Venue and organising the final performance
Bradford is home to a few brilliant venues that support a big variety of genres. Personally within Bradford city centre, I think that there are 2 stand out venues for local Jazz gigs being Glyde house (a pub with monthly Jazz nights) and the venue I opted for, called the Delius arts centre.
Below are some screenshots of my email conversation with the venue staff.
I decided to this in my first week of the project in order to get it out of the way so I wouldn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the project. I received a great response and the venue was incredibly helpful throughout the process and on the night. It was a pleasure to play at such a lovely venue and it will be an event I will look back on fondly.
Promotional flyer/poster
For this project I got the amazing opportunity to work with some graphic design students at Bradford University. For my project, the most important pieces of artwork that I required were to do with my promotional flyer and promotional poster. In preparation for creating these, I did some research on Jazz albums and the representation in art that famous Jazz players use. Below are some of my favourite examples that I came across.
As you can see above, these designs are all very similar and focus mainly on the artists aesthetic as being the focal point which differs to a lot of other genres such as rock albums which may focus more on an interesting design or a theme to an album.
When talking to the design students, my primary design example was Some Other Time by Bill Evans. My reasoning for this was that it stands out as being a classy and individual design, as well as Bill Evans being a hugely influential jazz pianist.
Below are the two designs that the design student, Baldev, came up with.
Although both designs are excellent, I opted to use the first image for flyers and posters as the lighting of the picture makes the design stand out more.
Below is the email conversation that I had with Baldev.
Promotion
For this project I decided to advertise my gig both online and physically through the use of flyers and posters.
When receiving this flyer from the design student I was working with, I shared it on both Facebook and Instagram which got a great response and prompted me to set up my own Instagram music page.
As you can see in the image above both of my Facebook and Instagram posts got over 100 likes each.
I also received huge amounts of wonderful feedback for this post, with many saying it looked professional and it was very classy. This definitely boosted my reputation as an artist and helped me to create my own individual aesthetic as an artist, so thank you to Baldev for doing such a brilliant job.
Below is a screenshot of my music Instagram account, a couple of days after creating it.
My posts at the time included a picture of my flyer as well as a video of a Jazz concert that I had attended.
By the end of My project, I had 74 followers and as you’ll see below my likes had improved drastically.
My first post received 25 likes whereas my 5th received 48 likes.
I also received lots of positive comments on my posts and stayed quite active on social media in order to try and engage with these people. A new concept I was working with on Instagram was using hashtags and by doing this I broke out of just getting likes from my friendship group and received likes from people all over the world which was quite surreal. However in order to promote yourself as an artist in today’s market, these are some of the techniques that you must master in order to promote yourself successfully. Social media can be a very powerful tool for gaining followers and fans if used correctly and I think that I did this well to get such a large increase in such a short period of time.
I also created a Facebook event for the gig a week and a half before the date. The event details can be seen below:
On the 4th May I attended a Jazz gig in Bradford. I decide to print off 40 flyers to hand round to members of the audience. I really enjoyed doing this as I got to chat to some great people and got a great response to advertising my gig which was heartwarming.
We were featured in a promotion from the local newspaper along with the rest of the music students from Bradford college, which wasn’t my doing but was very exciting and is an avenue I’ll look at for promotion for future gigs.