Saul Kaye live every night this month

Saul Kaye is a fine blues musician (see my 2010 post) who's exploring the intersections of Jewish and African lyrical and musical traditions. As he puts it...

"Jews have been enslaved in many countries over the centuries including Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Rome, Greece, Germany, and Malta. So, like the African Slave experience proved to be a catalyst for blues, so the path of Jewish history fostered its own form of soulful tears, from Jews crying out in Egyptian slavery ( Exodus) to the prophet Jeremiah weeping over the destruction of the Temple in Eicha ( Lamentations ) , Jews know the pain of spiritual crisis and call to Hashem with their own form of blues. You can hear it in the synagogue when the Torah and the books of Prophets are read, chanted in tropes passed down through time, recounting forbearers' sorrows on days of tragedy like Tisha B'Av, or remembering celebrations of freedom on Passover, when Jews recall the Israelite's "Song at the Sea," as the waters of freedom parted."

Kaye is experimenting with a new online approach to giving concerts between his live shows. Every night this month (August, 2011) except for Saturday night, he's giving an intimate live show via StageIt.com. The shows are at 9pm US Eastern / 6pm US Pacific time. I just found out last week and haven't caught one yet, but will try to catch tonight's show. I'm not exactly clear how StageIt works, but I get the impression that Kaye's shows are a 'pay what you feel appropriate' sort of thing.

I'm excited to catch one of the shows. This is a great opportunity for folks not in one of the big metro areas to catch a really talented performer. Check it out.

To give you a taste, here's Kaye playing the Desert Blues.

Desert Blues

Update: I caught the Saul Kaye show on StageIt last night and thought I'd report on both Kaye's performance and on StageIt. Kaye gave a casual 30 minute, from his living-room, performance, that included songs from his new albums, a few covers, some 'day in the life' stories and some chat with the audience. For a new fan (e.g. me) it was a great opportunity to get to know Kaye a bit and see that he really has the vocal and guitar chops you hear on the album. Now I really want to see him live.

The StageIt experience was reasonably good. Sign-in was easy (it took my Facebook account info). I was able to buy $5 worth of 'notes' to use as my ticket to the show and then another $5 worth to leave as a tip. The division of ticket and tip is smart. It gave me two different opportunity to decide how much I valued the performance, both before the show started and during the show. Sound quality was surprisingly good, though I suffered with some occasional screen buffering (which was probably a problem at my end).

One interesting thing is that Kaye was playing to a rather small audience, but has been doing so all month. He didn't get rich on last nights show, but brought in a few bucks and made at least one new fan (me!).

All in all the StageIt experience was a good one and I'll be interested in seeing if other bands start using it as a way to stay connected with their fans between tours and to build audiences in places they haven't played yet.