Tambourine Club

21+
$7

above: Bryan Lamanno, The Tambourine Club
Bryan Lamanno used to work at a Nashville, Tennessee recording studio for a couple of years. Afterward, he worked for a record store company in Baltimore, Maryland and moved to Kansas City in 2007. These places are a home away from home for Lamanno. "I consider them both still 'homes' of mine since I spent a significant amount of time in both," he says. "Also, I learned a great deal about different sides of the music business in each city."

Lamanno formed The Tambourine Club to accommodate his music making while residing in different locales and working with various musicians. "I have been writing songs and recording for years looking for the right people to play with. I finally created this 'club' while living in Baltmore, because I was tired of having the progress of my music stopped by moving to a different city," he says. "Now, with the Tambourine Club, it does not matter if I have to move to another city again, and it does not matter if a member/player of the club does not work out, I will still be at the heart of it since I created and it will continue to move forward."

Stylistically, the music is born out of the singer-songwriter tradition and Lamanno intends for it to grow up in Kansas City. "I am not planning on moving because I love Kansas City, and it is my original home. And recently, I have found two great musicians who are also great people to be around and play with," says Lamanno. "Our drummer Jason Wade moved to Lawrence from the Washington, D.C. area around the same time I moved back here from Baltimore. Our bass player Ricky Jones moved here from outside of St. Louis. I feel it is meant to be that we all found each other. We are eager to start playing shows soon in the Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas area, as well as starting to venture out nationally to play shows."

"I cannot tell you what kind of sound we are going for. We have lots of influences and I believe our songs have a wide array of 'sounds' to them," explains Lamanno. "People have said we sound like the Pixies, Flaming Lips, and Oasis to name a few. Those are all bands we like. All I can say is the sound that comes out is just a mix of everything we listen to."

One of the band's catchiest tracks, "Kansas City," is dubbed after Lamanno's hometown, but was written in Baltimore. "It's about my love-hate relationship with the Kansas City music scene, and it's about the fact that the country still looks to other places such as New York and L.A. for the most part when it comes to music, or other 'happenings,'" says Lamanno. " When the fact is, Kansas City is a great place, and it has just as much to offer as those. It's just too bad that most of the country won't recognize it as much for what it is. Most people who are not from here don't even realize it's a 'real city.' When I moved to Baltimore, everyone there thought we all milked our own cows for milk!"
--PresentMagazine.com
Website:www.tambourineclub.com/