This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Marian Call and Lisa Puananimōhala’ikalani Denny are organizing this week’s Alaska Music Summit in Juneau. It’s a chance for anyone who is a part of making music in the region to come together and swap ideas.
The Juneau summit is Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Devil’s Club Brewing. Participants can register at alaskamusicsummit.com.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Marian Call: I’m Marian Call. I’m the Program Director of Music Alaska.
Lisa Puananimōhala’ikalani Denny: I’m Lisa Puananimōhala’ikalani Denny. I am the project outreach coordinator for Music Alaska for the Juneau Music Summit. I also did a little volunteer coordination for our summit up in Anchorage.
The summit is a gathering of music-minded people across the state of Alaska. There are three of them: Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau. And it’s like a convention for people in every facet of the music industry to come together, to network, to share our perspectives and to connect with each other and level up together.
Marian Call: The music summit was started about some years ago, but this is the seventh one, and we’re really excited to see every year, more and more people who are in different parts of music-making. Like people who do booking or people who are DJs, or people who make beats, or people who write new operas, or people who are teaching preschoolers, right?
All these people serve different roles, but sometimes don’t have the chance to really talk to each other, even though all our fates are very connected. So the music summit makes space for this to happen, and it also gives us a chance to intentionally try to make our music ecosystem better, because it certainly nothing happens if we don’t try together to make it better. And when we do try to make it better, amazing things happen.
We’ll also be talking about money, about what musicians earn, what they’re paid, how to make the money work. How to make it work well for the venue too. How to have a successful event when you’re trying to make sure that people are being compensated what they’re worth.
Lisa Puananimōhala’ikalani Denny: We’ve reserved one small segment for to hear from the perspective of the bartenders, who are tend to be viewed as on the fringes of the scene, but they play such a crucial role in a lot of music events, especially like in downtown Juneau, where they’re helping run a lot of that show.
Marian Call: I think that’ll be great. I think nobody ever asked the bartenders ‘Hey, which shows work?’, but I think they have specialized knowledge about that.
Possibly the most important part is when we simply free the room up to everyone. Just talk to each other, right? Talk to someone you don’t know, talk to someone you haven’t talked to in a long time. So at lunch and afterwards and the next day at office hours, that’s really when it happens.
We’re trying to kind of build bonds between the most distant corners of the music community, like if you’re as far apart as you can be in the music community, if you’re playing heavy metal
versus performing like 11th century chant. Or if you’re like teaching preschoolers versus performing with seniors in a community choir.
No matter how far apart we are, all of our fates are tied together, and this is our opportunity, once a year, to try and make sure that people see that connection and value it.
Lisa Puananimōhala’ikalani Denny: I am an independent musician in Alaska, and I wasn’t that before I came here. And Juneau is such a fun community to be an artist, a performer, a musician in, because we are so supportive. We’re so all about it. You want to try something? Do it. We’re going to support and applaud you.