Syracuse.com ran an article about our project yesterday and we announced our target opening date – January 7, 2019 – and we’ve been completely overwhelmed by the positive response from friends and strangers alike.
Cafe by Day, Full Bar at Night ,Syracuse.com, December 3, 2018
It’s gratifying to get such an enthusiastic reaction from our community because we’ve actually had a lot of anxiety about whether this concept will fly in Syracuse.
A peek inside my brain these days looks something like this:
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
We are attempting to do something that’s a bit different for this area. For starters, we are a coffee house that’s also a bar. But – we’re not open late at night, we aren’t televising basketball games and we won’t have Quick Draw. We’re focusing on a style of show that isn’t familiar to a lot of music fans. You can occasionally catch listening room style shows at The Borodino Grange Hall, May Memorial Church and a little more regularly at the Nelson Odeon in Cazenovia. They are all fantastic rooms, but at 443 these shows will be on our calendar several times a month all year round.
So the million dollar question is – will anyone show up for this?
The idea for the room was born from the experience of seeing my first listening room style show at the Borodino Grange Hall in 2013. The show featured Dusty Pas’cal, Mike Powell and my friend Tim Herron. The room was perfection, and it was a really powerful experience to enjoy a show with 100% of the focus on the performers and their stories.
In 2014 my Red Shoes Black Bag Productions partner Joanna and I produced The Listening Room Acoustic Music Series in the back room of the old Small Plates restaurant in Armory Square. Some shows sold out and others sold less than 20 tickets, but there was no correlation between the tickets sold and the quality of the performances – every single one of them was an exceptional experience. Sadly, it just wasn’t viable for us financially.
Bringing national touring acoustic performers to Syracuse means selling tickets, and paying for entertainment is a touchy subject for some people. Funk ‘n Waffles has made good progress in this area by regularly charging for their events, but it’s something a lot of people still balk at. After all, you can catch live music all over town for free every night of the week, right?
The artists we are looking at are mainly performers we’ve discovered along the way on Pandora and Spotify. We have been researching our “Wish List” for months, and we still get a little thrill when we realize an artist we are excited about is “getable” – meaning they are still playing club shows and venues about our size. Our big challenge will be convincing music fans in Syracuse that they should take a chance on a ticketed show for a compelling artist they might not be super-familiar with.
My longtime friend Dave Frisina (of 105.9 The Rebel) is the biggest advocate for live music around. I heard him on the radio recently talking about an upcoming show. Both the headliner and the opening act were phenomenal, but neither is a household name yet. He pointed out that music fans should take a chance and buy a ticket, even if they aren’t familiar with every song – because they just might discover their new favorite band.
We couldn’t agree more.
We’ll do our part to introduce you to the artists we love by sharing their music regularly on our social media channels. You can also check out our Spotify playlist in the sidebar of this website, we update that regularly with artists we are interested in bringing to Syracuse. Plus – our shows will generally run 6:30-9:30pm. We know sometimes it’s tough to get to a show that doesn’t start until 10pm, and we don’t think you should have to stay up past your bedtime to catch great live music.
Our main goal at the Listening Room at 443 is to introduce Syracuse music lovers to a different kind of musical experience, something very intimate and memorable. We’re doing that with our choice of artists, the space we are creating for them to perform in, and the hospitality we offer everyone who enters our door. We are passionate music lovers and we’ve designed our business to reflect that.
Yesterday’s deluge of positive comments gives us renewed faith that we are on the right path. We’ve busted our asses for the last year and invested everything we have into bringing our vision kicking and screaming into reality. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who liked, shared, and commented on our post on Facebook plus all our new email subscribers – we appreciate your support more than we can say.
