Andrew Sherman
Audio By Carbonatix
When MJ Lenderman dropped his fifth LP, Manning Fireworks, in 2024, no one could have expected it to be one of the most celebrated albums of the year, spawning a meteoric rise to overnight fame, At least not the Dallas-based festival organizers who booked Lenderman for a free and low-capacity show as part of the inaugural Jambaloo Festival in 2025. With weeks to prepare for the show at Tulips and thousands of RSVPs, the two longtime friends and organizers, Corey Pond and Joseph Morrison, crossed their fingers and prayed for success, because the show had to go on.
“You can’t intend to book that,” Pond tells us. “You always want to have an artist like that, but it was very scary…. We, honest to God, just guessed, and we got lucky. There’s no other way to define what happened. Everybody who wanted to get into that show got into that show, and it worked out.”
Jambaloo is a free music festival, presented by Mullen & Mullen Injury Law, spanning multiple venues, genres and days in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in February. Last year, dozens of local performers and a few nationally recognized headliners, such as Lenderman, drew huge crowds.
Details on admission changes and ticket RSVPs for this year’s lineup will be released on Jan. 14. This year’s rendition of the festival will feature more than 30 artists at 14 venues between Feb. 7 – 15. Dallas’ own Tripping Daisy is headlining with a Friday, Feb. 13 show at Tulips. Pond and Morrison are hoping for another Lenderman-like demand, with a few conditions this time around.
“The worst thing that we could do is put on a free show like Tripping Daisy and have a thousand people show up,” Pond says.
In the freshman year, every show was free, and if you RSVP’d, you got in. However, when the Lenderman show reached 3,000 responses at a venue with a capacity of under 600, they shut down the response portal for the show, hoping to avoid a nightmare. The system is likely to change, but fear not, free shows aren’t going anywhere.
“Last year, every single person who got in their car and left their home and went to a venue to go see a show got into the show,” Pond tells us. “There was no exception to that. That almost certainly will not hold.”
Jambaloo, born from a friendship that began with a shared taste in music and a strong belief in the importance of a thriving local arts scene, will never embrace exclusivity.
“If somebody really wants to go to one of those shows and they show up early enough and get in line, they’re going to get in,” Pond says. “There’s a limit to that, of course. If somebody is standing outside Tulips at 4 o’clock on Friday the 13th, it would blow my mind if they did not get in to the show.”
After all, Jambaloo, more than anything else, is for the love of live music.
“The way all this is dovetailed together, it’s self-reinforcing,” Pond says. “I’m excited, and I think Joe is, too, about our true ability to reach and impact local artists in a way that I didn’t anticipate.”
The Passion Behind The Purpose
There are three driving forces behind Jambaloo, a massive undertaking that generates almost nothing in return, yet offers as much as it possibly can.
First, Pond and Morrison want to keep a fervent heartbeat for live and local music alive.
“Some people are struggling right now and don’t have the disposable money to go and see a show,” Morrison says. “So, [we’re] trying to open doors for people. Also, a big part of it is trying to get people to remember how fun live music is, how fun it is to go to a show.”
Second, the organizers strategically plan each concert to expose as many new bands as possible to the largest audience possible.
“If we can book a bigger band and spend some more money on the top, then it’s a more fun night,” Pond says. “It’s better in every way possible. But it’s also really great for the opening local artists to get to perform in a bunch of people that would have never seen them perform, period.”
Finally, and certainly importantly, the two men are hoping to breathe a little extra oxygen into the deflating lungs of the area’s smaller spaces.
“The biggest reason to support independent venues is because that’s where independent artists start,” Pond says. “If you don’t have a minor league, then you can’t have a major league… If you remove those little rooms, then what you end up doing is killing art.”
To further support this mission, the festival offers a $20,000 cash prize to an independent venue in need each year. It’s the only award of its kind. Last year’s winner, The Cicada, was facing operational uncertainty, but the prize served as a lifeline, keeping the fixture of Fort Worth’s live music scene alive.
“There’s not anything that we could do, including this festival, that would make as big of an impact as keeping The Cicada open for six months,” Pond tells us. “[The local music scene] is all an ecosystem, and we’re trying our best to support it in all the different ways you can, but it really all goes back to the art. We’re just trying to build a metroplex where artists feel like they’re supported.”
Big Things Coming This Time Around
This year, recruiting more venues is a point of pride for the organizers, who take nothing from the spaces that choose to host. The venues that participated last year witnessed a 160% increase in sales in the same period. This year, they’ve added even more alternative spaces.
North Texas music staple Josey Records will be transformed into a late-night discotheque, featuring shows from some of the region’s most prolific DJs. LadyLove Lounge in Oak Cliff, which has become the spot to dance in the city, also joined the roster of venues this time around. Vinyl and music mixing were a focus for the two organizers this year, who aimed to improve and diversify their efforts from last year.
New programming features a discussion with Cole Cuchna, host of the wildly popular music podcast Dissect. The show will unpack the music science behind some of Radiohead’s greatest hits with a live cover band.
“This will be a really unique, once-in-a-lifetime type thing,” Pond says. “I don’t think 500 people would pay $30 to see this. I’m hoping 500 people will show up if it’s free. But I promise you that the people who do show up will remember that forever.”
As this year’s interaction approaches, Pond and Morrison continue to learn from their first year running the festival, despite its overwhelming success. Things are changing; the festival is growing, but the mission remains the same.
“It is based on the fundamental belief that we have, and we’re not alone in this, but that DFW has the talent already,” Pond says. “That’s not the problem. The problem is that those artists sometimes don’t reach the success that they should.”
