Focus Groups to Help The Art of Cool Project Bring a World-Class Music Festival to Durham

Durham is widely-known as a haven for creativity and authenticity.  Given those attributes, it is somewhat surprising that Durham does not have multiple live music festivals to give more energy to the emerging club scene with venues like Motorco and the Casbah, and to accompany the Bull Durham Blues Festival.  If a new project has its way, that will all change.

The Art of Cool Project (AOCP), in its quest to bring a live music festival to downtown Durham, is pleased to announce a series of focus group sessions to be held in the large classroom at American Tobacco Underground, from 7:00PM until 8:00PM. These one-hour sessions have been scheduled in order for the AOCP to get input from the community on what they hope to see in a music festival in Durham. The American Tobacco Underground is located at the corner of Blackwell and Pettigrew Streets in downtown Durham.

The first focus group session will take place Monday, October 15 and will address festival format and footprint considerations. Anyone who is interested in helping AOCP lock down a date, format and footprint are welcome. Specifically topics covered will be:
1. Picking the right date
2. Essential festival highlights
3. How large the footprint should be
4. Free versus ticketed events

This initial session will be co-moderated by Greg Lowenhagen, Director of Hopscotch, and Marc Lee, Blues Festival, Hayti Heritage, and WNCU radio announcer/emcee.

The full schedule of topics and the dates they will be discussed are as follows:

October 15th: Date/Format/Footprint
October 22nd: Venues/Ticketing
October 29th: Musical and Artistic Programming
November 5th: Fundraising/Sponsorships
November 12th: Food Trucks/Restaurants
November 19th: Traffic/Parking/Transportation
November 26th: Kids & Educational Activities
December 3rd: Volunteer Coordination/Sustainability
December 10th: Marketing/PR

 The Art of Cool Project Focus Group Sessions are open to the public. Anyone desiring to help bring a top-notch music festival to the Triangle and also to foster a world class jazz and live music culture is encouraged to attend one or all of the sessions. Come and give your “two cents.” Get in on the ground floor planning of a dynamic culture-changing event.

For more information and to R.S.V.P. for these focus groups, please sign up online.

Dedicated to increasing the visibility of the local vibrant, varied and surprisingly under-appreciated jazz and live music scene, The Art of Cool Project is a unique collaboration between the jazz and art communities to bring both creative mediums to supporters in an intimate concert setting. The Project also has additional goals of solidifying the Triangle as a metropolitan area with a world-class defined jazz culture by bring a Jazz Festival to Durham, as well as recognizing the need to keep jazz as part of America’s fabric by cultivating the genre in future generations. Bringing this festival to Durham is a step towards these goals. With its second year in existence, expect many exciting things to come from The Art of Cool Project.

To keep up with the latest The Art of Cool Project News, visit them online, on Facebook,or follow them on Twitter.