Ben KonenBen Konen is a student at Berklee College of Music. With the help of International Programs he and his band, Cluttered Clarity, will be touring around Europe this summer. Read more about Ben’s adventures here.

Eight months ago, Jernej and I realized, that living in Boston was great. However, being away from your hometown for such a long time had one major downside. The local music scene forgets who you are. We decided to start a new band and apply at local festivals in Luxembourg and Slovenia.

band photo

The band, Cluttered Clarity

We had a discussion about what kind of band we want to play with. Studying music at such a good school, like Berklee College of music, Jazz is sometimes the only thing you can think of. Unfortunately, the public isn’t as attracted by traditional Jazz as it used to be. We decided to form a band that uses high-level improvisation that you find in Jazz based on a strong Groove people can dance to.

It is not easy to find people you like and people with whom you connect on a musical basis. In order to find our musicians, we started auditions. However, we didn’t tell people that it is an audition; we just called musicians to jam. We soon found the people we liked playing with.

To make sure that the people we found are really the people we like to play with, we called them for another session under the pretext of recording one of my songs for a project. Little did they now, that we took the recording to send it as an application to the biggest Jazz Festival in Luxembourg. Fortunately, we got accepted to the festival. Having our first festival, made the project become real. The 3 following months were about to become the busiest and craziest months Jernej and I’ve ever had. We learned a lot about music business, band leading skills and promotion. So far it has been a crazy adventure, but I don’t regret a single second.

yours truly,
Ben Konen

To learn more about the band visit: www.clutteredclarity.com

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