What do you do …
… when you get a neatly printed festival programme of the Viennese Danube Canal Festival 2012 for the coming weekend in your mailbox and you know that it’s too late to get booked for one of those stages? No, you don’t wait for next year – you make use of a Viennese regulation that allows busking at Danube Canal the whole year long, place yourself right in the middle of the hustle and bustle and just sing. Passers-by enjoy it very much and think that you are part of the festival. That’s what we did this Friday.
Making music this way is a lot of fun because you are playing for the people …
… who stop just to hear you sing. You get in contact with many nice folks, have some good chats, do a little promotion for your next concert. In passing you sell a few CDs, get a little money in your guitar case, some new names on the newsletter-list, run into the “Austria/Society.oe24.at” -photographer, … But the best of all that: You perform for people who love exactly this kind of music and partially keep sitting on the quay wall right in front of you, intently listening to you the whole evening.
On Sunday we grabbed instruments and amps again, went down the stairs to the quai, ran right into a friendly guy who offered us to play on the terrasse of a Café instead of “on the street”. An African drummer postponed his workshop for half an hour just to play us a perfect backing percussion. In the end we learned that the friendly and now enthusiastic guy was not the Café owner but the festival organizer! So we asked for his contact data to apply for a next year’s stage. With big smiles on our faces we found our next spot to put up our mics and amps and continued playing. It was a wonderful weekend despite the changeable weather. Life is live!
Happy,
Mona & Lisa
