Gordon Webster - Live at Boston Swing Central: Support Kickstarter Campaign for new CD

In a week, between January 25-26, 2013, Gordon Webster will record his next album: Live at Boston Swing Central.

Boston Swing Central almost secretly started a Kickstarter campaign to fund part of the production costs. You can become a backer here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bostonswingcentral/gordon-webster-live-at-boston-swing-central

Official Campaign Text

Gordon Webster is a rare jazz musician and bandleader who has dedicated his life and music to the Lindy Hop Community. He is in great demand around the world, where he is constantly in motion in a car or on an airplane getting to his next gig.

These days, he plays almost exclusively at Exchanges, Camps, and Competition weekends. Every time he takes the stage it is a “Special Event”.

If you’re reading this, you probably know Gordon or his music quite well. But if not, we hope that you will someday soon get to experience a live Gordon Webster performance. Gordon Webster’s music is the ultimate soundtrack to a great swing dance. Cathartic and personal, he aims to connect with Lindy Hoppers and swing dancers.

As a musician, he thinks like a dancer, because he is a dancer. He met his wife at Swing Out New Hampshire dance camp over ten years ago, and has been dancing and playing for dancers ever since.

He knows many dancers personally, as is evident when he walks through a dance to get to the stage. He stops to hug, dance or talk to almost everyone. It’s that personal connection with Lindy Hoppers that is flowing through each and every bar of every song.

There is an invisible thread connecting the wide variety of styles and genres he incorporates in his music: it is the Lindy Hop. And it is, perhaps, because of this that the Lindy Hop Community loves Gordon. He would be on the list of many of us as their favorite artist to dance to.

It is important that we as dancers and music fans support our favorite musicians. And that is why Boston Swing Central is launching this Kickstarter campaign.

It is our hope that we can give a little bit back to Gordon to help him make the recording: Live at Boston Swing Central. Making a live recording will document what is happening at Boston Swing Central on Friday nights. We also hope that Gordon will delight us with some more great songs to add to the Lindy Hop canon, the songs that swing DJs love to play at dances.

You might have heard a few of these “hits” and not recognized them as Gordon's, but songs like “Long Gone John”, “Twenty Four Robbers”, and “I Like Pie” are songs that fill the dance floor with joy and energy.

Your donations don’t have to be big for this to be a success, give what you can. There are some Thank You rewards affiliated with the amounts you give. We hope you know that whatever you give, Boston Swing Central and Gordon Webster will feel your Lindy Love.

Our goal is to raise at least $5000.

We hope you can be a part of this project, whether you attend the Live at Boston Swing Central recording sessions on January 25th or 26th (we’ve named the weekend Kind of a Big Deal) or you participate in spirit by donating and getting a copy of the album.

The total cost of making this recording is about $18,000

We're hoping to fund 30% of this through Kickstarter. The other funding will come from Boston Swing Central and Gordon Webster.

Together, Boston Swing Central, Gordon Webster, and YOU will get this project completed.

A rough breakdown of the costs of this recording is this, just so you can have some insight into the economics of a recording, and why they cost $15 for small, independent artists (as opposed to those cheap downloads of major label recording artists you’ll find on the web):

Recording Equipment Rental: $1000
Recording Engineer + Travel: $1300
Mixing & Editing in a Professional Studio: $2300 (all the instruments are recorded on separate channels, here we set the levels and equalize each instrument into a balanced perfect mix.)
Mastering: $1000 (mastering is the final stage and is a mysterious alchemy, but trust us this is a crucial part of making a recording.)
CD Artwork Layout: $600 Mechanical Rights (Songwriters Royalties): $1200 (these are paid to the Harry Fox Agency, who distributes them to the original songwriters or the copyright holders.)
ISRC Codes: $75 (A registered CD encoding to identify the album, track, artist.)
Steinway D Rental & Tuning: $1680 (a major expense, Gordon's instrument of choice.)
Musicians Fees, Travel, Expenses: $8000

Total: $18,055

Since Boston Swing Central is a non-profit, all of your donations are tax deductible, except where noted to cover the costs of expenses, also this campaign will finish in January 2013, which means you can take this deduction for that year.