Musicians ‘sit apart and play together’ during virtual Street Music Week

Playing music in front of an iPhone camera isn’t quite the same as performing for an actual audience. For one, you can do the former in your pajamas with uncombed hair in your basement. But that doesn’t mean you should.

Spokane guitarist, producer and songwriter Joe Brasch has been part of the annual Street Music Week since its inception in 2003. All year long, he looks forward to that week in June and the opportunity for some of the spontaneity he thrives on as a musician. There was the time former Mayor Mary Verner joined Brasch for an impromptu duet of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” as he was busking downtown. That sort of thing you just can’t replicate in your basement, Brasch said.

Street Music Week has moved online this year, so Brasch has been performing from his home recording studio instead. He said there’s still a bit of that spontaneity in posting your music to the internet.

“The first day, I thought I’d just head down and record in my PJs,” Brasch said. “Then you look at the video and realize you look like a train wreck – you can’t post that.”

Other times, he’ll be halfway through a performance when the phone he’s recording on starts buzzing and ringing with notifications. There’s always something to add that excitement he misses.

Brasch has long been a mainstay of the Spokane music scene. In the 1980s and ’90s, he played guitar for cover band All Fall Down six nights a week at JJ’s Lounge.

That led to work writing music for TV and films and a long-running collaboration with Peter Rivera, former drummer for ’60s soul group Rare Earth. Brasch taught guitar at Spokane Falls Community College for 20 years, which is where he met Street Music Week founder Doug Clark. He’s now a member of Clark’s band Trailer Park Girls.

Despite his long career, Brasch said the stage fright never fades away completely.

He gets nervous every time he goes out on stage, so he thought returning to live performance after quarantine forcing him to take a break would be a special kind of nerve-wracking. But sending out virtual performances for hundreds of people to see doesn’t make him any less stressed.

“It’s almost scarier putting it on the internet, because anything there is gonna stay there forever,” Brasch said.

Things are certainly different from Brasch’s typical Street Music Week, but he said he’s basically doing exactly what he’s always done for the event. There have been some solo performances, some Zoom collaborations with long-distance friends, and a couple of socially distanced jams with Clark. It’s been nice to “sit apart and play together” after months of quarantine, Brasch said, but he wants to keep the focus on the reason for the whole event. Just like every year, the virtual Street Music Week will donate all its profits to Spokane food bank Second Harvest.

“We want to keep our eye on the big picture here,” Brasch said. “With the food bank in such dire need now, it’s just whatever we can do to keep it going.”

According to event founder Clark, the virtual 2020 Street Music Week had raised more than $22,000 as of Friday afternoon, the event’s last day. That pushes the total funds raised over the past 18 years to more than a quarter-million dollars, a long way from the $503 Clark raised by himself that first year.