MarchFourth Marching Band OFFICIAL WEBSITE: homepage.

MarchFourth Marching Band to tour China’s Henan Province on a US State Department diplomatic cultural exchange May 21-June 3, 2013.

PORTLAND, Ore., May 21, 2013 (PRWEB) — MarchFourth Marching Band is embarking on a US State Department cultural exchange tour in China, sponsored jointly by the United States Embassy in Beijing, Sias International University, Sias Foundation, and the Government of Henan China Cultural Affairs. MarchFourth’s eighteen performers (and three crew, including a cameraman/documentarian) will tour the Henan Province of China, putting on shows at universities, arts centers and public squares from May 21-June 3, 2013.

MarchFourth Marching Band is an American music and performance ensemble. Their original music is anchored by funky electric bass, echoing the deepest grooves of American funk, rock, and jazz, framed in cinematic fashion by high-stepping stilt-aerobatics and dazzling dancers, all in fanciful costumes. This genre-busting, circus dance party is not to be missed! What began as a Fat Tuesday band in Portland, Oregon on March 4, 2003, has since become one of the nation’s best live touring acts and an experience that’s not soon forgotten.

Stiltwalker Aaron Lyon explains why MarchFourth Marching Band is a great choice for this kind of cultural exchange. ”We are not a lyrically driven stage act. From the moment we start making music and moving, people begin to feel something,” he says. “It’s part of our accessibility. MarchFourth speaks two universal languages–music and dance–and we’re saying ‘Hey everybody! Let’s have a party. Right here. Right now. Just because we can.’”

Cymbal player and tour manager Dan Stauffer adds, “Every time we go abroad we’re bringing something about America that no one sees in the rest of the world. It makes every experience precious in a way that traveling around the States could never be exactly.”

Since the Cold War era, trips like this have long been part of American cultural diplomacy efforts to showcase the American arts and, by extension, our way of life. Some of the first musicians to tour the world on the US State Department dime were jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Though they declined somewhat in the second half of the 20th century, these kinds of programs, which feature all genres of music as well as dance, theater, and fine art, were revived or ­reinvigorated after 9/11 in an attempt to downplay anti-US sentiments around the world.

Download a band photo here

Watch filmmaker Kevin Balmer’s trailer for “Was Ist Das?”, the short documentary made of MarchFourth’s 2009 trip to Germany here

About MarchFourth Marching Band:
MarchFourth Marching Band consists of 18 performers (or so) and features an all-star cast of percussion, saxes, trumpets, trombones, as well as bass and electric guitar and stiltwalkers, acrobats, hula hoops and dancing girls. Their most recent album ‘Magnificent Beast,’ was produced by Steve Berlin (of Los Lobos and was self-released October 2011. Their song “Gospel” will be featured in this year’s highly anticipated Disney/Pixar movie, ”Monsters University.” The song will also be heard in the closing credits and the movie trailer.

“From the first note to the last, the sound was pumping and the fun never stopped.” - USA Today

www.MarchFourthMarchingBand.com // @M4MB

Nayana Jennings
Publicity Manager
MarchFourth Marching Band
info@marchfourthmarchingband.com

MarchFourth Marching Band from Portland, Oregon, USA, is embarking on a US State Department Cultural Exchange Tour in China, sponsored jointly by Sias International University, Sias Foundation, the United States Embassy in Beijing and the Government of Henan China Cultural Affairs. MarchFourth’s 18 performers (and 3 crew, including cameraman/documentarian Kevin Balmer of Diggable Monkey) will tour the Henan Province of China, putting on shows at universities, arts centers and public squares from May 21-June 3, 2013.

Since the Cold War era, trips like this to developing and/or communist countries have long been part of American cultural diplomacy efforts to showcase the American arts and, by extension, our way of life. Some of the first musicians to tour the world on the US State Department dime were jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Though these programs declined somewhat in the second half of the 20^th century, they were revived or ­reinvigorated after 9/11 in an attempt to downplay anti-US sentiments around the world.

Our good friends at AudioGlobe are recording our birthday shows again this year and will be streaming their live-mixed video online during our performances. It’s free and available to all (servers permitting!) as a live broadcast, or you will be able to buy a copy of show for download later on. It’s our 10th birthday and we didn’t want to celebrate without you! Here’s the link: www.audioglobe.com/archive/m4mb10thanniversary

The Disney/Pixar official trailer for ‘Monsters University’ features about 16 seconds of our track “Gospel,” from our 2009 album, Rise Up. The song kicks in at 1:05, but you can watch it all here…

As part of our 10th Anniversary celebration, we’re debuting a new line of posters, t-shirts, stickers, and more! There’s also a DVD in the works from AudioGlobe’s footage of our 9th birthday show at the Crystal Ballroom in 2012. Even though it’s our month “off” we’re busy making a bunch of new stuff for you. Take a look at the new poster to get an idea of some of the new imagery we’re working on…

2013 tour poster

Paste teamed up with Horny Toad at the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival to capture off-the-wall performances around town. Click to watch the feature video they produced.

10/25 Salt Lake City, UT State Room

10/26 Boulder, CO Boulder Theater

10/27 Englewood, CO Gothic Theatr

10/29 Lincoln, NE Bourbon Theatre

10/31 Kansas City, MO  Beaumont Club

11/1   Bloomington, IL  Castle Theatre

11/2   Minneapolis, MN  Cabooze

11/3   Chicago, IL   Martyrs’

11/5   St. Louis, MO  Old Rock House

11/8-9 Live Oak, FL  Bear Creek Festival

11/10  Tampa, FL Skippers Smokehouse

11/11 Atlanta, GA Smiths Olde Bar

11/13 Charlotte, NC Neighborhood Theatre

11/14 Arlington, VA Artisphere

11/15  Harrisburg, PA Abbey Bar

11/16  Baltimore, MD  8 x 10

11/17 Brooklyn, NY Brooklyn Bowl

11/18 Stamford, CT UBS Parade

12/8 Austin, TX Club DeVille

12/9 Dallas, TX Trees

12/12Albuquerque, NMDirty Bourbon

12/13 Tucson, AZ Rialto Theate

12/14 Phoenix, AZ Crescent Ballroom

12/15 Flagstaff, AZ Orpheum Theater

12/16 Los Angeles, CA Echoplex

12/31 Portland, OR Inspire Truth

Hello, this is John, bass player and bandleader for MarchFourth. I am on every tour, so I feel intimately connected to our bus. Every time we go on the road I pray that we make it home safely and don’t miss any shows. It’s a small miracle that even though the bus broke down a few times last year, we managed to make every date (we were a couple hours late for the Strawberry Music Festival, but they found room for us to play anyway and we arrived to streets lined with cheering festival-goers). Our 9th Anniversary shows this past weekend marked the end of our busiest year to date, and the band is finally taking a much-deserved break to develop new material before we hit the road again in late April. We will also use this break to buy a new bus and start the process of customizing it to our needs. Thus, the Kickstarter campaign.

Last night I wrote a little piece that we were going to send out this morning as a last-minute promotional push. I awoke this morning to discover that we’d already reached our goal. And, as icing on the cake, a big fan has stepped up to match the next $1000 in donations before it all wraps up at 6:57 PM PST today. Such good news! Here is what I wrote last night, which still holds true the morning after.

1. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far. I am grateful and amazed that so many people want to help. The reason we started this Kickstarter campaign is because we obviously don’t have the kind of extra money we’d need to buy a bus. I have to credit Nayana Jennings (along with Andy Shapiro and video wiz Kevin Balmer) for spearheading this Kickstarter thing, which came on the heels of a year of being mostly on the road—over 200 days—and recording, releasing, promoting, and touring a new album (Magnificent Beast). All the money we make on tour pays for the tours themselves, and the biggest expense of touring is payroll for 23 people. Some bands have used Kickstarter to raise money to produce their albums. I am proud of the fact that our latest record, which cost approx $17,000 to produce, was paid for entirely by our merchandise savings. But, a new bus is a much bigger project, and we need the bus sooner than we can save enough to pay for it. So, in some ways, this truly is a “kickstarter” campaign because the money is literally going to kick-start the project.

2. Why did we ask for $46,064 exactly? The truth is that $46,064 is about half of the amount it will actually take us to purchase and renovate the kind of bus we want. After Kickstarter fees and the cost of sending out all those incentives, we’ll probably end up with about $40,000, which is close to what a 1995 MCI coach goes for (we’ve been looking at busses online for almost a year now). That’s the cheapest bus we can buy that would still qualify as an upgrade. When all is said and done we will spend closer to $100,000, but we felt that requesting that much was too steep a number for us to raise on Kickstarter, so we lowered the amount to $46,000. Then, just for fun, we decided to make that number a palindrome (46064 backwards is 46064, heh). But really, the amount is kind of arbitrary. Our goal is to purchase a bus within the next month, and the Kickstarter money will at least make a solid down-payment.

3. What’s up with Razzle Dazzle? Our current bus is not broken, but it is at that critical point where we don’t know when the last trip will be. It is a great bus, and with $15,000 we could install a new engine and drivetrain. But, it’s a size thing: we’ve outgrown the 40-foot bus. A 45-foot bus with a more powerful engine will be able to pull a gear trailer, which will not only free up more space on the bus, but will allow us to bring more equipment and put on an even better production than the one we have been touring with. Also, 45-foot bus (also 6″ wider and 12″ taller) will be easier to build-out 24 bunks so we can all sleep comfortably (our current bus has 10 bunks). As anyone who has toured knows: sleep (and personal space) are in limited supply, and Razzle Dazzle (although a worthy steed) is just too small for all of us to live in.

4. The big picture. I have to say that when we put the band together nine years ago, there is no way I could have predicted our journey and the way it has unfolded. When we started this thing, there was no business plan. There was no “ultimate goal.” The idea was “do what you love” and share that with other people in the form of an event. Then we played the streets of Portland prior to the invasion of Iraq two weeks later (March 20, 2003), and there was this sense of purpose that emerged among us. It seemed that there might be an actual need for the project, that people in a post-9-11 world could be uplifted by our collective energy somehow. I feel grateful that the band is still together and moving on an upward path, and that we’ve had so many opportunities to share this artistic experiment with the world. There have never been investors or sponsors or record labels backing our tours or projects (there still aren’t). The people who’ve invested in M4 are the musicians, dancers, drivers, crew and hosts who were willing to donate their time and energy so that we can show up and put on a show. What happens if you create something with a group of people, and try to make that ambition and momentum sustainable? In other words, sacrificing almost everything else for the remote chance of succeeding as an artist? That is our experiment.

This project is far from being sustainable, but we’re just keeping the faith and continuing to work as long as people continue to want to hire us. When I think about this project as a business, I fantasize about all the things we could do and develop if we had some kind of financial backing. Believe me, there are a lot of other things we could spend $46K on (new gear, marketing, videos, staging, a sound and light tech, maybe some kind of health plan, etc etc), but right now it’s all about the bus! The bus is one step towards ensuring that we will be able to fulfill our touring obligations. Beginning in late April, we will be on tour throughout the summer (and most likely through November), hopefully trekking to a city near you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for supporting this crazy thing.
John

Explore the MarchFourth Marching Band 9th anniversary show at the Crystal Ballroom on 3/4/12. This gigapixel image captured by photographer Bruce Ely was made from stitching more than 100 images from the show and is not intended to represent one moment from the show. There are numerous stitching “errors” which are usually caused by a person that is partially in a picture moving to a different location by the time my camera made another pass. See if you can spot any familiar faces!