A Little Dixieland Jazz

Last night I got to sit in with some fine players doing some Dixieland over in Charlottesville. A member of the audience took this video and posted it to FaceBook. The tune is called "Fidgety Feet".

Performance Diary

Back on Saturday morning 5/17 we played for a fundraiser put on by Doris W in the parking lot of the local nursing home. I've been doing this event for years, originally just by myself, and in the past few years some of the Kenwood Players have been joining me. That's Dick and Maggie on trumpet and clarinet. Crawford is the tuba player with his instrument at rest so he can smile for the camera, with Bill next to him taking up the slack on the bass line. 

The fellow in the background with the children's train shows up at most community events to give the kids a ride and they love it. One of the tunes we played was "Take The A Train". 

One thing to notice is how bundled up everyone but me is. After a long cold winter we've had a chilly spring and it was just in the upper 40's. My hands and fingers didn't go numb, but fretting even easy chords took a little extra mental effort. I've also decided to go with just banjo a lot of the time, as the guitar is just one more thing to lug around, and the banjo has a more focussed sound that projects better. What that meant was playing some familiar songs in unfamiliar (without the capo) keys.

In this shot above you can see Judy playing the drums. You can also make out my current sound system which gives enough support to be helpful, without overkill - or heavier stuff to lug around. My sense in that 20 feet away from us you'd be hearing half what we're doing ourselves and half the reinforced sound.

The tubas have one large condenser mic between and above them. Maggie has a small condenser on her stand for the clarinet. I have a small condenser on my stand for vocals, and a small dynamic mic at banjo hight, because the banjo is very directional and without amplification to spread the sound around, people I'm not facing will say they can't hear it.

The little mixer on the folding table is a Mackie that has four inputs for condenser mics. For amps I'm using one large and one small Peavy keyboard amp - sort of a woofer and a tweeter. We need at least one large amp for the tubas, but just one seems enough. The smaller one is to point is a slightly different direction to fill out the sound of the clarinet, vocals, and banjo.

Thanks to Jeff Poole of the Orange County Review for these great shots.

Performance Diary

This past Saturday saw the "soft launch" of two groups I'm hoping to establish. The occasion  was a walking tour of Gordonsville put on by the Dolley Madison Garden Club.

From 11:00 a.m. until noon the "Kenwood Players Brass Choir" played with Tom May on the pipe organ in Christ Episcopal Church. We had a trumpet, a flugelhorn, a French horn, a euphonium and two E flat tubas. We did a number of hymns, usually with the trumpet on soprano, flugelhorn on alto, horn and euphonium on tenor and tubas on the bass the first time through. Then second time through the trumpet went up to a descant, the flugelhorn went to soprano and the horn to alto. Third time through was organ only, then fourth time was brass and organ together again. On tunes without a descant, the second time the flugelhorn and the tubas together played the melody with the organ as accompaniment. 

The one long piece we did was the R. V. Williams setting of "Old One Hundreth" he did for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth back in the fifties. There are brass flourishes at the beginning, then a number of variations on the tune, a trumpet descant, then ending with more brass flourishes.

We'd been expecting people to come and go throughout the performance, but in the event a number of people came early for good seats and stayed the entire time, with a few people coming and going in the back of the church. We were very well received, with strong applause after each tune - and Ben Armistead, the choir director, who announced each tune, led the singing if people wanted to join in, and many did.

I find the sound of brass and pipe organ to be viscerally moving, and a lot of the audience seemed have that experience. A number of people in the front pews had expressions of reverie on their faces the entire time. I think part of that comes from the fact that hearing a live brass ensemble is a fairly rare event, especially out here in this rural area. 

My favorite comment came from a lady that came up afterwards with an expression of fatigued wonderment, who said she'd been ill with bad allergies all week and unable to even speak, but that she was able to sing with the brass and organ. Another comment that gets across the feeling was the trumpet player saying that with all that sound and support he felt his range and endurance was expanded for the duration of the performance.

I've put together brass groups before, but this instrumentation gave by far the best results and I hope to keep the group going, with secular as well as church performances. 

Then from 2:00 until 4:00 what I'm calling the "Kenwood Players Chamber Group" played on Main Street, which had been closed to traffic. For the Handel Water Music/Music for the Royal Fireworks we were recorder (soprano/sopranino), flute, alto flute, clarinet, cello, and percussion. For the pop and movie tunes from the 60's I switched from alto flute to guitar or banjo.

This group also went over very well. What most pleased me was seeing people being drawn in to the Handel. I'm convinced that music is very infectious and appealing - but that most people aren't at all familiar with it, or live chamber music of any sort. With the banjo/guitar music we had people dancing. 

I'm hoping to keep this group going as well, and maybe add a second clarinet. The limiting factor is that our cello is Dr. Andy, who has to come down from Harpers Ferry to play with us, which pretty much means weekends only.

I have the hope that when people are exposed to live music like this, that's not normally heard around here, they'll like it and want more of it. Maybe the novelty of loud DJ music will wane and people will enjoy returning to live music in more of the classical/acoustic tradition.

UPDATE - for photos and a little more info, go here.

Audio Note

The Kenwood Players have already had one outdoor performance this summer, and are looking to have three more. Unless we're on a porch and the crowd is small, I always use some amplification for these events. If nothing else, at least a set of very small speakers used as monitors for my guitar, so everyone in the group can hear me even though I'm in front and facing the audience.

One thing that I find remarkable is that whenever I mention using a little amplification, it's not unusual for the person arranging for the music to get what I can only call righteously angry about past events where a band used so much amplification people were unable to talk to one another. When I talk to friends about this, almost everyone has a horror story of an event being ruined by a too loud band - and years ago I walked out of a Judy Collins concert because the sound was so loud it hurt.

During a period when live music is on the wane, sonically assaulting the audience seems a weird thing to do, but it seems to happen with great frequency. I think one problem (besides the members of loud bands having lost hearing over time and not realizing what they're doing) is the way the main speakers are pointed at the audience, with monitor speakers facing the band. With things set up this way, it's easy for the band to not realize just how loud they are to the audience.

Over time the way I set up has evolved into not distinguishing between speakers for the audience and monitors for the band. I put the speakers a bit behind and to the side of the band and turned at something like a 45 degree angle inward so they work as both monitors for us while also sending some sound out front. That creates the danger of feedback, but I've found that turning the treble down on everything lowers the threshold for that by a lot. And, of course, the precursor to feedback is that nice reverb feeling where you can feel the sound as well as hear it. As long as I keep the sound levels in that range, things work really well.

As to who/what gets a microphone - I have one for vocals and the clarinet gets one so she can play with good tone low in her range and be heard. My acoustic guitar with the onboard pickup gets plugged in, and if it's a large event I put a mic up for the tubas so we can have a nice solid bass line without them having to work for volume. 

Also, I've started using a small dynamic mic on my music stand to pick up the banjo at large events. It's hard to believe, but the one comment I get on the sound system over and over is people coming up afterwards and saying that couldn't hear the banjo. I think the issue is that it's so very directional in its sound - if the drum head is facing you, you hear it, but if it's angled away, you don't.

Performance Diary

Last Saturday the Kenwood Players had a little Dixieland performance on the downtown mall in Charlottesville, Va and this snapshot was taken right before we started, with the trombone player just out of the shot to the left. Our regular trombone players were both unable to join us, so Dick, the trumpeter in the white cap, asked a friend in a big band he plays in to fill in. 

This was all part of a big band festival put on by the Orange and Charlottesville bands, with a dozen community bands from around the state scheduled to play from 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. Unfortunately that weather system, el derecho, came through the night before and Virginia got whacked, some people still without power even today. One group's bus was damaged by a tree overnight and the army band was dispatched to clean-up duties.

We had a nice little crowd for the Dixieland, with nearly a dozen pre-school age children sitting on the bricks in front of us fascinated by it all. 

That was at 10:30 a.m. and it was only in the low 90's. When the Orange Community Band played at 5:30 in the pavilion at the end of the mall it was close to 100, so that audience was sparse. (Also, half the traffic lights weren't working and over half the city was without power.) We played well, but I kept noticing I'd never felt my horn so warm to the touch, and the heat and humidity did something to the sound - it seemed more tactile and vaguely felt and sounded like we were under water.

Good Time Banjo & Thumb Piano

Performance Diary

Recently the community band had a couple of performances, I played Dixieland with a very high level group of players, I did the music for a small country church Sunday service, and my group played for some military veterans the day after Memorial Day.

One thing that strikes me over and over with the community band is just how much the acoustic environment affects our sound. Because we are such a relatively large group, approaching 50 members, the balance of what I hear in the horn section is remarkably different from room to room. I've gotten used to the fact that it's always going to be different from how we sound in rehearsals, but it's still a little unsettling trying to play to a room on the fly.

The other thing about the two venues the band plays in is that one is smaller and people sit closer to the front and to each other than in the other, where the same number of people are scattered throughout a larger auditorium. We always get a better response in the first.

The Dixieland performance was on the front porch of Ambrose (brother of James) Madison's home for a Garden Week afternoon party. I'd played with the trumpet, trombone and drummer before, but had never even met the clarinet, tenor sax and double bass players. I've heard about pros getting together and sight reading for performances, but never done so myself, and was amazed at how well we played. (I had gotten the banjo music a couple of weeks before and the pieces I was unfamiliar with I drilled over and over - so I wasn't sight reading).

At the time of the performance I was completely focused on listening and trying to play as supportively as I could. Only listening to the recording could I fully appreciate just how good the other players were and how nearly every tune settled into a great rhythmic groove. Listening to the CD the first few times induced a sort of delayed flow that I was too busy in the head in the moment to appreciate.

For the church service I played solo horn for prelude and postlude, alto flute while the offering plate was being passed, and led the congregation in hymn singing with the guitar. The church was full of family and friends, and helping people on their spiritual paths with music is something I find deeply rewarding.

The Kenwood Players played for the Ride 2 Recovery for a second year and had a great time. We played well and were very well received. I was also pleased that over time I've gotten more efficient setting up and striking the audio equipment so that it took less than an hour for each and the system worked well.

One thing I noticed at this event as well as the Dixieland event was how at the beginning of brass licks when a player is really laying into a riff, a few audience members will spontaneously yell out something like "Yeahhh" in just the instant after the riff starts, almost like they're making music with us for a moment. I'd love to know exactly what it is that triggers that reaction, as it's such an intense engagement of a listener.

Horn Diary

I've been playing the horn for coming on to seven years now and it still pulls me in like no other instrument I've ever played. There are things I can do on other instruments (piano, guitar, banjo, alto flute/flute, and cello) that I can't do on the horn, but none of them as consistently have me exploring how to make music.

Part of it is probably the fact that when I started the horn in my mid 50's, I already knew a lot about the generality of music making, which allows me to bring all that to bear in learning the horn.

Increasingly, though, I think it's the very tactile nature of playing the horn that has taken me so much deeper into the experience of music making. My hands, arms, and torso all vibrate in resonance with the tones I primarily feel in my embouchure. I love the feel of the resonance of the guitar/banjo, cello and flutes, but with the horn there's just more of it.

There's also more of a one to one relationship between breathing and phrasing than on the flute that I think has to do with all of the air going into the horn as opposed to being split by the embouchure plate and only some going into the flute. 

For me the tone of the horn is simply larger and more malleable than that of other instruments, and somehow I feel more inside the tone experiencing it than being outside the tone and manipulating it.

Back Issues

For the past several weeks I've been spending more time on a daily basis practicing music, working to extend my technique enough to perform some new pieces on horn and flute, than I have since conservatory days (late 70's). Back then I was a piano major, not having touched a keyboard for something like ten years before wanting to get credentialed as a music therapist. I lived with an amazingly tense and sore back, right between the shoulder blades.

Since then I've gotten and done a lot of bodywork. Pretty much everyone has back and shoulder issues, usually from a mostly unconscious hunching of the shoulders. For me, when I'm working to deepen my technique, whether its keyboard, guitar, banjo, flute or horn, there's a tendency to let the intensity of my mental effort create needless physical tension, especially in the shoulders and their muscle attachments to the torso. It's sort of a negative example of embodied cognition. The relaxed and alert physical state best for making music seems a little antithetical to our mental image of someone working hard and thinking hard.

Somehow my feeling of really working hard and concentrating and being completely focused on the task at hand suggests the body posture of hunching over the instrument and using exaggerated control gestures and scowling (!). I'll catch myself, relax, let my shoulders slip back to a more neutral position and let go of the facial contortions. Then the next time I see 16th notes in a key signature of more than a couple of sharps or flats, or have a new chord or chord progression to fret, I slip back into the needless extra tension. Over time I slip back less, and to usually a lighter degree of tension, but it always happens. My suspicion is that those two and a half years of intense piano work, with very little sense of what I was doing to my body, helped me create this situation.

Jeffrey Agrell and James Boldin over on the Regular Reads: Horn list both have talked about the need to be aware of basic body issues when learning to make music and I think they're really on to something. As a therapist I've always paid a lot of attention to how a client physically interacts with an instrument. I just wish I'd figured out my own issues before wiring my brain and body in some dysfunctional ways back in the day. 

Update - Pasting in below most of a comment left by Jonathan West, as it is so responsive to my post:

I'm with James & Jeffrey on being aware of your physical state when playing. It may be that you need to put regular relaxation exercises explicitly into your practice routine.

When you play horn in band, you aren't playing continuously, so it is reasonable for your practice at home to mimic to some extent the kinds of activities involved when you play in a group. And that consists of bursts of playing interspersed with rests. If you get into the habit of doing some kind of relaxation exercise during home practice, you may find that it comes increasingly naturally to you to do such execises during rests in band rehearsal as well, and you may find that this has a surprising effect on your endurance.

As for what exercises to do, I suspect that you're in a better position than I am to know the sorts of exercises that would be good for you.

Relaxation exercises to loosen your shoulders are great, but I think that it would be an even better idea to find some kind of relaxation technique that stops your shoulders getting bunched in the first place.

Try standing, and play an octave scale of long tones, each one with a long crescendo and diminuendo. You get rid of all technical issues, and you just concentrate on feeling relaxed and getting that smooth intense non-brassy tone you want, all the way from p to f and back again. Think of and feel your shoulders as you crescendo and concentrate on remaining relaxed.

If you find yourself getting tense during practice, stop what you are doing, do a relaxation exercise to un-knit your shoulder muscles, and then do a couple of long tones to remind yourself how you should be feeling when playing. Then go back to what you were doing before.

Pete Seeger Banjo

I've mentioned from time to time playing a banjo and here's a photo of the one I use. It's an old Gibson I got second hand back in 1967 when a freshman at Duke. It's called a "Pete Seeger" model (or "folk banjo" or "long neck banjo") because he's the one that popularized this particular model.

Where the capo is on the third fret is where regular banjos stop. The extra three frets allow for longer strings and a deeper sound when the capo isn't used, which is great for baritones. It's also the case that to make the instrument strong enough for that extra string length, it weighs a ton, but that extra weight adds heft to the sound as well. 

Currently the fifth string has been removed because I'm playing it as if it were a tenor banjo with the Dixieland group and the Kenwood Players. Having that drone just doesn't work with all the jazz chords and the chamber wind ensemble.

One of the glorious things about a banjo is that the bridge is held in place by simple string tension, so it can be placed exactly right so that the first harmonic matches the 12th fret. That, and the fact the bridge is sitting on a drum head that's set in motion when the strings vibrate, is why the banjo "rings".

Of all the instruments I play, the banjo pulls people in the most. There's just something about it people love to hear and to come up and talk about.

Dixieland

Last Friday evening A Touch of Dixie played an unamplified outdoor set over at the Orange County Fair, just over Chicken Mountain on the grounds of James Madison's Montpelier. If you've ever been there, the fair was in the open space back behind the old Montpelier Store, across Rt 20 from the Montpelier Station Post Office.

Just like every other time we've played, I'm always struck by how live Dixieland jazz can just make folks feel happy. We had some children come up and dance with the music, and afterwards a number of people came up with sparkling eyes and broad smiles to say how much they'd enjoyed it. Sometimes I think I might have had more effect as a music therapist by simply playing banjo in Dixieland bands all this time.

Picnic in the Park: July Fourth

Every performance of the Kenwood Players has been a learning experience. Since I'm being much more a facilitator than a leader of the group, the direction the music takes grows out of the group's musical interactions. With any particular group of players and instruments there is a potential sound that can develop organically over time, and since schedules mean different groupings of the basic set of Kenwood Players for individual performances, that development doesn't go in a straight line.

This time we didn't have percussion, so I stuck exclusively with the banjo and had worked with the tubas to be more rhythmic and precise in their playing. So the tubas were more present in the mix and it makes for a nice effect. Also noticed the tuba solos caught the attention of the audience more than usual.

Bill B. has joined the group to take Gabby's place when she heads off to college next month. He plays tenor, alto and soprano sax. For this performance he played just the soprano at my request, mainly because we were outdoors and needed all the volume we could get. He and Dick (on trumpet) alternated solos with my vocals, and having the extra treble voice was a great addition to the sound. Bill has a natural feel for "tailgating", or filling in between the end of a vocal phrase and the start of the next, which made my singing a lot more fun.

The most pleasing aspect of this performance was our connection with the audience. On every number there were people moving with the music and/or singing along. After various solos there was applause that indicated some of the audience was following the music closely and liking it. Also saw various members of the Community Band listening with big happy grins, indicating they could tell how much fun we were having.

One of the aspects of music therapy that's nearly magical is that as long as everyone has musical tasks that are within their skill level, various skill levels can blend into great music. One thing that struck me forcibly going from the banjo with the Players, to the horn with the Community Band, and then back to the banjo for the Players' second set was what a world of difference playing within my skill level makes. Being the only horn I had a part in America the Beautiful that is beyond my current ability. Anxiety over that colored my entire time on the stage. Never again. From now on will do up those high parts in Finale for other instruments of the director's choice. Going the normal music educator's route simply sets me up to fail.

The schedule for the Players' performance kept shifting right up to the end, due to fitting in with the skydivers, the chorus and band, the fireworks, and the canine unit being unable to perform. We had way more material prepared than needed and were able to jump around the songbook to make up the sets as we went along. That flexibility was really helpful.

Cold Time

The Dixie group is playing tomorrow evening as part of the Music on Main Street in Orange, and we rehearsed this afternoon. I'm getting over this nasty viral cold that's been going around, and while playing this afternoon I flashed on another reason having a cold might help one's playing. 

Earlier I mentioned it might make one more physically sensitive and less likely to over-think. Another part of it is my time sense is subtly altered. We played things with faster tempi, but I felt I had all the time in world to vary banjo strums, both to make some more arpeggio like and to make more subtle syncopations.

I have the feeling if I could cultivate this expanded sense of time, my playing would be remarkably better. It may just be that feeling so miserable, I'm not as hyper about being "right" in my playing.