Return of Groove
Creating and collaborating through a pandemic with musician Sam Uribe-Botero
—By Hannah Nutting
While the rise of Covid-19 in 2020 left everyone’s lives at a standstill, those immersed in the world of live entertainment quickly realized that things were about to become more impossible than ever before. In an arts-heavy city like Ann Arbor, the once-bustling streets of students and locals looking for something to occupy their minds were left barren. It appeared that no ounce of creativity was able to be publicly presented in a safe way.
With it now being 2022, it finally feels you have the arguably safe option of once again crowding into a venue to watch artists perform their truest forms of self-expression. Back are the days of dancing and singing along for hours with strangers, one of few differences now being that you can’t help but think about how lucky you are to have gotten through the past two years. That’s the experience from one end of the stage, but what is it like for those who are brave enough to be on the other?
Musical beginnings
Sam Uribe-Botero, undergraduate Performing Arts Technology student at U-M, is an artist and producer who has had his fair share of collaborating and performing alongside Ann Arbor’s best. Growing up in a family with a love for music, Uribe began taking piano lessons before ultimately teaching himself the saxophone during his school years.
During his senior year at Ann Arbor’s Community High School, Uribe joined a band and began playing live shows, collaborating and writing original music, and eventually putting out an album with the group. Though the experience was a learning process, he explained that being a part of that band led him “into a rabbit hole of music production, songwriting, and managing musicians” that soon enough evolved into a total deep dive into the world of creating and producing music.
Creating in isolation
After graduating high school and taking a year off to work and travel, Uribe came to U-M with the intention of putting together a band to incorporate all of the skills he was learning. With the sudden rise of Covid shortly after beginning college, setting out with the goal of finding like-minded musicians he could click with and create new projects soon became near impossible.
Now unable to work alongside others as he had previously, Uribe explained that he took the time during Covid’s isolation period to really push himself towards “a more in the box approach of music making—more within my computer instead of writing with friends.” Taking this time to learn allowed him to expand his production skillset even further, while also acknowledging that not being able to collaborate with other people produced an extremely different final product. For Uribe, the product during the pandemic was a lot of electronic ambient music combined with a bigger focus on the mixing stage of music production. While not an ideal situation, isolation gave him the opportunity to dive into things he hadn’t had the chance to before.
Band together
As society shifts to a new normal, Uribe now finds himself as an instrumentalist and producer within three bands composed of people from all over U-M’s campus: funk-soul group Joe and the Ruckus, indie-folk band Kingfisher, and singer-songwriter Cece June’s Cece and the Crawlers. Though all three bands have definite collaborative emphasis, Uribe explains that each group has creative approaches that differ—and that for him they in fact differ for the better.
Uribe describes the process of performing with Joe and the Ruckus as very improvisational. That is, while performing with the band “people will just call a song, you have to know it on the spot and you just go—or we’ll change up sections on the fly or throw in new parts.” A lot of the time spent rehearsing with the group involves improvising together and learning as many new songs as possible. When it comes to Joe and the Ruckus’ original music, Uribe explained that writing tends to happen in waves. Someone brings an idea in and everyone else throws their thoughts and own ideas at it, and after letting it sit the song eventually fully develops with the input of all the members.
This process varies greatly from what he describes happening within Kingfisher. For the group, much of the time rehearsing usually involves learning and working through the parts written by the group’s main songwriter, Sam DuBose. Uribe mentions that Kingfisher has original music that all eight members are contributing different parts to along the way, but much of their time is spent making sure things are meshing nicely within the group based on what has been written beforehand. Kingfisher’s debut album, Grip Your Fist, I’m Heaven Bound, was released in November of 2022 and was met with great enthusiasm by listeners as it captures their truly unique sound and incredible musicality of the group.
Evaluating collaboration
Being able to safely work again in these dynamic group spaces has left him with a valuable understanding of what it takes to successfully collaborate and create with other musicians. More specifically, he emphasizes that throughout these processes you have to embrace “open communication and different roles between people, and how to manage that.” Uribe explains also that being able to take a step back, know when to let go, and effectively understand how your own ideas can benefit a project’s direction are essential throughout the creative process.
Reflecting on the time spent in isolation due to Covid, Uribe mentions wanting, at the time, to have had an understanding of what it takes to effectively put together and execute a project like those he is a part of now. He goes on to acknowledge that understanding comes through experience, and much of what he has learned through performing live recently is “stage presence, what it means to hold an audience and play with their attention…and being able to read what the crowd is reacting to and change what you’re doing on the fly to respond.”
While the live entertainment scene suffered at the hands of Covid over the past couple years, Uribe has hope for the future. He says the bands he is a part of plan on growing as much as possible in the local music scene during the current school year, with hopes of putting out albums soon and working on as much music as possible not only as a group but within side projects. Uribe has observed that the aftermath of the lull due to Covid actually “really revamped the live scene, there’s so many bands everywhere and it kind of seems like everybody wants to be a part of the scene.” Which, thankfully, seems to be the case everywhere as entertainment metrics soar above pre-pandemic numbers.
Hope for the future
What’s next for Uribe? Besides hopes of continuing to play, record, and publish music with Joe and the Ruckus, Kingfisher, and Cece and the Crawlers, he’s taking the time recently to reflect on writing his own individual music. While writing with a group is a great way of combining ideas and having fun while creating, Uribe says that for him it can be harder to express certain emotions while in a group environment. As he describes, “I think when I’m writing by myself, it becomes more of an internal reflection, an internal introspection of what has been going on around me, even if what I’m writing isn’t directly correlated to an event that’s happened in my life or a person in my life.” Though the process can differ greatly, he emphasizes that he’s learning how to have fun with the process and to commit to putting his stuff out there without getting too in his head about it, and focusing overall on “learning how to have fun with it.”
Feature Photo by Abigail Lynn via Unsplash