimpshire says. Jarfest already feels less like an event somebody invented and more like something Columbus was supposed to have.

THE LONG WAY HOME

Behind all of it is a network most people standing in front of the stage will never see.

Scrimpshire readily admits he’s “a bit of a control freak” about Jarfest, from sponsorships and artwork to the overall vision for the festival. But one of the most important pieces is Drew Beskin of Super Canoe, whose years in the Southeast music scene have helped connect Jarfest with artists and managers well beyond Columbus.

Beskin spent eight years running the Georgia Theatre in Athens and now manages several artists appearing at this year’s festival. He has also become one of Scrimpshire’s close friends and an integral part of building Jarfest.

“We couldn’t do it without him,” Scrimpshire says. “He kind of legitimizes us a little bit when he’s the one that reaches out. I can’t tell you how many people we’ve met through all this and relationships we’ve made purely because of Drew.”

Those relationships are part of how a festival grows. Not overnight. Not because somebody slapped “festival” on a Facebook event and ordered wristbands. Year by year. Band by band. Introduction by introduction.

Until one day a group of local restaurant guys can look at a touring artist they genuinely love and think: Let’s bring them to Columbus.

For Scrimpshire, landing Michigander is particularly personal. He has followed the band for years and watched them perform at festivals around the country. Four Jarfests in, they’re coming to his parking lot.

SEE YOU IN THE PARKING LOT

There are bigger festivals. There are bigger stages, bigger cities and considerably more expensive ways to spend a Saturday listening to music. Jarfest isn’t trying to be those things.

Its charm is precisely that you can hear exceptional original music in the middle of your own city, eat something good, run into somebody you know, meet somebody you don’t, dance if the spirit moves you and eventually go home to your own bed.

No interstate required.

Because beneath the lineup, artwork, vendors, food, logistics and all the other machinery required to turn a restaurant parking lot into a music festival, Jarfest is built around an extraordinarily simple idea: Columbus deserves good live music, too.

“We just want to push and drive live music culture in Columbus,” Scrimpshire says. “That’s the goal.”

On October 24, they’ll get another chance. The amps will come on. The parking lot will fill. Somebody will hear their new favorite band for the first time.

For one Saturday in Midtown, nobody gets to say there’s nothing to do in Columbus.

You know where to be.

For updates, lineup news and festival details, follow @jarflymidtown and @jarfest_columbus on Instagram, and follow Jarfly and Jarfest on Facebook.