Performance & Composer's Diary

On 9/16/17 we had an afternoon of music I've composed and arranged. Jeff Poole of the Orange County Review, and a great photographer, was there in a private capacity and took these pics so unobtrusively I never noticed he was taking them. (Thanks, Jeff!)

Here's the music room with the 1923 Steinway where it all happened.

While people were gathering and getting their drinks, I played some of the piano pieces I wrote back in the late 80's and early 90's

Here's Karla, our hostess with the mostess, welcoming her guests.

The first number was Mosaic, dating from around '93 or '94, with Dr. Andy playing the lead on cello.

Then with Heather joining us on clarinet we did "Encumbrances of Angels", a poem by Dr. Andy's wife Janet I set to music sometime in the late 90's.

Here's Janet reading "My Tale", a poem of hers I set to music last year.

This pic shows Karla singing "My Tale" with Benjamin joining us on violin. 

I doubled Karla's vocal an octave down in the alto flute.

Lama Tashi was here from Arunachal Pradesh and we did the Mandala Offering and the Om Mani Peme Hung chant from Mantra Mountain, with Stephen joining us on cello.

From this pic it looks like I neglected to give Benjamin the music and he's having to look over on to Dr. Andy's music

Here's one section of the audience with top row from left to right my sister-in-law Carolyn, cousin John, his wife Kate, cousin Ada and cousin Wallace.

In this pic Heather, Andy and I are playing "explorations", a trio I wrote three or four years ago.

Here are Sage, Patrick and Benjamin playing Karlalied, which was written two years ago.

These three are all students at James Madison University and really fine players and here you can see them playing with a wonderful ensemble feel . . . 

. . .  and with marvelous expression

That feeling when you hear your music being played by others and you can just sit back and listen and hear them take it places you hadn't realized it could go.

Taking a well deserved bow

The last piece on the program was Mosaic again, but this time with Heather playing the lead and Dr. Andy playing an accompanying line I added just a few months ago

Performance Lessons

Our performance at Piedmont this summer was the most ambitious we've ever attempted in terms of repertoire, length and sound system. The response that night, and in the days following as I saw people around town who'd been there, was terrific. This post is to sum up why I think things went as well as they did.

A performance is more than just making music - it's a kind of enchantment or spell casting - and the setting is important. In this case, our hostess worked very hard on all the details on the setup on a beautiful lawn with a stunning view of the Blue Ridge. Just walking from the parking area down to the tents was a wonderful experience, and I'm sure put people in a great frame of mind. So before we even started playing the enchantment had begun.

Given the responses we got, my sense is a lot of people have often felt assaulted by bands with overly loud sound systems playing music they don't particularly enjoy. Lots of people said to us things about knowing and loving all the songs we played, and that our sound was wonderful. There's a reason, "give the people what they want," is a cliché.

While I didn't use the word "curated", with all it's hipster vogue, our hostess had expressed a love of jazz in general, not just Dixieland, so the tunes we did all illustrated the various threads woven into jazz and as I announced each song I pointed out how they all fit into the overall notion of jazz. I think it also helped that the narration began as soon as the applause for the previous song ended, so that if there was time taken to shuffle music, the audience knew what we were doing next and not left hanging.

We also had a wonderful audience. A number of them are members of a group that arranges for regular house concerts of very high level musicians over the course of the year. I'm convinced we played better than usual because we could feel their appreciation of what we were doing. There was applause after every number, and during the second set when there were slightly fewer people in the audience, the applause got louder and more enthusiastic as that core of music loving people showed themselves. 

We also had more help than usual. Ed ran the sound system, leaving me more brain capacity for narrating, strumming, singing and general band leading. My cousin John helped with the logistics of the setup and by walking around the venue checking how we sounded and being a liaison with the hostess. 

On the purely musical front, I remain convinced part of our appeal as a group is that we have such fun making music and that joy gets communicated to the audience both through the music and our behavior. 

We are also blessed to have some really fine musicians in the group, especially Dick on trumpet and Steve on trombone. In the "Summertime" video I put up, I'd made a bare bones arrangement based on the original piano sheet music and Dick and Steve helped me tweak it into playable form - but everything they're playing was improvised in the moment.

We're also very lucky to have Dave on drums. He was in the Army band and played for the troops in Vietnam back in the day. We only have him on occasions when the venue is large enough to take a full drum kit. He's simply terrific and we play on a higher level when we have him. For the Dixieland tunes he's reading music, but on all of mine he's just playing as he feels.

One thing that was sort of scary to me about this performance was that most of my arrangements were new to the group, and were being tweaked right up to the final rehearsal. I can be a worst case scenario kind of person, and there was a great scope for failure. In the event, though, things went well, and the very newness and freshness of the arrangements ended up being a positive. We weren't "covering" the tunes so much as recreating them in this performance in a new way just for our instrumentation and personality. 

Audio Note

The audio system we set up for the Piedmont performance was the most ambitious ever. There were six inputs into the mixer. One mic for my vocals, one Dick's vocal, one for the tubas, one for Maggie's clarinet, one for the banjo, and then a line for the onboard pickup inside my acoustic guitar. In the photo below you can see my vocal mic and then one affixed lower on the stand for the banjo. 

In this photo you can see the mic for the tubas up high in the back and the one for Maggie's clarinet on her stand.

We got a lot of positive compliments about our "wonderful sound". I'm convinced part of it was due to the extreme humidity (there had been downpours off and on all day). Wet air transmits sound better, and I think people felt our sound as well as simply hearing it. 

Another acoustic phenomenon that just about drove me crazy was a weird disjunct between the sound space the band was in and the other one the audience was in. In the top photo you can see how we were each in our own tents with a bit of a gap between. Particularly when I was singing, it sounded as though there was some sort of out of phase interference in that space between us, and though people said they could hear my vocals just fine, it felt to me I wasn't connecting with the audience.

On balance though, this system worked very well and I'll use something very much like it in the future for large events like this. If we can all hear each other we play well, and if the audience can hear us comfortably without our being too loud, that's a success.

Summertime at Piedmont

Here are Dick Stageberg on trumpet and Steve Sanford on trombone improvising two times through Summertime. 

Summer Jazz Set Lists

Here is the sheet I did up for Ed to use running the mixer at our recent performance. Tunes without asterisks are standard Dixieland arrangements, those with one asterisk are ones I've done in the past and just tweaked a bit this time, and those with two asterisks are the ones I've done since this past March when I learned our hostess for this event was a lover of all kinds of jazz, not just Dixieland.

Summer Jazz At Piedmont

1st Set

*Hello Dolly - Guitar

   Three times through - vocal; instrumental; vocal & instrumental

*Eliza Jane - Banjo

   Everybody gets a solo

Little Brown Jug - Banjo

   Instrumental Dixieland tune (clarinet solo)

*Deep River Blues - Guitar

   Short a capella guitar intro - then a mix of vocals & solos

Hard Hearted Hannah - Banjo

   Dixieland tune with short vocal about half way through

Charleston - Banjo

   Instrumental Dixieland tune.

**I'll Be Seeing You - Guitar

   All instrumental arrangement two times through

*Georgia On My Mind - Guitar

   Clarinet intro, then vocal 1st time instrumental 2nd time

*Tuxedo Junction - Banjo

    All instrumental arrangement two times through

**Moonlight Serenade - Guitar

    All instrumental arrangement one time through

**It Ain't Necessarily So - Banjo

    Trumpet, Vocal & Trombone solos

Shortnin' Bread - Banjo

   Dixieland tune (clarinet solo)

Swaneeland - Banjo

   Dixieland tune (ends with tuba solo)

**Summertime - Guitar

   Twice through - 1st time trumpet, 2nd time trombone

2nd Set

Floatin' Down To Cotton Town - Banjo

   Dixieland tune (tuba solo)

**Blue Skies - Banjo

   Trombone/banjo intro; then 1st time vocal; 2nd time sax & clar.; 3rd time all

Tin Roof Blues - Banjo

   Dixieland tune (clarinet solo)

*Ain't She Sweet - Banjo

   1st time vocal; 2nd time instrumental

Do You Know What It Means - Banjo

   Dixieland tune

Sioux City Sue - Banjo

   Dixieland tune

St. James Infirmary Blues - Banjo

   Dixieland tune - Dick has the vocal

Midnight In Moscow - Banjo

   Dixieland tune

**Dream A Little Dream Of Me - Guitar

   Vocal & Trombone on verse; 1st chorus vocal; 2nd chorus trpt/clar/trpt

The Entertainer - Banjo

   Dixieland tune (tuba solo)

It Don't Mean A Thing - Banjo

   Dixieland tune

Silver Threads - Banjo

   Dixieland tune

       Fidgety Feet - Banjo

             Dixieland tune

         Panama - Banjo

             Dixieland tune

*Just A Closer Walk - Banjo

   I'll call out who does what when

*The Saints - Banjo

   I'll call out who does what when

Performance Diary

Here are some pictures from our performance last night.

Here we are during the soundcheck, right after the rain stopped. You can see how everything had gotten scrunched together to keep the electrical stuff out of the rain. For the second set we moved the large amps out onto the lawn off to the side of the tent.

This shot shows Ed in the back running the mixer. The original plan was for him to be down in front, but the rain had us set up this way.

                            

This shot shows how the audience was on a level a bit lower than we were. There were also tables spread out around the lawn.

Here we are late into the second set.