"Voices Behind the Art" at the Redstone Room -- October 7.
Friday, October 7, 8 p.m.
The Redstone Room, 129 Main Street, Davenport IA
Presented on October 7 in collaboration with the area collective “My Arts Voice,” Voices Behind the Art will fuse visual and musical art in a showcase of more than a half-dozen Midwestern talents. The event stands as the latest cultural offering by Common Chord, the Davenport venue previously known as River Music Experience. And as Executive Director Tyson Danner explains, the institution's new moniker isn't the signal for a new direction for the former RME: “The name change has been the end of the process, really.
“Our programs have changed so much over the past few years,” says Danner, “especially in living through and coming out of COVID, and we've been figuring out that there are a lot more ways to create music than only concerts and education programs. And we've also gone so far beyond roots music. We still do roots music, of course, but it's just so much bigger now. We do all kinds of music, and it finally got the point where it was like, 'We need to actually describe this better.' So the name is really catching up to a few years of work we've been doing already.
“Before the shutdown,” Danner continues, “we had started talking a lot about the genres we present and who we weren't reaching, basically. We did a great job at reaching a part of our population but didn't really provide a lot for the rest of the population in the Quad Cities. So we had already started exploring that more. And I think what the pandemic did was really make us think differently about how to do programs. So we still do concerts, but we also do, like, 'Let's put a piano outside that people can just walk up to and play.' There are all these different ways that people can engage with music beyond buying a ticket, sitting down, and seeing a show, and figuring that out has opened things to a lot more … . Well, a lot more fun, for sure, but a lot more people, too.”
One of those different ways will be explored in Voices Behind the Art, which will effectively blend the experience of enjoying and appreciating music with the experience of enjoying and appreciating visual art. With the performance headlined by Frankie Fontagne, the evening will deliver a celebration of soul, funk, R&B, hip hop, trap, Latin, and Afro-Cuban rhythms as the scheduled entertainers present their hand-drawn original artworks in tandem with their music – as Danner says, “presenting the visual art and then the music that kind of drives the art and links to it. Basically giving people that bigger experience of visual art plus music.”
Scheduled to join Fontagne in presenting Voices Behind the Art are Aubs. (Aubrey Barnes), Roo Maroon, Stone Face, Love Baker, Angelique, Fat Guy Mook, and Quest – all music and visual artists residing in the Midwest, some from here in the Quad Cities. Danner states that focusing on area talent is another significant direction for the newly named Common Chord.
“When the Redstone Room opened,” he says, “it was really intended to rely heavily on touring musicians. Which is great, and we still do a lot of that. But also, you can't neglect the great local musicians we have here that are coming up. I mean, we put local musicians on stage all the time, and we always get people coming up to us asking where they're from. And we're like, 'They're from here.' 'Oh wow!'
“I think much of the public doesn't realize the depth of talent we have here. So we're going to be doing a lot more of that – presenting these local artists more, and helping them build up to get bigger audiences themselves.”
Voices Behind the Art will be presented at the Davenport venue on October 7 at 8 p.m., admission is $10-12 and $75 (plus admission fees) for a reserved four-top table, and more information and tickets are available by calling (563)326-1333 and visiting CommonChordQC.com.
