How do you nurture and grow a local music community as a musician, as a business and as a practicing fan of the scene? What’s the social media secret to transforming all your myriad Facebook friends into bona fide fans who actively support your music? How can you use the internet as both a marketing and publicity tool?
These questions and so many others are addressed at the third annual Homemade Music Symposium, a multi-day event that opens up the dialogue between musicians, music professionals, music advocates and music fans via nearly 20 hours’ worth of free workshops and panel discussions on anything from how we can make the Bay area a destination for music, to DIY recording techniques, to maximizing your use of social media. The discussions are augmented by a range of live music offerings — Saturday night showcases by New Granada Records and Brokenmold Entertainment, a singer/songwriters presentation paired with tasty barbecue, and more.
Homemade is one of several programs facilitated by the well-established Artists and Writers Group. Headed up by cultural crusaders/co-directors David Audet and T. Hampton Dohrman, the Tampa nonprofit strives to cultivate and grow the area’s rich creative community by taking on projects that provide learning and performance opportunities for artists, writers and musicians. “Basically, someone comes to us with a creative idea and we have the infrastructure, experience, business status and connections to make the idea a reality,” Dohrman told me when we met over coffee to chat about the group and its programs, which also include the award-winning Ybor Festival of the Moving Image and the literary Deep Carnivale.
Homemade is not just about helping musicians learn how to market and promote their work, but creating a synthesis of local industry knowledge and encouraging the community to nurture, sustain and support the local music scene, or in some cases, to change the perspective of the scene or expose it to those who may not even know it exists. “‘Local’ seems to be a euphemism for ‘bad,’ but there are bands here that sound just as good here as anywhere else,” Hampton pointed out.
Homemade was born in 2008 and is funded via a grant offered by the Ybor City Development Corporation. And Homemade has managed to expand and gain support over the past three years even though they’re still working within the grant’s shoestring budget.
Neither Audet and Dohrman are professional or practicing musicians trying to push their own agendas, and Dohrman says he thinks that’s part of the reason why so many people are willing to take part and volunteer their time. The other part is the genuine effort of Homemade and the Artists & Writers’ Group as a whole to make Ybor City not only a destination for the arts, but a place where creative types can thrive. Changing the prevailing image of Ybor as a debauched place with limitless get-down-and-get-wasted potential is just one step; offering positive cultural events like Homemade is another.
Hampton’s favorite part of what he does comes when, in the midst of all the craziness, he gets the chance to “take a moment to stop and realize that something really awesome is happening.” Last year’s performance by the late Rosa Rio was a particular highlight. “I felt so good about what we did with that. We were able to expose a few hundred people to what Rosa did and what Rosa was, and that’s something that, especially after she’s passed, you can’t get again and was meaningful for the people who got to see it. It’s always nice to know that what we’re doing is making a difference in how people think.”
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2010.
