Chris Daniels turns to a James Taylor tune when he describes the audiences who return to outdoor concerts in Aurora summer after summer.
“Some are like summer coming back every year, got your baby, got your blanket, got your bucket of beer,” Taylor sings of crowds at outdoor shows in the song “That’s Why I’m Here.” The description is a bit overly simplistic when it comes to the thousands who attend the yearly “Banks in Harmony” and “Sounds at Southlands” music festivals every year, but there’s a poetic justice to the lyric all the same.
As in past years, Aurora audiences will gather in parks across the city and at the Southlands shopping center this summer to sit back, relax and revel in live music.
“It’s been one of the best audiences for us, and I wish I could tell you why,” said Daniels, who will play both concert series this summer. “They do things like applaud after solos.”
As the frontman for Chris Daniels and the Kings, he’s played for many different audiences in the past 30 years. Daniels, a Colorado Music Hall of Fame inductee, has toured the U.S. and Europe several times. He’s played the local and national bar circuit. He’s appeared at some the state’s biggest and most legendary venues. But the crowds in Aurora still stand out.
The “Banks in Harmony” festival in Aurora’s parks has hosted Chris Daniels and the Kings for several years in a row, and it offers a vibe that’s hard to find anywhere else. There’s a similar mood at Southlands.
“It’s fun for us. ‘Banks in Harmony’ has a big, huge, pro (sound) system and we get to come in and feel like stars. It’s all about the music and not the technical stuff,” he said. “They really take care of their artists and their community well.”
Local concert organizers have had time to hone the craft of putting on an outdoor show. The “Banks” series started in 1987 as a joint project between the Aurora Chamber of Commerce and the Musicians’ Performance Trust Fund, as well as local banks such as Wells Fargo and Citywide. Since then, the shows have picked up more and more local sponsors and have become an annual cultural tradition. Bands like Chris Daniels and the Kings, the Dean Bushnell Orchestra and Hazel Miller are just a few of the artists who return every year to play live in Aurora’s parks.
That festival was complemented when the Southlands shopping center opened in southeast Aurora in 2005. The center established its own outdoor concert series in 2007, a festival featuring an eclectic mix of cover groups, dance bands and local music legends.
“We set it up on the Southlands Town Square. We have a big stage at one end, and then people can set up blankets or lawn chairs. We overflow into the streets,” said Southlands spokeswoman Joyce Rocha. “We try real hard to get the best of the best here. I see the same faces week in and week out, then I see the same faces year in and year out.”
Both festivals tap into a local audience that is largely underserved when it comes to live music. As the second-largest city in the metro area, Aurora suffers from a lack of places to hear live music. Apart from the Zephyr, a mainstay for blues, R&B and soul acts on East Colfax Avenue, Aurora has very few places for bands looking to find gigs and crowds looking to listen to live tunes.
That’s part of the reason why the city’s summer festivals attract such a wide array of artists and such a dependable annual audience. This year is no exception. The “Banks” series will kick off June 19 at Utah Park with a show from alt-country rockers Buckstein, to be followed by shows by Bushnell, Phat Daddy, the Kings, Miller, Raising Cain and FourEver Fab.
Some of those acts will also play the “Sounds of Southlands” series, which starts June 5. The slate of 13 bands includes local jazz vets Dotsero, the Kory Brunson Band and a wide array of cover groups, including bands dedicated to the music of the Police, the Eagles and the music of the 1980s. The series wraps up with a “Rock and Roll All Star Jam,” a tribute show that includes live tributes to Otis Redding, Heart and
Stevie Wonder.
The scope and scale of both of these festivals is impressive, and it’s all because of the dedicated audience that keeps showing up year after year. Unlike the music venues that have come and gone in the past 20 years, these festivals have targeted their ideal audience and perfected a formula for bringing them back every year.
“I think the venues have struggled in Aurora figuring out who their audience is and how to please them. These festivals totally have it down,” Daniels said, adding more local clubs are bound to catch on. “It’s too cool of a city not to have live music.”