Richmond was a great place to have a functioning set of eardrums this past weekend. The city was fi lled with a cornucopia of sound generation and I helped myself to as much of it as I could. My ears are stuff ed.

I started gorging myself Friday night during the opening of the Richmond Folk Festival on the sounds of the Japanese ritual drumming of San Jose Taiko, the three-part harmonies of the Itals, the Cajun grooves of BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet and the blissful soul of Howard Tate. I kept thinking to myself as I walked around on that beautiful October night how lucky I was to be able to hear these great performers. I’ve lived in Richmond long enough to know that events like this never used to happen. To those of us with many years under our beats in the capital city, this now locally run Folk Festival is nothing short of a miracle. I was in a state of bliss.

As good as those shows were, the performance of the night was Galactic at Toad’s Place. I am longtime friends with the group’s sax player Ben Ellman and drummer Stanton Moore (one of the best, if not thesingle best trap kit player I have ever seen) from their days with the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars, but, truth be told, I have never been all that enamored with their Meters inspiredbread-and-butter gig. Tonight was di.erent. On their current tour, they had the good sense to bring fellowNew Orleans musicians, trombonist Corey Harris and trumpet player Shamarr Allen on the road with them and they blew the roof o.the sucker. Those two guys, in the words of Miles Davis, are complete “motherfuckers” on their respective instruments. I was truly impressed.

With family in tow, I went back to the Folk Festival on Saturday and saw the Fiddle Traditions performance on the Wachovia Securities stage. My mother and several people around us furrowed their brows when the name Wachovia was mentioned, but I didn’t want to think about the nation’s current fi nancial crisis. I was only interested in hearing music. After all the fi ddle playing, I took my daughter up front to see the drummers of San Jose Taiko and she danced, waving her arms to their precise syncopations. She kept saying, “happy” over and over again while they were playing. From there, we caught performances by Saharan blues guitarist, Vieux Farka Toure (my family’s consensus favorite performer of the festival) and Sharde Thomas & Rising Star Fife & Drum before ending the day with Dale Watson. Again, my daughter stole the show for me as she danced, clapped and gave high fi ves to everyone within high-fi ving distance during his set. Excuse my French, but that was a fucking beautiful moment. I won’t soon forget it.

After watching the Redskins lose on Sunday (which was solely my fault because I didn’t eat a hot dog the night before the game as I have prior to all their previous wins), I hustledthe family back down to the festival to see the Inuit throat singing of Nukarik. I don’t know what I enjoyed more, the thoroughly bizarre vocal sounds they generated or the ba.ed looks of people listening to it. Eitherway, it was a win-win situation for me. We ended the day catching the last performance of the festival weekend by Plena Libre.

As we were leaving, I heard many people saying that they couldn’t wait for next year’s festival.

Neither can I.