Photo by Coleman Sirbu.
It is one thing to be compelled to accomplish something because of the grade your professor will give you. It is something else to do that same thing but for the genuine love of doing it. Mad Café, a series of shows put together by our very own Music Industry Club, allows Daytona State students to do just that. To get out in the community and put their passion of music production into action is much more rewarding than any letter grade could be.
But what is Mad Café? The title Mad Café is an acronym, where Mad stands for “music after dark,” and the Café is “curated, artist-focused experience.” Birthed by Brett Tomadin at Sweet Marlay’s Coffee House in downtown Daytona Beach, Mad Café is a string of four live performances tucked away in a small venue intended to be an intimate listening experience, where the performer(s) are the central focus.
For this past month’s rebirth of Mad Café, the production found a new home in the hidden studio tucked at the back of The Elite Academy of Music and Motion. The owner (and my very own drum instructor), Jim Sinex, dreamed of turning this music lessons academy into something more. “Eventually, we’re going to have a full production studio where you can record,” Sinex says. “If you’re a live band and you just want to work on your sound, you can just go in there and work on yourself.”
Photo by Coleman Sirbu.
Though the Academy already has an excellent sound system installed, it was of utmost importance for the music production students to bring their own equipment to set up the shows. The assistant chair of the music production program at DSC, Professor Scott Velazco, realizes the value of this experience for the Music Industry Club, the student life organization he advises.
“Part of what I want is that the students have an ongoing opportunity where they are really put in charge of completely transporting and setting everything up on their own,” he says. “Outside of a class environment with no help from an instructor or professor, it is their job to figure it out over and over and over again.”
Professor Velazco greatly wanted Mad Café to stand out from other live music in the area. Mad Café, as he says, is meant to be a “true listening room where when the musician is on stage, the purpose of the audience is to pay attention to what’s going on.” In other venues, acts may feel like background music and not the rightful center of attention. “For cover sets at a bar, a lot of the times those musicians feel like they’re kind of being ignored on stage,” he continues. But when the lights in the studio go red, the room goes dead, and the musician receives their much deserved attention.
Another unique quality of Mad Café is that all music is entirely original. “No Sweet Home Alabama, no Sweet Caroline, no sweet songs,” Professor Velazco remarks. The concerts feature the talented artists of Volusia County, some of whom are Daytona State alumni themselves. Samuel James, the most recent Mad Café act, graduated from DSC last May and flew back down after starting to build a name for himself up in Nashville, Tennessee. Shane and Tori Scantling, a husband-and-wife duo called the Dirty Apples, are also graduates of the music program, and opened this fall’s Mad Café with a sold-out show.
Photo By Coleman Sirbu.
But behind the scenes is where more of the magic happens. Organizer of Mad Café and vice president of the Music Industry Club, as well as a music production student herself, Lydia Simone is getting a head start on her future endeavors with Mad Café. “I want to do music business, specifically concert organization, concert management, live shows,” Simone says. “This has been an absolute blessing to me to take charge of something like this, because this is exactly what I want to be doing when I graduate.”
Mad Café is a key example of how our music production students are gaining crucial hands-on experience in the field and how our community’s live music scene may be changing for the better as a result. The last of the four shows takes place on December 14 at 7:30 and features Bran the Artist. If you are unable to attend, the next batch of Mad Café concerts will return in February. To buy your tickets and learn some more about Mad Café, visit madcafe.org.