I was not able to return to McCaffrey’s to see Arturo play because he was no longer there. I was glad I got his card on my first visit. I pursued an interview with him to talk about the venue, performing there and his life as a musician. I found out other things about Arturo that I did not know before.
Arturo Romay is from Venezuela and came to the United States in 1990. He started playing the guitar at 20 years old. He is a self-taught musician. Arturo just picked up the guitar and learned it himself. He never went to school for music and played by ear, a talent that not many people possess. When he came to America he decided to work in different places and then proceeded to make his first CD and business card. This then prompted him to start playing in different venues around Princeton (i.e. restaurants, parties, hotels, festivals etc.) and other areas of the nation and world, like Madison Square Garden, Cruise ships and Lincoln Center. He is a member of the Latin Grammy Recording Academy and can vote on who gets nominated. He is responsible for distinguishing what genre of music a song is classified under. Arturo has four CDs to date and is in the midst of working on his fifth CD.
When talking more specifically about venues and the many places he performed, I asked where his favorite place was to perform. He said he just enjoys playing from his heart. He plays with the same passion for one person or thousands of people. Arturo said it is always nice to play for a club setting or somewhere with nice acoustics, but in the end it does not matter for him because it is all about the joy of performing. If he needs to make adjustments on his amplifier to make his sound a little louder, he will do it. He would love to play in big theatres all the time, but in reality it does not always happen, so he has to do whatever he has to do to make it in this industry.
When I asked him about his experience at McCaffrey’s he said that they called him asking for him to perform at the Princeton venue. He played on Saturdays and he said that the people loved it, as did I. People could shop and listen to the music. It was a very pleasant experience. This type of venue was very different from where he performed in the past. He jokingly said, “I was in front of the bakery…so yeah it was different! People would try the bread and it was kind of cool because they would eat and not expect a musician to be playing in a supermarket.” I enjoyed this perspective of his because a musician could easily think of it as sort of demoting to not be front and center, or have themselves acknowledged in some way, but he was purely there to entertain, regardless of what was going on around him.
One big difference in the audience was that the overall population of shoppers at McCaffrey’s tend to be wealthier, so he would get tips for just playing in the supermarket. At other venues in different areas, he did not make as much tip and did not sell CDs. However, the way he touched his audience remained the same. Arturo made people smile, from children to older folk. He said he would see people shopping with very serious faces and then when they noticed the music, their expressions changed and they were happy. Just by playing he touched people’s hearts and made them feel good, and in return he felt blessed.
Music in Princeton 