Long before Boulder became synonymous with startups, outdoor recreation and increasingly expensive real estate, a tiny 300-capacity room on The Hill was quietly hosting some of the most important musicians in America.
For five decades, Tulagi welcomed artists ranging from Miles Davis and Muddy Waters to Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, ZZ Top and the Eagles. The club closed in 2003, but its name never completely disappeared from Boulder’s collective memory. More than two decades later, Tulagi is returning in a very different form.
The festival formerly known as Boulder Roots Music Festival has adopted the historic name for its second year, returning August 27 through 30 with more than 200 performances involving over 800 artists spread across more than 20 venues throughout Boulder. Instead of fencing audiences into a traditional festival site, organizers are attempting something considerably more ambitious: turning downtown Boulder itself into the venue.
“The name Tulagi signals that Boulder will once again be a place known for music,” says Dan Caruso, board chair of Tulagi and managing director at Caruso Ventures.
That ambition extends well beyond nostalgia. Tulagi describes itself as a “takeover festival,” drawing inspiration from the way SXSW transforms Austin and Sundance reshapes Park City. Historic theaters, small clubs, patios and spaces that rarely host live music will operate simultaneously within a compact, walkable section of Boulder, with performances staggered throughout the day so there is almost always something new beginning nearby.
It is an approach designed to make exploring Boulder as important as catching any individual set. Last year’s inaugural Boulder Roots offered an early indication that the concept could work, with Downtown Boulder Partnership pedestrian counters showing Pearl Street Mall traffic increasing 64 percent compared with the same weekend the previous year and 75 percent on Saturday alone. Organizers say shops and restaurants without any formal connection to the festival also experienced one of their better weekends of the year.
“A good weekend on Pearl Street isn’t ours alone,” Caruso says. “The restaurants, the galleries, the small venues, everybody comes up together, and that’s most of the reason to do it downtown rather than in a field.”
That relationship with Boulder extends into the programming itself. The 2026 festival brings together Big Head Todd and the Monsters, The SteelDrivers, Cimafunk, Itchy-O, Maddy O’Neal, Magoo, Gasoline Lollipops, Brandywine & the Mighty Fines and plenty of emerging artists before Everclear closes the festival Sunday at the Boulder Theater.
The range is intentional, but so is where each performance happens. Organizers say they curate the rooms as carefully as the lineup, recognizing that an artist capable of creating something extraordinary inside a tiny club might not translate the same way to a larger stage. It is also a philosophy borrowed from the original Tulagi, where local musicians once shared stages with touring artists who would go on to become household names.
For the team behind the festival, rebuilding that kind of ecosystem is about more than assembling a memorable weekend. With the Sundance Film Festival arriving in Boulder in January 2027, the city is preparing for new cultural infrastructure and national attention, and Tulagi’s organizers see an opportunity to make sure that momentum extends throughout the year. Their long-term vision is for Tulagi to become an August bookend to Sundance and another signature event capable of establishing Boulder as a destination for music, film and creativity.
“The measure of this working is a young musician deciding to stay in Boulder rather than leave for somewhere with more stages,” Caruso says.
Pulling off that vision also requires an unconventional economic model. Tulagi is owned by nonprofit Bear Roots, while Caruso Ventures handles organizing work pro bono. The festival collaborates with more than 20 venues alongside the City of Boulder, State of Colorado and organizations spanning the city’s business, tourism, arts and innovation communities.
Its Founders Experience takes the idea even further, inviting entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists and other community leaders to support the festival through something organizers describe as closer to patronage than traditional sponsorship. That funding helps pay musicians, keep general admission accessible and make it possible to program rooms that might not otherwise make financial sense.
Tulagi is simultaneously beginning to stretch beyond music. This year’s broader cultural programming incorporates visual and performing arts, comedy, live podcasts, curated conversations and an Evening of Film & Storytelling in collaboration with Sundance. Organizers insist those additions are meant to complement rather than dilute the festival’s identity, with music remaining at the center of the experience.
Ultimately, though, Tulagi’s biggest idea may be its simplest one. At a time when so much culture is consumed alone through screens, the festival is betting on the value of putting thousands of people into the same few blocks for four days and allowing the city itself to shape what happens next.
“The thing we heard most after the first festival was that it made people see their own downtown differently,” Caruso says. “That’s the part we’re trying to repeat.”
Rooster caught up with the Tulagi festival team to talk about resurrecting one of Boulder’s most storied music names, transforming downtown into a sprawling festival grounds and why they believe the city is ready to reclaim its place on the national music map. Check out our conversation below!
[Rooster]: Tulagi enters 2026 with a new name after previously operating as Boulder Roots Music Festival. What prompted that evolution, and what does the name Tulagi represent for the next chapter of the festival?
[Tulagi Festival Team]: We launched in 2025 as Boulder Roots — a name that came from our launch partnership with Roots Music Project. The use of Roots in both names created brand confusion. At the same time, the festival is becoming something broader and more substantial, and that deserves a name of its own, with real Boulder history behind it.
Tulagi was a three-hundred-capacity room on The Hill, a few blocks from the CU Boulder campus. For fifty years it was one of the great small venues in the country. The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and ZZ Top. It closed in 2003, but the name was fondly remembered by many who still live in Boulder.
The name Tulagi signals that Boulder will once again be a place known for music.
Last year’s festival had a measurable impact across downtown Boulder, including major increases in foot traffic throughout the weekend. When you saw the city respond that way, what did it tell you about the appetite for an event like this in Boulder?
The Downtown Boulder Partnership’s pedestrian counters had traffic on the Pearl Street Mall up 64% over the same weekend the year before — and up 75% on the Saturday — and shops and restaurants with no formal connection to the festival had one of their better weekends of the year.
The Boulder community responded. The music brought them downtown for the long weekend. Boulderites are yearning for music and human interaction.
The shops, restaurants and other venues of downtown Boulder showed tremendous appreciation. As a result, their support for Tulagi in 2026 is outstanding.
A good weekend on Pearl Street isn’t ours alone. The restaurants, the galleries, the small venues — everybody comes up together, and that’s most of the reason to do it downtown rather than in a field.
Rather than building a traditional festival site, Tulagi spreads across venues and spaces throughout Boulder. Why has embedding the festival within the city itself been so central to the vision?
Tulagi is a takeover festival. Instead of building a fenced-off site with a single main stage, the festival takes over the town itself — for four days the venues, patios and sidewalks of downtown all become the festival at once, a multi-day, multi-venue, immersive experience inside a small geographic footprint. It is what Sundance does to Park City and what SXSW does to Austin, and those are the events we have learned the most from.
Pearl Street is unusually well suited to it. You have historic theaters, small clubs, open decks and a number of rooms that do not ordinarily host live music, all inside a few walkable blocks. We run 200-plus performances involving 800-plus artists across 20+ venues, staggered so there is always something starting somewhere.
Boulder has an incredibly deep music history, but its identity as a live music destination continues to evolve. What role do you hope Tulagi can play in this next chapter of the city’s music culture?
The ambition is a signature Boulder event that gets bigger each year and helps this city regain its national stage as a center for music, film and innovation. Sundance arrives in January 2027 and a lot of infrastructure will be built for it. That infrastructure needs to be busy the rest of the year too, and we would like Tulagi to be the August bookend to it.
The programming brings together national, regional, and emerging artists across multiple genres. When you’re curating something this broad, what makes an artist or performance feel right for the Tulagi experience?
The range is the point — Big Head Todd and the Monsters, The SteelDrivers, Cimafunk, Itchy-O, Maddy O’Neal, Magoo, Gasoline Lollipops, and Brandywine & the Mighty Fines, with Everclear closing out the festival on Sunday at the Boulder Theater, alongside Colorado acts and plenty of bands most people have not heard yet. The original Tulagi mattered because it put local bands on the same stage as touring ones, and we are carrying that forward.
Beyond that, we curate the rooms as much as the lineup. A band that is extraordinary in a small room is a different proposition on a big stage, and getting that pairing right is most of the work. We keep musicians first and hold production quality high, because Boulder can spot anything inauthentic right away.
One thing that stands out is how intentionally the festival connects its success back to the surrounding community, from local businesses to partnerships like the Downtown Boulder incentive program. How do you think about making sure the economic and cultural impact extends beyond the festival itself?
The festival is owned by Bear Roots, a nonprofit, and Caruso Ventures does the organizing work pro bono.
We are collaborating with 20+ venues, the city of Boulder, the state of Colorado, and many organizations that focus on culture and innovation such as the Downtown Boulder Partnership, Visit Boulder, the Boulder Chamber, Endeavor Colorado, Techstars, and YPO Boulder. We launched a Community Appreciation Program with discounted multi-day passes for healthcare, education, first responders and public service — along with employees of our sponsors, partners, venues and talent — and the Caruso Foundation supports Boulder nonprofits in arts, music, entrepreneurship and community through an incentive grant program.
The Founders Experience is an interesting part of the model because it asks members of Boulder’s business, civic, and creative communities to become active supporters of the festival. Why was it important to build that kind of community investment into Tulagi, and what does it allow you to do differently?
Founders are community builders — entrepreneurs, investors, people in professional services, philanthropists — helping sustain an artist-driven festival. It is closer to patronage than sponsorship.
Practically, it is the revenue source that pays our musicians, keeps general admission accessible, and programs rooms that would never pencil out commercially.
Founders are doing this to support Boulder and Colorado. They are doing it to bring the community together around art, artists and culture. And they are doing this to build relationships with others in the Boulder community.
We are extremely appreciative of the support we have received from the Founder community.
The Founders programming also expands beyond music through experiences like Bold Conversations That Matter and the Evening of Film & Storytelling. As Tulagi grows, how do you think about expanding its cultural footprint without losing music as the heart of the weekend?
Boulder’s creative community is bigger than its bands, so this year we are widening into the visual and performing arts — comedy and performing arts woven through the weekend. On the Founders side, there is a curated exhibition of local visual artists, including painters, at the Museum of Boulder — separate from the museum’s own exhibitions — along with an evening of film and storytelling with Sundance at the Dairy on the 26th, Bold Conversations roundtables, and three Bear Roars podcasts recorded live, open to all ticket holders.
Music stays the core of it. Everything else is built around the music rather than in place of it, and most of the additional programming runs before the weekend properly opens.
You’re building Tulagi around the idea that meaningful shared experiences are becoming increasingly rare. When people leave Boulder after four days together, what do you hope they’ve experienced that they couldn’t have gotten simply by attending a series of concerts?
Most people are divided over something at the moment and living a good deal of it through a screen. Music puts strangers in the same room and allows them to share an experience together.
A concert is somewhere you go and then leave. Four days moving through twenty-odd rooms in the same few blocks is different — you keep running into the same people, and the town itself becomes the venue. You get to connect with one another and, hopefully, leave the weekend with new friendships.
The thing we heard most after the first festival was that it made people see their own downtown differently. That’s the part we’re trying to repeat.
