Alexia Bomtempo

Explanation For the next picture, we have a picture taken during Alexia Bomtempo's show at the Elephant Room. That said, this isn't really about her as she's just a blurry figure to the left edge of the picture. Obviously, this is about the drummer right up front.

But let's first talk about Alexia Bomtempo's music a bit. The New York based artist's music floats between a jazzy pop feel and Brazilian style bossa nova. There's a sort of casual and effortless cool that her voice projects which I find really relaxing.

Enough of that, let's talk about this picture. Unlike a lot of pictures I've taken recently, this one kind of stands out by its lack of really strong compositional form. It's not a triangle or an a/b. But it's also not a simplistic single focal point piece either. As I mentioned earlier, Alexia Bomtempo herself is to the far left of the frame. The guitarist in her band is in the center to the back and quite out of focus so he isn't really drawing significant attention.

This picture ultimately hinges on the sharpness of the drumset and the action of the drummer's hands which I think works out really well. There's a lot of detail and you can even tell, for example, that the closer drumstick is held such that the hi-hat is being hit by the grip or butt end of the stick rather than the tip. I personally found that a bit interesting but I'm not a drummer so I'm not sure why one might do that. You can see that the other drumstick is held more normally with the tip end interacting with the drums, even though it's in motion and blurry.

To finish off my discussion of this picture I just want to paint the picture of where and how I was standing to take this picture. This picture was taken off stage left. To describe the Elephant Room, it's a pretty dimly lit jazz bar that's effectively a maybe 20-30 foot wide hallway with the stage to the back of the venue. On either side is a small hallway that leads to the restrooms, one on each side. I took this picture just outside that hallway to the men's room. To get this particular angle I had to crouch against the wall because the stage is only elevated about 6 inches to a foot so standing upright would have me a fair bit above the top of the drumset even though I'm not particularly tall. Ultimately though I really like this picture. It's not necessarily the one you might expect. However, I do think it has that very jazzy vibe to it that works so well with both this space and this music. That's all for this post. A few more artist specific posts before wrapping up SXSW with the roll posts.