Empowering Communities Through Live Music

The Jazz Nano project has, at its heart, aa simple goal - we want to bring more live music to places where it has, unfortunately, been disappearing. We're doing it ourselves right now, and in the long-term we want to empower other people to do it in their own communities. One day, if and when we see these early goals being achieved, we hope to use our resources to invest in the communities we love directly - again with an eye towards music. But more on that later. First, the basics:

More and more, especially at small venues that used to host musicians - like smaller cafes, bars, exhibitions - owners and organizers are just hooking up a simple sound system and piping in music, or at best possibly bringing in a DJ.

By supporting us, you'll be supporting a multi-step plan to try to bring more live music to the masses - with maximum ease and affordability. The dollar goal you see above has been chosen because it'll allow us to comfortably commit to our project instead of on our day jobs - the Jazz Nano duo have both worked in a number of fields, but currently the project is funded in no small part by income from freelance translation work. But we hope to achieve bigger dreams than document translations. So for now, we're working at low (and usually no) pay - playing in local cafes to build support for live music and our project.

On that note, I'll call attention to the front-man of the team, the one you see playing guitar in our videos and streams: Mr. Takeshi Suda. Besides being trained (certified B.A!) in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music, he's a patent-holding inventor - the equipment you can see him playing in cafes or on the street was created by the man himself. His "burger" guitar is a one-of-a-kind travel model, and his amp is customized and battery-powered, powerful enough to be heard over chatter in a café, but also light and long-lasting enough for travel and use on the street when a convenient power source isn't available.

That tech is key: we're doing this to try to bring our love of music into a state of synergy with traveling musicians, buskers, small venue operators and, of course, listeners. Part of that is by traveling and playing, including in places whose budget is too small to support a full-size band or even decent pay for solo musicians. But another part is our future plans to keep developing Takeshi's prototypes and make them available to the general public, hopefully leading to more musicians traveling comfortably with their equipment, more small venues hosting live music, and a better experience for music-lovers around the world.

If you think that sounds like something you can support, every dollar (euro, złoty, etc.) helps. If we get enough donations, we hope to implement bigger projects (including the aforementioned continuation of amp and travel guitar development), with an eye toward hiring people in the regions close to our heart - currently we're Balkan-based (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Takeshi also built a life in UKR, before the war broke out there, and we hope to part of the rebuilding efforts as soon as the opportunity presents itself - be it via the founding of a company to produce the unique equipment he's developed, cultural support, or otherwise.

The words you're reading are coming from me, Nick Flynt. I'm a media and marketing professional with a background in sports media and anti-corruption reporting, as well as Russian-to-English translation. I first moved to Sarajevo to work with an NGO, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Before that, I finished a Russian language degree by volunteering at an English language summer camp near Kostroma in the Russian Federation. There I made many friends who were forced to immigrate from their homeland due to their anti-Putin (and later anti-war) stance. Takeshi and I bonded over our love for music and our hopes that the region we once called home can heal from the disaster currently taking place there.

We have big dreams, but they start with any donation you're willing to offer.

Thanks,

-Nick and Takeshi