Jim,

Some odds and ends.  I book the Gainesville, Georgia, dance. As Kimbi noted, we work with Atlanta (as does Sautee) to provide easy Friday->Saturday mini-tours to help pull good bands this far south. The Asheville/RiverFalls/Serenity dances provide an established mini-tour path that many bands know, and that helps pull in good touring bands for them. We're hoping to do likewise.

I don't have a "stable" of local bands that I need to book, for good-and-ill. Good is that I can book the best available bands for our dancers. Bad is that we're not developing a full contra dance ecosystem.

I personally invest in our Gainesville dance in that we pay more than most venues, we have a nice facility, we provide good sound, etc. so good bands are starting to come to us for booking when passing through. (clue here is to be established long enough that bands approach you)

I don't have a set pattern. Couple weeks ago I started booking Sept.-Dec. bands by sending out a half dozen emails to key musicians who are in multiple bands. As the dust settles I'll do similar for the callers. Handling that sequence because some callers prefer some flavors of contra music (traditional, fusion, swing, ...) and I try to work positive synergy. I try to give the band the option of saying yes/no as the callers line up. 

Some bands that I reach out to are already solidly booked well into 2019. I ask them to suggest a date in 2019 and negotiate from there. The top national bands book out a year or more in advance.

If there's a weekend dance in the area you can often pick up the good bands by offering Thursday or Monday dances (if your regular dance lands on one of those days). Wild Asparagus played Summer Soirée this past weekend in Asheville. So they played the regular Thursday OFB dance the evening before. Toss the Possum was the other band for Soirée. Toss played Charlotte's Monday night dance after Soirée.  

I don't like saying NO to someone, but do that from time to time. Doesn't feel good. Can't say I handle that well.

KEY:  Work with other local dances in the area, if possible, so that everyone can book out as far as good touring bands need to setup their tour.  I've had national musicians complain that some important touring areas don't book out at the same time, which makes lining up tours IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE MUSICIANS in that area, without taking large risks. My suggestion is have your regular booking pattern, whatever that might be, but be open to booking much further out if you are approached by a top band/caller.  Also coordinate with the other potential tour dances to promote one another to good touring bands.

Also, depending on the flavor of your dance, do consider hiring Emily Rush or someone like her to have something similar to her RushFest. That's a techno contra with recorded pop music (rather than the heavy thump-thump techno music). Relatively inexpensive and a ridiculous amount of fun when top hits from the past several decades are intermixed and everyone is singing along while dancing.
    http://www.rushfestcontra.com/
Trick is the person who assembles the music puts in a *lot* of time to blend the music right.

Our dance's prior bands and callers list, going back two years:
    http://atgaga.com/php/txt.php?txt=/schedule/index#prior

Where are you located? We're hosting a southeast and mid-Atlantic region weekend retreat for contra dance organizers July 20-22 an hour outside Atlanta in Rutledge, Georgia. Food and housing provided free. If you're in the area ....

Heitzso
http://atgaga.com




Hi, folks,

I'd like to hear about different people's approaches to booking bands and callers for a dance series. For example:

* Do you ask a bunch of bands and callers at once for their availability dates and then try to fill in the schedule based on the combined responses, or do you contact folks sequentially on an "if you're available for date X, you've got it" basis?

* How far in advance to you seek to book your talent?  Does it vary for different people (callers vs. bands; locals vs. out-of-towners; top-tier locals vs. others; musicians who don't want to commit too far in advance because they might get offered a wedding gig; ...)?

* What if a band or caller asks you about some date and you were planning to ask someone else that you'd prefer but might not be able to get?  or if you ask about availability of band X and your band contact comes back with something like "No can do, but what about (lower cachet) band Y?" or "... what about most of band X with substitute fiddler TBD?"?

* Have you found ways to mix different approaches to booking so as to get "the best of both worlds" instead of the worst?

* Are there other questions you think I should have asked and, if so, what are your aswers to them?

It would be easy to go on at length about the *potential* plusses and minuses of various ways of doing bookings.  What I'd prefer is to hear about *ideas that have worked well in practice* for other organizers.