If you want to see Brooklyn Funk Essentials live, but can’t see a show listed anywhere near your home town - here’s what you need to know and what you can do.
Photo by Richard Ahlstrom.
BFE love to play live. It’s our favorite thing to do. The band pretty much accepts all offers of shows, so long as the available budget will cover travel and other expenses.
BFE is very much an international band. Ever since the band started in New York in the early nineties, it has been made up of members from all corners of the globe. Today, BFE members even live in different parts of the world, which makes touring more complicated. We also have our fans spread out all over the planet. Some so far off that we only wish that we could go there and play.
We are working hard with booking agents to get gigs. The agents are in contact with promoters of clubs and festivals on a daily basis to arrange gigs and tours for the band. These days, when playing live is the only way for artists to make any kind of a living from music, promoters get bombarded with offers from agents. It’s a cut-throat market.
At the same time, not a day passes that we don’t get requests from fans, like: “Come and play in Brazil!”, “Come to New Zealand - we love you here!”, “Why do you never play the US west coast?”, “If you’re a Brooklyn band, how come you never play in Brooklyn?”, “Venez à Paris!”, and so on. It is very nice for us to see that so many people want us to come and play in their city, but the truth is that until a promoter in that city offers us a show, there is nothing we can do about it.
Promoters want to book artists that will fill up their venues, but they have a tough job keeping up with who’s hot and who’s not. The best guidance they can get, is from their local audiences themselves. So, if you want BFE to come and play your city, the best way to make that happen is for you to approach your local promoter and ask them to book us. If you can get all your friends to call as well, this may actually persuade them to look us up. In fact, if all BFE fans contacted their local club and festival promoters asking them to book BFE, we would probably be on the road all the time, even hitting those far-off places the we could only ever dream of playing.
