Welcome To The U. City Musicians Documentary Blog

Hello everyone.  I'm Rod Milam, UCHS Class of 1988 alum and owner of MilamNYC Productions.  This is the first of what I hope to be many blog entries surrounding the development and production of a multimedia documentary of professional musicians that are related to the city of University City, Missouri, USA. From here, I will tell keep you informed, if you are interested, about the whole process and progress of this project to record some of the great artistic work that has been performed by members of the University City Diaspora. 

I've come up with the idea of this project slowly over the past 5-6 years while I've lived here in New York City.  I've met and continue to meet many people from my home town here in the Big Apple and felt a huge sense of commonality with them all (no matter what it is we do now and how we ended up in NYC).  And one of the many ways that we all seemed to be able to bond was over our inherent need to be involved in the arts and music in some way.  Some of us are still active participants in that scene and some of us support it as a matter of course in our daily lives.  We all seem to attribute that trait to growing up in U. City.

About two and a half years ago, I organized an event called "UC in NYC before DC" set to take place in Brooklyn, New York, one day before the inauguration of Barack Obama down in Washington, DC in 2009 since I'd heard that there would be a good number of U. City people heading for the nation's capital.  Here is a promo video that I produced to promote the event: 

About 25-30 people from U. City that lived anywhere from Vermont to Washington DC showed up on a snowy night to hang out and have a great time...as well as to listen to some great music by some U. City folks.  A great time was had.

That whole event inspired me to do a follow up on some more of the musicians from U. City that I knew about and to expand the group of people that I did know.  So in the middle of 2010, I finally gathered a bunch of the recorded music from various artists that I knew and decided to use only U. City folks as background music to some of the sunrise/sunset video that I'd shot around the world so that I could run it as network filler on my project website The Global Loop.  After a lot of work gathering the files and recording end editing, I came up with a two hour video that I currently use ahead of and after any live events that I may be running on any live webcasts on the site.  You can check out the music (and pretty video) by going to this link:

http://www.thegloballoop.com/home/2010/11/19/from-the-u-city-loop-to-the-global-loop.html

15 different U. City related musicians were involved in getting that video made and I made sure to send DVD copies of the finished video to all of them.  They seemed to really enjoy it.  At the same time that I handed out the DVDs, I asked them all if they'd like to be involved in a documentary about the people from approximately 1965 to 2008 that passed through U. City at some point and decided to make music a profession at some point in their lives.  Not one person said "no".  I also asked if they'd be willing to help in getting me in touch with even more people than the 15 I'd already gotten in touch with so that I could try to get as complete a record as possible.  Again, not one person said "no".

The result of that is that MilamNYC Productions is now in pre-production on a documentary about musicians with a tie to University City.  These musicians don't have to be currently playing, the biggest stars on the planet, or part of a specific genre of music.  They only need to fit these criteria: 1) Must have spent 1 year of life in University City, 2) Must have attended at least 1 year of school in the University City school district, 3) Must have worked as a paid and recorded musician (or producer/conductor) for 1 year at some point in their lives.  That's it.

I already have many people on board, but I'm certainly looking for many more to get involved.  I won't just want to hear from musicians either.  My goal with this project is to make it a 100% U. City production.  I am sure that there is enough talent in the area of the arts, photography, technology, finance, grant writing, production, and logistics that an important document such as what I hope to produce can be done totally "in-house" so that we can create and preserve our own unique culture and history. (U. City isn't ONLY about the arts.) Again, I'm in the fairly early stages of this project, but some things have been done.  I would certainly appreciate any leads that any of you might have.

So now that I've put this out in the Internet ether, I hope that anyone reading this will help in getting people that fit the following criteria in touch with me here at MilamNYC Productions.  If you or others can and want to find out more and help, you can send an e-mail to ucdoc@milamnyc.com . You should also feel free to forward this link on to others that you know so that they can get in touch with me if they'd like to.

Thanks for reading this and I hope that you stay tuned to this space so that you'll know what's going on as this project progresses.