Enter through the spinning doors of Millesime, (located at 29th street and Madison Avenue) and you’ll find yourself in a chic, beautifully decorated restaurant bar. In the center of the high ceiling, two story-lofted restaurant, stands a grand Steinway piano in the middle of a small stage. The waitresses are dressed in little black silky dresses; the clientele for the most part is dressed to impress; the men wear ironed button-down collared shirts and dress pants, and the women are decked out in beautiful eveningwear and fine jewelry. In this restaurant, I sit at a candle-lit table in the back, across from Los Angeles born musician Kris Bowers. In front of me, he appears relaxed and comfortable, at ease in this calm cool restaurant atmosphere.
Millesime is not the usual hang for just any college student, but if you’re Kris Bowers, it’s an entirely different story. A jazz piano musician since the age of four, a grad student at Julliard, and the CEO and founder of Campusounds.com, Kris has a lot more on his plate than just the average 21-year old.
Tonight at eight, Kris is playing piano for the beautiful people of Millesime, for one hour with his band. Through a friend connection within the restaurant, Kris tells me that his band and he have secured a Thursday night spot at this restaurant.
The story goes something like this: at four years old, Bowers started in music school, and at nine years old, he began private classical piano lessons. At some point, he was able to switch to jazz piano, which he found to be far more entertaining than classical.
“I hated that I was inside practicing piano all the time while my friends were outside playing; my parents decided for me basically before I was even born that I would be a musician,” Bowers said. “My mother used to put headphones on her stomach while she was pregnant with me.”
Kris remained loyal to the piano, for he’d developed a love for jazz. Drawing influence from the greatest, like Herbie Hancock, and Brad Mehldau, he decided to devote all his efforts to the piano and eventually found himself at the Julliard School.
According to Kris, Julliard wasn’t even his first choice school, because he actually intended on going to Berklee School of Music in Boston. He says that he’s glad he ended up in Julliard though, for the musical expertise and education the teachers’ have to offer is beyond anything he could have ever imagined. At Julliard, Kris has already completed his four years of undergraduate studies, and is now studying for his Master’s degree.
When Kris completes his masters’ degree, his ideal job would be to work with film scoring. “It’s cool because I have a lot of teachers who are able to offer me connections with the type of career I want to pursue,” Bowers said. “Jazz music is amazing, and it’s fun to play, but I want to score the music for films. That’s a much more grounded lifestyle, as opposed to traveling and gigging all the time.”
Kris’s love for music definitely takes up a lot of his life, but he doesn’t see that as a negative idea in the least bit; on the contrary, music is the soundtrack to his days. “Sometimes, I score the music for my entire day…I get a little anal about it,” Kris says. Kris essentially creates a soundtrack for his day to day activities. Everything from waking up, walking to class, meeting with people has a song to correlate, (most easily comparable to how a film-scorer might create the soundtrack to each scene for an entire movie.)
But even a full-time jazz musician/student needs a break from the Jazz world. And that’s where Campusounds.com enters the picture.
Kris is also the CEO and founder of a music blog called Campusounds.com, which he started around August 2010. The blog’s mission is to make people aware about college musicians. That can be anyone from a young underground musician in college, or successful musicians/bands that originally got their start in college. The purpose, according to Kris, is to give some recognition, and share new music with viewers. According to the website, the writers for Campusounds all have some sort of musical background.
Sammy Miller, a writer for Campusounds and a friend of Kris’s, said that working for Campusounds has helped open new doors for him. “I’m always excited to check out music, and it basically gives me an excuse to spend more time doing that,” Sammy said. Sammy, 19, studies drums at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and Kris and he play in a band together.
So far, the website has gotten a fair amount of traffic, with about 10,000 hits total in its first couple months of existence. From day-to-day there’s an average of 200-500 hits, but Kris says that it fluctuates. Kris knows this because he is able to monitor the website activity every day. Kris says that his cousin, Murs, a rapper who just left the Warner Bros record label and wants to go back to the underground hip-hop scene, will be joining forces with Campusounds as a new partner. With Murs’ network capabilities and connections from his work with Warner Bros, Kris feels that the new addition to the team will help attract even more attention to the website.
The life of a Julliard college student, jazz musician and CEO/founder of a music blog can be somewhat hectic, but from the looks of it, Kris has it all under his belt and in control. All that’s really left for Kris is his career with film scoring, but for now he’ll just have to settle for putting together the soundtrack for his day-to-day activities.
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