Thank you Keri Brenner and Paul Liberatore at the Marin Independent Journal for writing about the inspiring endeavors of Marin's musical community during this unprecedented time. At Bread & Roses Presents, we are doing our best as we shelter in place to support the musicians who give us so much joy through their live concerts year-round and especially those performers who give back to our isolated audiences throughout the year. It is heartening to see such a blossoming of online creativity during this time of forced isolation.
By Keri Brenner, Marin Independent Journal
POSTED: March 26, 2020
Marin’s gigging musicians — and producers at local venues where they play — say they are doing a major reset as virtually all of the spring and summer concert seasons this year have been canceled or postponed over the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re doing Facebook Live concerts every night at 8 p.m.,” said Rebecca Roudman of the blues and bluegrass-inspired band Dirty Cello. Roudman and Jason Eckl, her husband and bandmate, are streaming the concerts from their Novato home.
Ditto for Larkspur residents Bruce Victor and Marla FibIsh, the married bandmates of Noctambule, who are offering a Facebook Live concert daily at 12:30 p.m.
“Just one word describes the potential and actual effects of the mandated life adjustments necessary to contain the coronavirus upon musicians and artists in general: devastating,” the couple wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday.
Dirty Cello and Noctambule are two among scores of Marin acts that, in normal times up until about three weeks ago, volunteered to entertain confined or isolated audiences at Bay Area institutions, schools, hospitals and correctional facilities under the auspices of longtime Corte Madera nonprofit Bread & Roses Presents.
With the institutional concerts off-limits amid the local and statewide shelter-in-place orders, Bread & Roses is doing all it can to help its stable of performers, said Dave Perron, executive director.
“They’ve been giving up their time to us for free,” Perron said of the volunteer performers. “We are trying to see how we can support them now.”
You may also read Paul Liberatore's recent Marin IJ article "Lib At Large: How Marin musicians are coping with the corona virus crisis." (March 27, 2020.)
Article by Keri Brenner, Marin IJ
Photos added to article of perfomers at instututional shows by Bread & Roses Presents.
Photo Captions:
1) Dirty Cello at Delancy Street in 2016. Photo by Peter Merts.
2) Noctambule poses with residents at The Tamalpais in 2015. Photo by Peter Merts.