Musical Ethnography: Local Rock

I plan to do my musical ethnography over the different venues in and around the Deep Ellum area as my band begins to perform there. While my band will obviously be somewhat of a focus, I hope to focus more on the audience and time and space of the venues. I also hope to bring attention to the different expectations from both the audience and owners, and to the atmospheres in the different types of venues in an attempt to contrast the larger high paying venues with the smaller venues that run open mics.

These smaller venues, while having an emphasis on the types of music one hears on the radio and its quality, it is hugely different from the expectations of the mainstream version of this culture. One of the main differences comes from lack of audience knowledge of the music. In many rock concerts in popular music, audience participation such as jumping up and down, clapping, and singing along is highly encouraged. These local concerts usually have much less participation, and the bands are there more to increase the atmosphere in places like bars and some restaurants.

Since no blog post about ones band would not be complete without a plug, since my band currently has no music on the internet, here is a plug for one of my own songs with me on each instrument.

Blog 1: Classic Rock and it's influence on me

I have always done music. I started with piano lessons as early as five, and now play both guitar and drums. Even before I did this I always listened to classic rock. Bands that have high energy with guitars and emotional rock vocals such as The Who have always appealed to me. Though as a child I always appreciated bands like the The Beatles and pretty much any 80's music my father would listen to, as I grew up I started to appreciate the bands quite a bit more as I played instruments and learned theory. As I went on with life and my musical education I started to study the theory behind The Beatles and artists like Queen and Paul Simon. I am also very fond of the different versions of the blues that appear in so many classic rock songs, though I still think that Jimi Hendrix did it best.

These cultures not only influenced me by giving me something to listen to for my formative years, but by giving me something to study and aspire to. To even have the ability to produce sounds like theirs out of my instrument was a huge goal in my life, and I always hope to capture things like the emotion of the blues with things like the highly technical jazz theory of Paul Simon in anything I make or cover.

Also, though it hasn't always been a huge influence, I really enjoy acoustic fingerstyle guitar, which is a philosophy that the acoustic guitar should emulate the rhythm of drums and accompaniment of background instruments, while also producing the melody of the music all with one person.

On that note, here is Antoine Dufour, covering the song Drac & Friends I.