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BassPlayer.com >> This Month >> Keyboard’s Michael Gallant On Navigating South By
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Keyboard’s Michael Gallant on Navigating South By Southwest, Following Your Ears, and the Newest Keyboard Stars| March, 2008 I have a confession. Before heading to SXSW to cover it for Keyboard magazine’s live blogging site, livefrom.musicplayer.com, I felt more than a little intimidated. The festival would be a new experience for me. How could I possibly navigate a city’s worth of performances by 5.1 billion bands (well, 1,300-plus, actually) and capture the best keyboard action there? A helpful answer came to me from Cary Baker, president of Conqueroo PR, who ate tapas next to me at the Saba bar my first day in Austin. “Make a plan, but be ready to improvise,” he advised, showing me a meticulously prepared list he’d compiled of every party going on, every day, at the festival — impressive, to say the least. I decided to take it a step further and add a mantra I’d picked up from my fiancée after three years of exploring Burning Man: “Follow your ears.” These strategies worked in more than one way. After a MySpace page for a young pop pianoman named Ferras (pronounced fer-AHSS) caught my ears several weeks prior, I followed them to his DirecTV showcase at SXSW and was rewarded with the rawest, most brilliant live performance I heard in the entire festival. Similarly, the steadily increasing buzz I’d been hearing about Sara Bareilles led me to nail down a time to have orange juice with her and chat about her SXSW experiences. On the ground in Austin, my ears led me to countless nooks and crannies of bars and restaurants, where I paused for a few seconds or a few hours, listening to music that ranged from formulaic and ill-performed to transcendent and inspiring. I found SXSW to be a beautiful mess of styles, genres, philosophies, and cultures. I encourage you to follow my experiences — and those of my colleagues Darrin Fox of Guitar Player and Bill Leigh of Bass Player — at livefrom.musicplayer.com. |
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