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Sofa King Fest co-founder Travis Laurendine. The entrepreneur’s work regularly crosses between tech, music and the restaurant industry.
Couch surfing Sofa King Fest links cultural community and fans during the pandemic BY JAKE CLAPP ABOUT 300,000 UNIQUE VIEWERS
tuned in to an eight-hour virtual telethon on April 11 to raise funds to purchase personal protective equipment for New Orleans area hospitals. The 504LIFE Stream featured live and pre-recorded segments with notable people like Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, Walter Isaacson, Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Andrew Yang; actors Olivia Spencer and Wendell Pierce; and performances by Mannie Fresh, Big Freedia, George Porter Jr., Irma Thomas and Dee-1. The telethon — which raised more than $15,000 along with direct PPE donations to the city — was produced by a group that included New Orleans festival producers, artists and talent managers, a co-founder of the livestreaming platform Twitch, and Sofa King Fest.
The New Orleans-based Sofa King Fest launched on March 20, within days of New Orleans’ shut down under the stay-at-home order. The program — through its website (www.sofa-kingfest.com) and on social media — operates kind of like a TV guide for musicians and artists livestreaming their events and hosts some of those live videos on its platforms. But Sofa King Fest has steadily expanded into co-producing events, like the 504LIFE Stream, and has had a hand in raising more than $150,000 directly for musicians. Sofa King Fest will co-produce another 504LIFE online telethon, starting at 5:04 p.m. May 4, to raise money for the Foundation for Louisiana. It also will launch Jazz Feastival — a website (www.jazzfeastival.com) to connect users with food vendors who normally would be at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival — during what would have been the second weekend of Jazz Fest. And Sofa King Fest is set to launch its own digital platform, says co-founder Travis Laurendine. Laurendine says he was on his way out of town after a draining Mardi Gras season when he got a call from Reid Martin of artist management firm MidCitizen. Laurendine, who regularly crosses between technology, music and food, was a co-founder of the 2019 Boycott Bowl, organizes New Orleans Ideas Sound &
Entertainment, a music and tech conference during Jazz Fest, and operates the hackathon company CODEMKRS, among other initiatives. Along with being recognized by the Obama Administration for a tech idea aimed at addressing New Orleans’ murder rate, Laurendine and developer Max Gaudin created AirPnP, a crowdsourced app that finds open bathrooms along Mardi Gras parade routes. Laurendine and Martin started to brainstorm ideas to help New Orleans musicians and artists who are out of work because of the pandemic. “We realized that everybody’s going to be going online to do a festival or to do a show,” Laurendine says. “We could create a platform that creates unity. A lot of people are doing things, but people weren’t creating things for the people who were doing things. We went a step above — since every musician is going to be doing this, it’ll be chaos. It’s going to be a million people going live on Facebook and you don’t know which one is when. There needs to be a guide.” Along with Laurendine, developers JT Gleason, Christi Schneider and Jeremy Gottfried are among the people involved with Sofa King Fest. Sofa King Fest’s first goal, Laurendine says, was to incentivize people to stay home during the pandemic, to give artists a digital platform to encourage their fans to “flatten the curve.” The next goal was to help musicians recover part of their lost business by connecting fans directly to the artists. “Luckily I have this network of people who do it for love, that’s the hackathon world,” Laurendine says. “We’ve had probably about 50 different contributors in one shape or form to the project, which is awesome scale. You should see my Slack, it’s insane.” Laurendine, who is from New Orleans, attended Vanderbilt University and moved back to the city in 2006, describes a lot of his work in the past as a “conduit between the city’s analog past and digital future.” In the mid2000s, he worked with musicians to set up social media pages and email accounts and shoot videos. This is a continuation of that kind of digital work, he says, as online platforms are now some of the only lifelines for artists. “We need to come up with a new way for music businesses to operate,” Laurendine says. “The way they used to operate is not working. It used to be that you gave away your music online, on Spotify, essentially getting paid pennies, because you made money performing live. Now you’re not making money live, what do you do?”
Next Fest options DURING MOST YEARS, partaking of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival can be a mix of time spent at the fair grounds and days listening to live broadcasts via WWOZ 90.7 FM, the community radio station owned by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. This year, with Jazz Fest canceled, WWOZ is the best option for all eight days. The station is hosting “Jazz Festing in Place,” which features sets from past festivals being aired during the event’s normal hours. From 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, listeners can enjoy memorable sets, some dating back to its early years. The second weekend (April 30-May3) features
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Herbie Hancock, Jon Cleary, BeauSoleil and the Radiators Thursday; Roy Hargrove, Big Freedia, Aaron Neville, Wynton Marsalis and a 1974 recording of Professor Longhair Friday; Lucinda Williams, Taj Mahal, Esperanza Spalding, Terence Blanchard and Allen Toussaint on Saturday; and Sunday features an Irma Thomas tribute to Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, a tribute to Danny Barker and, as a closing act, a 1994 performance by the Neville Brothers. There also are a few second line parade recordings on the schedule. The WWOZ website (www.wwoz. org) also has some archived content, such as photos and videos, from the event’s first 50 years. Jazz Fest also has a YouTube channel (jazzfest), and while it has a lot of its online promotional videos and lineup announcements, it also has some highlight and interview videos. For those who want to add some of their favorite festival foods to the mix, see Fork + Center on page 21.
G A M B I T > B E S T O F N E WO R L E A N S . C O M > A p r i l 2 8 - M ay 4 > 2 0 2 0
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