The River Music Experience is a multi-use music facility and 501(c)3 non-profit organization located on the first two floors of the historic Redstone Building in downtown Davenport, Iowa.
The stated purpose of the River Music Experience is
to give Quad City residents and visitors opportunities to experience America's music, especially the music of the Mississippi River, through live musical performances, and programs which nurture, educate and inspire musicians and music appreciators.
The River Music Experience is the home of the RME Cafe, a coffee shop (1st floor) and live music venue, Redstone Room (2nd floor). RME Cafe and its community stage plays host to over 150 performances per year. These range from a weekly open-mic night to the top local bands, and are typically open to the public and free of charge. The Redstone Room is a state-of-the-art music venue hosting national and regional acts that play original music.
The River Music Experience offers a broad array of educational programming including Rock Camp USA (a branch of the highly successful school launched by the Austin School of Music), the Sound Lab educational recording studio (offering a 24-week, 96-hour certification in Audio Production), traditional music lessons, weekly open mic nights, monthly jazz jams, the "Songwriters in the Round" workshops, monthly Community Drum Circle, Winter Blues workshop series, and the ongoing River Currents Tours - a co-production with the Figge Art Museum which introduces grade-school students to the history of American roots music.
For the past five years, the River Music Experience has organized River Roots Live, an annual two-day music festival held on the banks of the Mississippi River in Davenport's LeClare Park. The festival has featured acts like Little Feat, The BoDeans, Edgar Winter, the Black Crowes, Junior Brown, Umphrey's McGee, Greg Brown (folk musician), America (band), Alejandro Escovedo, and many others.
Famous quotes containing the words river, music and/or experience:
“I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known—it was used primarily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is “the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy’s pony.””
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)