A platform called Openjamm is trying to make musical collaborations effortless in Bengaluru. Founded by Marcel Hoover, a corporate lawyer who quit to start this, Openjamm curates live performances for musicians and finds them venues and events. The platform was officially launched in March though it has been running off the record for some time.
“Some venues require an artiste a week, or there might be a restaurant with a constantly changing roster of artistes. We cater to these as well as closed groups, conferences, workshops and so on,” says Marcel. He adds that they are open to working with any kind of artiste — beatboxer, DJ, struggling musician, well-known one, established veteran and so on — as long as it’s related to music.
Apart from these commercial performances, Openjamm hosts a feature gig on the last day of every month, where they invite artistes or bands making waves in the local music scene, along with up-and-coming ones. This month they are hosting an event at Humming Tree in Indiranagar. While the commercial gigs ensure income and stability to the artistes, the feature gigs enable them to give back to the community and the city.
Marcel cites his personal experiences as a musician as the motivation for his enterprise. A lack of validation as a performer, no avenues to form new skills and connections, lack of performing spaces were the stumbling blocks he encountered. He wants to provide all these to today’s musicians with Openjamm.
Excerpts from an interview with Marcel:
How does Openjamm help musicians?
Struggling or up-and-coming musicians will not be able to line up gigs for themselves, nor will they be able to negotiate the payment with the venues. We take care of both these aspects for them.
If they try to look through Facebook groups or pages for gigs or connections, they will have to scroll through millions of posts, conversations and spam; and they may not find anything eventually.
Also, when artistes reach out to us, most of the content they share is really basic. We ensure that after each gig, they have some high-resolution images for their portfolio.
How does a musician sign up for this?
We have a website called openjamm.com and are present on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as @openjamm. The musician just has to get in touch with us over any of these platforms and express an interest to join. Venues can also reach out to us in the same way.
Have there been similar concepts earlier in the city?
Marcel Hoover, founder
There are startups abroad that are trying this out. Some startups here are trying to do this as well but they are doing concerts in houses and living rooms. That is not comfortable, and it isn’t a technically sound setting for musicians and audiences either.
What’s on the anvil?
We will be starting music-centric workshops soon where we will have stalwarts coming in to talk about what inspired them, what their influences are and so on. It will be a way for them to give back to the community. The first such workshop will take place on July 5, where we will have Prakash Sontakke and M R Jagadeesh, the director of Bangalore School of Music. They will be conducting a 90-minute guitar workshop themed on Indian accents.
We will also be looking at expanding the concept to other cities soon.
Once we have a fully functional community, the musicians will be able to select a venue and book a slot for a feature gig. WeWork and Life Behind Bars Cycles are some venues we have tied up with.
First feature gig
The first feature gig they did was on World Jazz Day (April 30) in WeWork, Church Street. Three jazz bands and an opening act performed on the occasion.