Some of the best bands start as people just jamming together. In the case of Downtown Mischief, a local funk/rap band that’s been creating beats and sharing their soulful rhythms over the past few years, jamming is how it all began.
“We met through jam parties,” Jameson Daniels, one of the band’s main singers, says. “We started playing music together because there were jam parties happening, and then everybody would just get in there together.”
It was the beginning of a beautiful musical relationship and a small-community feel that comes out when the band is together.
“We are all a community,” says Ollie Mckee-Reid, one of the band’s vocalists. There are the good vibes everybody in the band possesses and the lively colored handprints and psychedelic sea creatures painted throughout the walls of Downtown Mischief’s jam space. But there’s also the importance of names.
“It’s kind of like a tribe, you know? Everybody’s got their own thing,” says Mckee-Reid. Each member proudly wears a nickname, founded on individuality and inside jokes.
Every member of Downtown Mischief has the same love and passion when it comes to creating and playing music.
“We’re not racing, we’re not running and competing with people,” says Daniels. “There’s always somebody that can say, ‘These people are better,’ or, ‘Those people are better.’” Daniels ends off with a quote a fellow Downtown Mischief musician said to him the other day, which sums it all up: “Of course you’re in the middle: life is just a riddle.”
Downtown Mischief
Friday, November 14
$5, Felicita’s Pub, UVic
felicitas.ca