Initiative aims to bring more live music to Downtown Pittsburgh
The Pittsburgh Downtown Community Development Corp. announced an initiative Wednesday called Music City Downtown, which will bring live music to, or augment the music programming in, at least nine city venues beginning in February.
Among the venues adding music will be The Speakeasy at NOLA, The Market Street Grocery second-floor lounge, The Metropolitan and Molinaro’s. The CDC will also program additional music at the August Wilson Cultural Center and the Backstage Bar.
John Valentine, Downtown CDC executive director, said the organization started this effort three years ago with Sound Bites, but it’s going wider with Music City Downtown.
“It was always a goal of mine to have music venues Downtown. I went to New Orleans on vacation and saw all these music venues and a map to get to each place, so I said if we’re going to be a music mecca, we have to do this. So, I started to recruit venues and see which venues worked and which didn’t, and I wanted to do a mix of music, whether it was bluegrass or acoustic or jazz or blues or so on.”
To do the booking, he has recruited Kevin Saftner, who owned the North Side’s bustling James Street Gastropub and Speakeasy before it closed in late 2016. He went on to book music briefly at The Stage at Karma on the South Side.
“Music is something that is accessible by anyone,” Mr. Saftner said. “All you have to have is the desire to play or attend. And that’s it. There’s not tons of money needed. There’s not tons of things. As long as you can get there, you can be a part of it. At James Street on the North Side, we really saw that.”
The Downtown CDC is working independently of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, which has a similar goal of presenting music Downtown and partnered with WYEP-FM and the city on the Pittsburgh Music Ecosystem study.
Mr. Valentine, who previously owned Palate Bistro, Downtown, said most of the venues would be presenting music by mid-February.
“Some are so small,” he said, “you just need a microphone and speaker.”
Other Downtown CDC projects have included Fashion Week and the dog park near the Rachel Carson Bridge.