Saturday, August 10, 2013

Pairing Live Music with Outdoor Dining

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of The Splendid Table, (See www.splendidtable.org) once had a guest on to discuss the question of best practices for pairing music and dining.  He suggested these excellent points:

  1. Start out with upbeat familiar tunes that swing and say "This is going to be fun!"
  2. Move to instrumental music and soft sounds that blend with the setting, lighting and the outdoors. 
  3. Send them home with romantic R & B tunes that have them hugging goodbyes, dancing out the front door, and feeling the love and intimacy, e.g., Sam Cooke's "You Send Me"

In our shows on restaurant patios we like to follow a similar plan and mix it up by performing upbeat songs such as Van Morrisson’s swinging Moon Dance, then weave in softer instrumental finger style acoustic guitar so people can talk with each other at their tables and end strong with lots of positive and dance-able love songs. You can see our set list at: http://pauleschmusic.com/setlist

One restaurant had an ongoing poll on it's website. The question they asked:  "What music do you want to hear next time you visit our restaurant?"  The responses were:

Classic Rock - 53%
Top 40 - 17%
Blues - 15%
Hip Hop - 12%
Holiday Tunes - 3%

I always keep this in mind and we play a lot of cover tunes and light acoustic rock that appeals to the age group in the audience.

Hope to see you soon at one of our shows!