Shortly after Village Vinyl opened we began to meet many musicians who came into the store to explore it, shop it and listen to and talk music. Some were enrolled in Humber College’s music program, some were from the Lakeshore Village’s Artists Co-op and some were local residents and some were from further afield. In chatting with them we began to see the need for local music talent to have a venue to perform their music where folks came out for the purpose of enjoying watching new and burgeoning talent hone their craft and more exposed and experienced musicians try out some new tunes/music styles. We conceived ‘SUNDAY SESSIONS’ as a result of conversations with artists and others involved in the music industry (we have a few recording studios in the area) who frequented our store. We had an ideal location, a layout that could be easily converted for performances, decent acoustics and a great warm, music centric environment reminiscent of other famous ‘village’ coffee houses. We knew we wanted our performance sessions to be cost-free for folks to come in to, easy to spend a little time at or the whole time at and most importantly…artist focused. We chose Sundays as a day best suited to folks having some down time and afternoons from 2:00 to 5:00 as most convenient for an audience. We developed the 3 set format to allow people to come and go easily and access music product and cafe goods if they wanted to in between sets. We encouraged our booked artists to promote themselves and bring out friends and family to support them on their performance date. We asked recorded artists to bring in their recordings to promote and sell at their performance and after, with all proceeds going to the artist(s). We developed a poster for advertising the sessions in a calendar/music genre/artist bio format that is produced every 6 to 8 weeks and posted in local schools, business’ and other relevant locations as well as handed out to every visitor to /customer of Village Vinyl. We provided additional weekly artist promotion on our website calendar, on Facebook, in Now magazine and on our street sign.
‘SUNDAY SESSIONS’ came to life in October 2012 just two months after we opened and since then we have seen some amazing talent perform in our store. We like to provide a variety of music genres from week to week and even do some double bills from time to time. We have had the blues, electronica, classical guitar, reggae, jazz, celtic, bluegrass, new wave, indie pop, rock, folk, soul and all sorts of combos and mixes of these music genres entertain us since the debut of our live music Sundays at the cafe. We have made friends of many of the artists who have performed here and now enjoy watching them develop and pursue their music craft and goals. We love seeing our audience ‘regulars’ come in to spend some time with us on a Sunday as well as meeting those who have never been to one of our ‘sessions’ before and hearing their appreciative responses to our ‘Sunday Sessions’ concept and our artists. The endeavor has been and continues to be a fun, exciting and rewarding one for us and we hope you will make your way to a ‘Sunday Session’ soon. Check out our website calendar for session artist bios, links and event details!