For the past three years, The Telluride Cajun Festival has thrown a half-day celebration in mid-July that offers New Orleans funk and brass music paired with delicious Cajun fare.

The food has been awesome, and the music, fantastic. Crowd numbers, however, have fallen short of organizers’ expectations.

So this year, the festival is giving itself a makeover, changing its name to the Mountain Village Music Festival, extending the event by a day and settling into a new time slot of Aug. 2-3.

The name change stemmed from a desire to have more flexibility with the line-up, said organizer Teddy Errico.

“I’ve decided that I probably pigeonholed myself with the moniker of the Cajun Festival,” he said. “We figured that by going more generic it would enable us to be different every year.”

The name Mountain Village Music Festival also allows the event more opportunity to grow and evolve, he said. This way, they could do the Cajun thing, or they could do something like bring a Southern rock band and serve fried chicken.

Errico hopes the name change will also keep people more curious and receptive to the musical line-up.

In addition to the name change, the format is changing a little, as this year, the festival will take place over two days instead of one. Events will pick up in the early afternoon and wind down in early evening each day, which doesn’t require total commitment by participants.

“You can still go for a big hike in the morning, you can still go out to dinner at night,” Errico said.

And by extending it a day, organizers hope to give it more of an anchor.

And finally, the festival is moving time slots. This change the result of a game of musical chairs summertime events have engaged in this year. The Jazz Celebration moved from its historic timeslot of early August to the weekend of June 5-8. Then the KOTO Doo-Dah shuffled from its weekend in late July —which it was sharing with the San Miguel County Fair — to the mid-July spot that the Cajun Festival has called home. So the Cajun — err, Mountain Village Music Festival, moved to the spot that Jazz vacated.
Whew. The bottom line, it will take place Aug. 2-3.

Errico launched the festival in 2005 in an attempt to offer a musical experience that wasn’t available in Telluride. The first festival was held atop the parking structure in Mountain Village, but then moved to the grassy, hilly base of Chair 4. It has brought bands like Papa Grows Funk, the Hot 8 Brass Band, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Leo Noncentelli.

Fat Alley’s Robbie O’Dell and crew have provided a special menu of Cajun fare like meat pies and frog legs and jambalaya for the festival, as well as hurricanes.

“We really liked the Cajun mold, but it just didn’t take off as well as we would have hoped,” Errico said. “So we got together and said ‘this is the direction we need to go if it’s going to be successful.’”

The Telluride Mountain Village Owners Association has been a big supporter of the festival, and it supporting this year’s event as well, Errico said.

For more information, visit www.mountainvillagemusic.com. Errico said lineup announcements are still several weeks away, but they will be posting updates on the site.