Four days, 13 venues and nearly 350 bands and artists—to some this sounds like chaos, to others it’s just another year at the Underground Music Showcase (UMS). The festival, running July 27-30 on a half-mile stretch of South Broadway, will be flooded with an expected 15,000 eager concertgoers hoping to catch performances from their favorite local and national acts. The showcase means a lot of different things to different people, but to many it brings about a sense of community.
For Chloe Tang, a first-time festival performer, being selected to play was a big opportunity. “It’s like someone said, ‘You make cool music and that music is a significant puzzle piece in the Denver music scene,'" Tang states. For her, the strong sense of community and comradery makes the Denver scene unique. The scene proved such a draw that the Phoenix native moved to Denver in 2014 to pursue an education in music from CU-Denver. After moving here, Tang closely watched the examples set by local bands and made it a mission to follow in their footsteps.
“There's a lot of people that are actively trying to develop the music community and there's a lot of value in that,” she said. “It shows how much everyone cares about not only being focused on their own projects but helping other people out too.” The immense sense of community extended by CU and the city has helped launch her career as a musician.
In a world where rock often dominates festivals, UMS is very genre inclusive. YaSi, a Denver born-and-raised R&B artist, believes the festival has worked hard to ensure more genres are included in the lineup. At the festival, you can walk from one venue to the next and hear music on completely different ends of the spectrum. This gives artists of less mainstream genres a platform to reach people who otherwise may not have heard of them. Attendees may just find there’s a local artist producing music they really enjoy but would have never noticed because that artist’s style doesn’t fit their usual musical preferences. “Good music is good music and it doesn’t matter what genre it is,” YaSi said. “If you’re talented and have really good stage presence, then you can captivate an audience.”
With the participation of the Denver Post Community Foundation, proceeds from UMS go back into the community. Youth on Record, a non-profit focused on arts education for at-risk youth, receives some of this funding in the form of a grant and has been a partner with UMS for seven years. Their relationship with UMS has grown considerably, according to Andrea Viarrial-Murphy, Director of Visibility and Operations for Youth on Record. They started out as grant recipients with festival booth space and now have a stage on which their students perform, a fund-raising dunk tank for artists, events leading up to the festival and more. Within a year, Youth on Record’s goal is to build its relationship with UMS to include some student partnerships with music industry professionals which could result in job shadows and internships. For music industry professionals like Andrea, the festival is an opportunity to reconnect with peers. “It’s a networking opportunity that organically happens,” she says.
UMS itself doesn’t pay lip service to community, it engages with it directly and is offering discounted tickets to residents of the neighborhoods most impacted by the festival. For more information on the festival, neighborhood passes or any of the festival’s partnerships, visit theums.com.
Note: this story updated July 27 to reflect changing information provided in the run-up. It was originally reported to Denver Metro Media that there would be 15 venues and nearly 400 artists.
