On Axis Music Travels to Mississippi

Photo by H. Frank  

 I've often looked at myself as Chicagoan. When I graduated art school, I thought I was being super professional by making an email with the word "Chicago" in it. This was when emails were cryptic and the Internet was still waving on the ripples from the stone of AOL.

It took a little planning, and careful meandering of my goldfish watching responsibilities but I was able to break away from the ties that bind and go, camera in hand, like Hunter S. Thompson, to the Second Annual Mississippi Saxophone Festival.

I look forward to sharing the article and the photos and the most important lesson, however, was getting out of Dodge.

It is an important thing to do literally...we can travel in a song, but we are meant to travel as musicians and spread the music. Too often I see the only people taking up the flag of troubadorship as somewhat well off middle-upper-class-maybe-a-trust-fund was involved, and the spreading not of love and music, but of their carefully crafted cool brand, as they pray on stage like Jesus for CD sales (if anyone is buying) on "tour". This is something I see first hand as a sound tech, and usually the posturing is done to an empty club when the booking person threw a touring act on the bill on an off night, and they are on a stage to about 5 people. Truth hurts, sorry to sting ye, oh wide-eyed youth. These touring musicians usually have a great, complex merch display which is really thought out, and a wimpy, empty feeling set. Clearly, priorities are in the wrong place. But I digress.

While I suppose I covet these traveling musicians, I was glad to be finally able to travel myself albeit as a Journalist. On this trip I heard the fields of Mississippi come alive. I could hear the dirt. It sang.

Sometimes traveling literally is a bunch of wasted time (i.e. the bands I've described who are playing to empty rooms and begging the audience for gas money in thinly veiled jokes...you know who you are). So let's travel figuratively.

Let's get out of "Dodge" whatever that is. Our routines, our common steps, our every day activities that go nowhere and break new ground, even if it is with one footstep, one train ride, one step into the unknown.

- On Axis Music

Editors Note: Rare images and photos will be released at some point. National Geographic, look out.