![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/wp-content\/uploads\/music-photo1.jpg\")
\n Under a confetti shower,\u00a0Keek lead singer Conor Whitehead salutes the crowd at an all-ages show at Maverick, in December.<\/p>\n
Ottawa has no\u00a0local music scene. The venues are small;\u00a0the crowds are young;\u00a0the bands always leave for bigger cities. That\u00a0is what people keep hearing, anyway.<\/p>\n
\n Under a confetti shower,\u00a0Keek lead singer Conor Whitehead salutes the crowd at an all-ages show at Maverick, in December.<\/p>\n
Promoter Peter Roumeliotis moved to Ottawa from Montreal two years ago. \u201cI was told Ottawa doesn\u2019t have a scene,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when I got here, I was like, \u2018What are you guys talking about?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The venues are smaller and the kids may be young, but so what?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019ve realized is that Ottawa\u2019s scene is more intimate. In the pop-punk, metal and hardcore scenes, you tend to get the same 150 to 200 kids that come out to all the shows,\u201d says Roumeliotis.<\/p>\n
Roumeliotis, who\u00a0promoted\u00a0in Montreal for over a year,\u00a0says that in a bigger city the crowds are more sporadic. He says it was common to have certain shows draw sparse crowds and was often hard to fill\u00a0large venues.<\/p>\n
So, Ottawa\u2019s local music scene is a steady one, but why?<\/p>\n
Venues are smaller here, and the kids may be young, but so what?<\/p>\n
A friendlier scene<\/p>\n
Alex Brownlee, from the Ottawa-based band Constraints, says a big reason is because your hometown is the place to build your fan base.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re not liked by the kids in your hometown, chances are people won\u2019t like you in other towns either,\u201d he says, laughing.<\/p>\n
Constraints have now started to draw a bigger crowd in the greater Toronto area and have done some bigger summer tours by pairing up with bands in other cities and countries. \u00a0But Brownlee says it starts at home \u2014 it\u2019s all about networking and whom you know, which is why they do so well playing at home regularly.<\/p>\n
Conor Whitehead of the Ottawa-based band Keek agrees.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we started off we could play a show, and maybe 30 people would show up, and they\u2019d all be close friends,\u201d he says. \u201cWe go where the kids are; we used to play a lot of high schools and hand out flyers and hop on social networking like Twitter and Facebook, and that\u2019s what really got our fan base going here in Ottawa.\u201d<\/p>\n Keek is a pop-punk band that can draw a crowd of five to six hundred kids, says Roumeliotis. But that\u2019s only possible at an all-ages show \u2014 another reason why Ottawa has a thriving scene.<\/p>\n Downtown, places like Maverick, Caf\u00e9 Dekcuf and Ritual host all-ages shows. Adam Kronick, the owner and operator of Babylon nightclub on Bank Street, says doing all-ages shows is important for showing support for Ottawa artists.<\/p>\n In Montreal, this is in jeopardy, Roumeliotis explains.<\/p>\n \u201cBasically for smaller shows and for emerging artists in Canada, we had a venue called Underworld, and it was the only venue that would do all-ages shows, for kids who are like 15, 16, 17,\u201d he says. \u201cAs of December 31, Underworld\u2019s going to be a bar full time, and that\u2019s going to affect the music scene really bad.\u201d<\/p>\n Roumeliotis says venues are the important thing in a local music scene. In Ottawa, he says, the size of the rooms is perfect: smaller than first-rate music scenes as in Toronto and Montreal, yes. But this is a good thing.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Montreal a band like Down With Webster would play Metropolis, which is like 3,000 people; over here they\u2019re going to play Bronson Centre, which is barely 1,000 people, so it\u2019s definitely a more intimate scene,\u201d says Roumeliotis.<\/p>\n Route 401 to Toronto<\/p>\n He says in promoting in Ottawa for the last two years, he has sold out shows much more easily than in large venues in Montreal.<\/p>\n Of course, there are some drawbacks to the intimate Ottawa scene. Brownlee says Constraints do see risks in playing Ottawa regularly.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is the issue of over-saturating yourself in Ottawa,\u201d he says. \u201cBy playing a show every two weeks, you can go from having people come out and being really excited to a point where they get bored of you. So you have to space out the shows, for sure.”<\/p>\n Whitehead says Keek will eventually leave the city for bigger opportunities but not for lack of the local scene. \u201cOttawa\u2019s been great to us, and we\u2019ll leave when we\u2019re ready to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n Roumeliotis agrees that Toronto is the inevitable next step for most Ottawa \u2014 and even Canadian \u2014 bands, in hopes of finding a record label. But local is important.<\/p>\n \u201cI have kind of an unofficial rule with bands, that if you can\u2019t dominate your hometown then I can\u2019t see you dominating any other city,\u201d he says. \u201cAll the bands that are big right now can do ten times as many people here than by going to another city.\u201d<\/p>\n So if the venues are smaller, and the kids are young, and the bands are leaving for bigger cities, why would that mean the local music scene is dead? Local bands are building a huge fan base and a name for themselves, and Roumeliotis says the small-town city of Ottawa has much to offer.<\/p>\n \u201cOttawa just has a smaller scene, but it\u2019s a great scene, and it\u2019s definitely still alive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Branded unfairly as\u00a0dull music town, Ottawa suffers from comparisons with\u00a0Toronto and Montreal.\u00a0 True, it may never be a national magnet, but this small-town city thrives on local talent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4533"}],"version-history":[{"count":118,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6783,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions\/6783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/wp-content\/uploads\/music-photo41.jpg\")
\n Ottawa-based band Keek: from left to right<\/em>, Marek Lubanski, Kyle (Willy) Williams, Matt Belanger, Conor Whitehead and Kyle Megill.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/wp-content\/uploads\/music-photo34.jpg\")
\n Alive and kicking. Fans sing along at Keek’s Maverick show.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/capitalarts\/wp-content\/uploads\/music-photo2.jpg\")
\n Keek performing. \u201cWe go where the kids are,\u201d says Whitehead.<\/p>\n