As with any scrappy aspiring rock band, when Mother Falcon goes on tour, its members endure the hardships of the road — sleeping in the van, hauling instruments, recouping after canceled shows, eating cheaply, quickly, and imprudently, and taming the tensions that flare up in close quarters among musicians.

But Mother Falcon has a lot of members enduring those hardships.

“Our current lineup is between 12 and 14 people,” Tamir Kalifa said. “We probably have more multi-instrumentalists than the average band, probably just because of our size.” Mr. Kalifa himself plays accordion, piano, bouzouki and guitar. “I used to play saxophone,” he added, but he wasn’t that good, “so when we got a much better saxophone player, I put that one down to rest.”

But he also carries one instrument no one else does: a camera to create a lasting record of their recording and performing.

It beats lugging speakers. “People get mad at me for shooting stuff rather than carrying stuff,” he said. “But this is about the long term.”

Mother Falcon is based in Austin, Tex., where Mr. Kalifa studied journalism at the University of Texas with a concentration on photography and Middle Eastern studies. Growing up in Maryland, the son of a CNN cameraman, he always had a camera, which he sheepishly acknowledges sounds like a “cookie-cutter” photojournalist tale. He made documentaries for school projects, preferring videotape to poster board and markers. He studied cinematography for a year in the Czech Republic, where he also picked up an accordion. He returned to Austin as a busker, earning spare change in his spare time.

A friend of his, Nick Gregg, heard Mr. Kalifa on the street and invited him to a rehearsal for his band, Mother Falcon. The name came from the “Die Hard” movies, after Mr. Gregg misheard a sanitized version of Bruce Willis’s gleefully obscene coup de grâce to his trademark “Yippee ki-yay.” The band had been started a few years earlier by high school students who had grown tired of playing sheet music at football games.

“Something that Nick always says, which I love, is that when he reflects back on high school, he wants a guy walking down the hallway with a cello on his back to be as cool as the QB of the football game,” Mr. Kalifa said. “There’s no reason why that can’t be true.”



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The band tours often, growing in size, stature and success: It has played the South by Southwest Festival, performed for NPR’s Tiny Desk series and is scoring a documentary about the video game Starcraft. Only a handful of its members are full-time musicians, which means many of them need day jobs of sorts. For Mr. Kalifa, it has been photography, having freelanced for The Boston Globe and The Texas Tribune when not touring with Mother Falcon.

But Mr. Kalifa is equally committed to his passions.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m skiing down a hill, and one leg is photography and one leg is music,” he said. “And sometimes I feel like my legs are getting further and further apart, and either I’m going to break in half or something’s going to hit me in the crotch really hard.”

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He produces a lot of the materials Mother Falcon uses to promote itself — recently, GoPro sponsored the group and set Mr. Kalifa loose with five tiny cameras. Mother Falcon also offers a summer music lab for children in middle and high school. Mr. Kalifa instructs them on the “aesthetics” of being in a band — album art, logos, band photography — and collaborates with them to make portraits.

To him, it’s about social change. He once thought he could do it through photojournalism, but for now he is doing it through music. He predicts that his music career will end much sooner than his photographic career, and for that reason Mr. Kalifa is relishing every minute on stage or in rehearsal.

“I think back to when I was in high school, and I think of the records that got me through high school, and if some of the music we make or one of the songs we write can do that for someone, that means more than anything,” he said. “That’s as good as the picture heard ’round the world. And I feel like I have to take that opportunity. But if it were to come down to a fish-or-cut-bait moment, I’d have to flip a coin. It’s like, which kid do you love more?”

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