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FeedA taste of local music at the Taste of Buffalo
Believe it or not, this weekend, July 10 and 11, will see the streets of downtown filled again with consumers looking to swell their waistlines at the annual Taste of Buffalo. And the more than 450,000 expected visitors will have a chance to do more than just gobble down morsels in Niagara Square. The festival also serves as an invaluable platform for local musicians to gain some exposure.
Three years ago, the Taste committee added melody to the munching by setting up multiple stages around the festival highlighting the Buffalo music scene. The committee put out a call for event planners to craft a music festival around the existing food extravaganza, and Reed Rankin’s RPM Event Design won the bid to devise the Taste of Buffalo’s musical show. Rankin and his RPM company book the talent, coordinate the event, and provide the stage management.
This year’s twenty-three acts were chosen from a total of over 275 online submissions, and choosing was no easy task. “We do it all by just listening,” Rankin says. “We ask each artist for a CD, or if they don’t have a CD, then at least two tunes, and we sift through and catalogue everything. We pare the selection down to about forty or so performers, and we send these to the committee who make the final decisions.”
Rankin says he really wanted to impress on locals the wide range of styles represented at the festival: “We have terrific diversity this year, with a good mix of styles and talent. We’ve got jazz, country, blues, alternative, ska, roots. We’ve got LeeRon Zydeco, which is a Cajun band. And we also have the Scintas, an old-school showtunes act in Vegas hailing Buffalo.”
One of the Buffalo-raised bands who will hit the stage—on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. on the Huron St. stage, to be exact—is the rising alt-rock band Speakeasy Three. The trio is made up of Clint Manning on guitar and vocals, Andy Reardon on bass, and Mike Ruben on drums. The band formed about a year ago when Clint and Andy, who had played together before, were looking to form a new band and discovered Mike Ruben through a side project. The three artists felt their styles meshed well after just one show, and they’ve been together ever since.
The band has been playing as many local shows as possible, sending out press kits and copies of their album Would it Matter, and have been relying on the the up-tempo jazz-infused sound of their first album to carry them so far. They submitted material for the Taste of Buffalo and impressed the committee enough to earn a spot. Rankin says he liked Speakeasy Three’s sound “immediately—very musical, tight, well-produced and recorded, and they’re excellent musicians individually.”
This will be the biggest event that Speakeasy Three has ever played, and drummer Mike Ruben says they “consider it a great honor … They’re putting us in the same show with the band More Than Me, who just won the Hard Rock Battle of the Bands and played in London with Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, and they’ve been together for ten years. We’ve only been together for less than a year, and here we are playing the same show.”
The band will be going on a two week tour of the East Coast at the end of the month, and they hope that playing large festivals like the Taste of Buffalo at home will lead to opportunities to play at other large fests elsewhere. Manning says he and his bandmates believe that “having a core group of people that support you, and a foundation for your band, leads to [opportunities] outside of the area. This is a testing ground to see if we can play at this level.”
For more info on the Taste of Buffalo or RPM Event Design, follow these links. And Speakeasy Three can be found on its official site, on MySpace, and on Purevolume.com.
