{"id":2399497,"date":"2026-05-02T21:10:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T21:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2399497"},"modified":"2026-05-02T21:10:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T21:10:38","slug":"founders-of-new-boston-music-festival-mojo-explain-how-the-idea-started-in-umass-amherst-dorm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/founders-of-new-boston-music-festival-mojo-explain-how-the-idea-started-in-umass-amherst-dorm\/","title":{"rendered":"Founders of new Boston music festival, Mojo, explain how the idea started in UMass Amherst dorm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<p>An idea born in the dorms at UMass Amherst is quickly becoming a national music movement on college campuses.\u00a0<br \/>\u00a0<br \/>&#8220;It started with just promoting local musicians, promoting local bands, just trying to cultivate a good creative music scene, putting together musicians, photographers, videographers, and then putting on shows and giving them an audience and a platform to showcase,&#8221; said Mojo founder and CEO Charley Blacker.<\/p>\n<p>COO of Mojo Alex Parker, Director of Mojo Emily Donovan, and Blacker launched the company as college sophomores with the goal of bringing modern-day music festivals back to the basics.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;At the end of the day, we&#8217;re just trying to make great experiences for everybody,&#8221; said Donovan. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The Mojo Boston Musical Festival is set to take over City Hall Plaza on May 9 for the very first time. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is where the old Boston Calling was, and so we&#8217;re like, all right, maybe it&#8217;s possible,&#8221; Blacker said. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The trio raised all of the money for the production on their own through sponsorships and ticket sales from other festivals. They told WBZ-TV that they expect around 8,000 people to attend and for the event to benefit the city as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think the city&#8217;s been trying hard to activate public spaces a lot over the past couple of years, and there have been some smaller-scale festivals,&#8221; said\u00a0Andrew Galvin, Director of Communication and Community Outreach for Erin Murphy. &#8220;But there hasn&#8217;t been anything quite this big since the original Boston Calling.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>New Bedford-based band of brothers Morrissey Boulevard met the founders while at UMass and has since played a few smaller-scale Mojo festivals.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;One of the coolest gigs we&#8217;ve ever played,&#8221; said frontman Zan Morrissey. &#8220;Maybe the coolest gig we&#8217;ve ever played.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Zan said that the festivals are a dream for the live music community.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These bands are so cool, and they&#8217;re so inspiring to us,&#8221; says drummer Wilson Morrissey. &#8220;It&#8217;s almost like, how do we fit in with them? It&#8217;s a massive stage for us and it&#8217;s so much fun for us to feel like small mice in a big city.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>With 10 hours of music, two stages, food trucks, and more, the Mojo team is looking forward to seeing all their hard work pay off.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are really confident that it&#8217;s gonna be a banger of a festival. We&#8217;re really excited,&#8221; said Blacker.<\/p>\n<section class=\"content__body--footer\">\n<\/section>\n<p>  <!-- data-recirc-source=\"queryly\" --><\/p>\n<aside class=\"component list recirculation component--type-recirculation  \">\n<p><h3 class=\"component__title\">More from CBS News<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<section class=\"content__body--footer\">\n      <!-- tags --><\/p>\n<section class=\"content__tags\">\n<p class=\"content__tags__label\">In:<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section><\/div>\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cbsnews.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An idea born in the dorms at UMass Amherst is quickly becoming a national music movement on college campuses.\u00a0\u00a0&#8220;It started with just promoting local musicians, promoting local bands, just trying to cultivate a good creative music scene, putting together musicians, photographers, videographers, and then putting on shows and giving them an audience and a platform [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2399498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[29139,468440],"class_list":["post-2399497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-boston","tag-umass-amherst"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Founders-of-new-Boston-music-festival-Mojo-explain-how-the.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2399497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2399499,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399497\/revisions\/2399499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2399498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2399497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2399497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2399497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}