CHRISTINE MACHADO
There’s a relaxed atmosphere all around. A young duo announce their next tune and quickly launch into a rendition of John Mayer’s Free Fallin. It appears to be quite the favorite this evening. Close to the stage, a bunch of their friends and family have their smartphones out all ready to capture and share it instantly on social media. At the other end, the next act is waiting in anticipation for their turn. What’s interesting is that quite a few of these faces are unfamiliar, newbies to the stage. But they are doing a fine job in holding the audience captive.
“It’s beautiful to see the crowd be there and support the musicians,” says Lester D’Souza, a musician himself. D’Souza and Gretchen Barretto, a young singer who is already making waves in the Goan music scene, together curate the music acts for the open mic evenings. These are usually held every Wednesday at the LVC Comedy and Music Cafe at the Lounge Terminal, Caculo Mall. “The idea behind having the mics is to provide a platform where any musician can come and perform the music that they want to. We don’t have any restriction when it comes to the genre of music they’d like to play,” explains D’Souza.
The LVC team receives quite a few entries every week, which D’Souza and Barretto then narrow down and pick from. “We ask interested artists to contact us through the shared contact details. To ensure quality acts, I insist on them sending across their audios to me so that I can push them forward to be a part of the day’s line-up. We then work around the availability of the artists and move forward,” states Barretto. As for getting onboard a few established artists, either D’Souza or Barretto personally gets in touch with them to see if they are interested.
The turnout however has been quite surprising for the team. “I honestly didn’t expect so many high school students to come and perform. If I was in school still, I would be very hesitant to go up and perform but artists like Young Blunder and Shub and Dwight just to name a few have been absolute surprises,” says D’Souza.
Warren Viegas, the young man behind this initiative has also been pleasantly surprised with the way things have shaped up. A stand up comedian, Viegas has been quite active in promoting stand up comedy through his group Las Viegas Comedy Club which he began in early 2017. In fact when he zeroed in on the Lounge Terminal space, he was initially looking at it as just a stand up comedy venue. While the club has had comedy shows with some big names in the Indian comedy scene at different venues in Goa, Viegas states that sometimes comedians like to do shows at smaller venues. And this seemed like a perfect choice. At the same time, Viegas also knew quite a few of his friends and acquaintances who were into music and realised that there wasn’t a space as such where these people could just go out and perform, thus giving them a feel of being infront of a crowd, while also introducing the audience to new music talent. With poetry also coming back in a big way, getting a space for poetry open mics also seemed like a good idea. “While in Mumbai there are spaces like The Hive which does a variety of open mics, I felt Goa needed one too,” he says. Viegas thus decided to launch the new venue as The LVC Comedy and Music Cafe. And the cafe has open mics on a weekly basis in stand up, music and poetry. Magic is also something that the cafe has tried to delve into.
“Our music open mics in particular have been quite the hit. In fact the high standards of music has taken me by surprise. We’ve had a nine year old playing the violin so beautifully. We’ve also had twins in their early forties doing a show,” says Viegas.
Barretto however states that she was in fact expecting the open mics to do well. “We started it for a reason i.e. to get new artists who don’t exactly commercialize or who are new to the field to have a platform. In fact more than anything we promote originals and we’ve had a lot of those. You don’t see a lot of that happening in Goa,” she says.
