Your August Culture Calendar Just Got Loud — Starting With Second Saturday

I have a soft spot the size of Haddon Avenue for the way South Jersey does the arts, and August is about to prove my point four or five times over. So grab a pen, or better yet grab a friend, because the next few weeks are stacked.

Start on Haddon Avenue

We start close to home this Saturday, August 8, when Collingswood does its Second Saturday thing along Haddon Avenue from 4 to 8 p.m. If you’ve never done one, let me paint it for you: sidewalk artists set up shop, musicians play on corners, galleries throw their doors open, and the whole main drag turns into a slow, happy stroll where you keep bumping into people you know. It’s free, it’s unpretentious, and it’s the single best argument I can make that you don’t need to cross a bridge to have a real night out. Second Saturdays only run a handful of times a year here — April, June, August, and October — so this is one of just four chances, and the August edition always has that golden late-summer-evening light that makes everything look like a memory you’re having in advance.

Later in the month, the ambition scales up

On Saturday, August 29, the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood hosts Chris Botti — yes, that Chris Botti, the Grammy-winning trumpet player who has shared stages with damn near everyone worth sharing a stage with — at 8 p.m. I’ve sat in that room for a dozen shows and I’ll tell you the thing nobody tells you about the Scottish Rite: it’s intimate in a way big venues can only dream about. When a horn player of Botti’s caliber fills a space that size, you don’t just hear it, you feel it in your sternum.

That same Saturday, if jazz isn’t your speed, Haddon Township throws its Summer of Love Music Festival, kicking off at 2 p.m. and running into the evening — a looser, sunnier, all-ages affair for the crowd that wants their live music with grass under their feet and a food truck within reach. It’s a genuinely lovely problem to have, two good shows on the same night three towns apart.

This is grassroots culture — the church-basement-theater, corner-of-the-bar, someone’s-cousin-on-the-drums kind — and it is thriving out here.Jenna Joy

Here’s what I keep coming back to as I look at this calendar. None of this is being handed down from some corporate entertainment complex. The Second Saturday musicians are your neighbors. The Scottish Rite is a building the community fought to keep alive. The Summer of Love festival exists because somebody in Haddon Township decided their town deserved a party and then did the unglamorous work of making one.

So do the thing. Walk Haddon Avenue Saturday. Circle August 29 twice and make a real decision about it. And when someone tells you there’s nothing to do in South Jersey, hand them this calendar and watch them run out of month before they run out of options.

Based on reporting from Collingswood.com, AllEvents, and Visit South Jersey.