JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
Jacqui's bringing Alexis with her!!!!!!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
Thursday, November 29, 2007
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!! (November 28)
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
Jacqui Twine is coming to visit us in Vancouver for a week in December!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
Jacqui Twine is coming to visit us in Vancouver for a week in December!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The trouble with women (November 27)
Wotcher. News from Tuesday:
Rehearsals for One Million Things Happening In December proceed apace. I'll put up a list for your awed admiration once I can bear to look at it. It's going to be a Very Busy Month. Last night we were rehearsing for the gospel choir, chroma (which owing to time considerations, viz. we have none, is going to be the main casualty when we hit the new year and clean house a bit). Tonight we were polishing and then running the Broadway Chorus show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables.
It turns out that Dani from Broadway Chorus, who plays my hapless starcrossed lover Jenny, works in video game law and is one of the authors of the Video Game Law Blog. Quite the coinkidink.
Adam from BC pointed us at the world's most boring game, Desert Bus. LOL.
In fantastic news, Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate is brilliant: I've completed it once and am now trogging through it a second time. I haven't even looked at the new Sam And Max despite buying it the instant it went live. Might get a chance to play it this weekend.
I didn't get any sleep Sunday night but as a result at four thirty in the morning I wrote lyrics for a gorgeous piece of music which Sarah had likewise composed in a time of insomnia. The result is something quite unusual for us, far more poetic than I normally try for, and hopefully nice.
For Chilli & Sage fans, there's new music at our MySpace page.
We've also set up the blog page for Take December Off, which is our latest cunning project. We had intended to have fun making a video for I Want To Be A Panda - and indeed we will, early next year - but instead we're going to push our seasonal song, Take December Off, which is, as the title might suggest, a comedy song about getting the whole of the month off work. We were hoping to make a quick video in time for December 1st, but we're so swamped that we're going to have to settle for a sound file and a comedy blog and photos, with a video to come after a few days. The upshot is, remember that link and take a look at it on December 1st, and then send it to all your friends. It's how to skive off work for 31 days, set to a samba beat. You want it.
We go now to collapse...
Rehearsals for One Million Things Happening In December proceed apace. I'll put up a list for your awed admiration once I can bear to look at it. It's going to be a Very Busy Month. Last night we were rehearsing for the gospel choir, chroma (which owing to time considerations, viz. we have none, is going to be the main casualty when we hit the new year and clean house a bit). Tonight we were polishing and then running the Broadway Chorus show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables.
It turns out that Dani from Broadway Chorus, who plays my hapless starcrossed lover Jenny, works in video game law and is one of the authors of the Video Game Law Blog. Quite the coinkidink.
Adam from BC pointed us at the world's most boring game, Desert Bus. LOL.
In fantastic news, Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate is brilliant: I've completed it once and am now trogging through it a second time. I haven't even looked at the new Sam And Max despite buying it the instant it went live. Might get a chance to play it this weekend.
I didn't get any sleep Sunday night but as a result at four thirty in the morning I wrote lyrics for a gorgeous piece of music which Sarah had likewise composed in a time of insomnia. The result is something quite unusual for us, far more poetic than I normally try for, and hopefully nice.
For Chilli & Sage fans, there's new music at our MySpace page.
We've also set up the blog page for Take December Off, which is our latest cunning project. We had intended to have fun making a video for I Want To Be A Panda - and indeed we will, early next year - but instead we're going to push our seasonal song, Take December Off, which is, as the title might suggest, a comedy song about getting the whole of the month off work. We were hoping to make a quick video in time for December 1st, but we're so swamped that we're going to have to settle for a sound file and a comedy blog and photos, with a video to come after a few days. The upshot is, remember that link and take a look at it on December 1st, and then send it to all your friends. It's how to skive off work for 31 days, set to a samba beat. You want it.
We go now to collapse...
Friday, November 16, 2007
CAVE People Get Jobs! (November 15)
Tonight's subject line is taken from an ad on the SkyTrain wall. It depicts a group of people who all look extremely Indian. I feel that whichever organization has this acronym CAVE (I can't remember what else the poster said), they were perhaps ill-advised to word their slogan like that. Or, I'm racist and so the racist interpretation sprang to mind faster than it might to a nice person's. Either way, amusing in the way that those Western Union ads back in England are amusing. (If you've never seen them, they basically say: "Don't trust a member of your family to take money back to Pakistan to give to your poor needy mother! Send it via Western Union instead!" Because, that's right, if you're from Pakistan you can't trust your own family! Why, they're practically niggers! ... *sigh*)
Some more random highlights of the past couple of months which we've dredged from our "schmoozing" diary...
Some more random highlights of the past couple of months which we've dredged from our "schmoozing" diary...
- We helped Kim write a song for her father's 60th birthday. It had started off sounding suspiciously like Billy Joel's Piano Man, but Sarah fixed that. I helped with a couple of lyrics, then Kim recorded it, I mixed it, and she put together a Powerpoint slideshow. Apparently it went down a treat and we were heroes. Hurrah!
- We've sold about $160 of our CDs, mostly at $10 a pop, occasionally cheaper where our nerve faltered or we were part-exchanging for another CD. Not bad. But still legally a hobby, defined as something you do where you don't make as much as you spend.
- James' ensemble, My Lady's Chamber, has not only worked on Sarah's choral piece The Blackbird Of Derrycairn, but has taken on our surreal jazz piece Air Conditioning. We joined them in performing it at the party the weekend before last and it was an absolute hoot to hear it with nearly a dozen voices powering it. As for Blackbird, Sarah is extremely pleased. It's been thirteen years since she composed it, and this is the first she's heard it performed (by anyone outside of a slightly incompetent panda multitracking his voice as a Christmas present a few years ago).
- And on the subject of things Sarah wrote thirteen years ago... Sleeping Beauty: The Musical is finally moving forward! This version of the traditional story is decidedly untraditional - the princess is a feminist and the prince is a prat, as one lyric observes - and after a couple of years of teasing people with songs taken from it, Sarah was at last persuaded to take the plunge and organize a singthrough/readthrough. People from High Spirits have leapt at the chance to take part, and no doubt (he says enthusiastically) you'll hear something about how it went on here at the start of December.
- We've bought some art! Two pictures from a great shop called Kimprint down in Gastown. One is from a series of scenes from Alice In Wonderland... the artist has a great command of perspective and the series is pretty striking, so we may slowly accumulate it. The other is a small but equally striking long-range picture of a fantasy city. Buying art made us feel grown-up. All this art plus my Medieval gold CD and our A New Brain framed poster on the walls... the apartment is starting to look like we live, rather than squat, here...
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Getting up to date!
Look, only one month behind in the TARDIS! I felt smug as I posted that. And then, it occurred to me that even as the Blog TARDIS whirls around in the wake of the timestream, I could... post something else! Covering today!
So: today I had physio. I have a trapped nerve in my back, which is causing neck pain and occasional streaks of unpleasantness down my left arm. I had my first session last Tuesday and this one was at the same time: 7:10am! Argh! Ultrasound, electrical pulses, and neck-stretching in a machine which looked suspiciously like a James Bond villain might reprogramme it to rip my head off at any moment - and all happening two hours before I normally even consider waking up. Argh argh! This will also be our first experience of claiming on medical insurance. (Hopefully. It won't be very nice if it turns out to be our first experience of failing to claim on medical insurance.)
Sarah spent today doing Voiceprint and working on the music for our new Christmas song, Take December Off. This is a bonkers samba-themed Christmas rave based on the idea of encouraging an overly-politically-correct (and uninformed) boss to give you plenty of days off for cultural reasons. At the moment it clocks in at something like eight minutes. But I don't want to edit it because it's all very funny, so the plan is to switch the drum rhythm and do something else exciting to make the verses stay fresh. We still haven't sorted out samples of the new songs, but these will crop up soon, my pretties, soon...
Tonight, we had Broadway Chorus. Have I mentioned this before? Their website is here. They call it community theatre over here; it's basically like English amateur theatre, but this specific company is interesting in that they perform what are essentially revue shows with a plot, and the chorus has a lot to do. The musical selection is pretty up-to-date too; the last show had Sailing from A New Brain and some stuff from The Light In The Piazza, and this time round it's clear the director has just seen The Drowsy Chaperone. He also enjoys ridiculing pretentious songs; I get to sing the dismal I Believe My Heart (from The Woman In White) in a yokel accent, with the chorus adding overly-hysterical backing vocals.
It's a bit of a hoot, all told. We've been going there for a couple of months, and the new show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables is four weeks away.
If I haven't been posting regular entries here then that means I haven't had a chance to complain about our self-inflicted schedule of death. You could ignore my pleas for sympathy on the basis that this is all our own fault. But please don't, as you're supposed to be our friends, you bastards ;)
What else can I tell you? On Monday we discovered a brand of chocolate called Toffifee, for people who can't stop spelling toffee. We also discovered yet another destination which we can reach on the 22 bus. That bus goes everywhere! (And soon we'll have a song to prove it...)
And there's a new Mystery Case Files game!
And a new season of Sam And Max!
Life is good!
So: today I had physio. I have a trapped nerve in my back, which is causing neck pain and occasional streaks of unpleasantness down my left arm. I had my first session last Tuesday and this one was at the same time: 7:10am! Argh! Ultrasound, electrical pulses, and neck-stretching in a machine which looked suspiciously like a James Bond villain might reprogramme it to rip my head off at any moment - and all happening two hours before I normally even consider waking up. Argh argh! This will also be our first experience of claiming on medical insurance. (Hopefully. It won't be very nice if it turns out to be our first experience of failing to claim on medical insurance.)
Sarah spent today doing Voiceprint and working on the music for our new Christmas song, Take December Off. This is a bonkers samba-themed Christmas rave based on the idea of encouraging an overly-politically-correct (and uninformed) boss to give you plenty of days off for cultural reasons. At the moment it clocks in at something like eight minutes. But I don't want to edit it because it's all very funny, so the plan is to switch the drum rhythm and do something else exciting to make the verses stay fresh. We still haven't sorted out samples of the new songs, but these will crop up soon, my pretties, soon...
Tonight, we had Broadway Chorus. Have I mentioned this before? Their website is here. They call it community theatre over here; it's basically like English amateur theatre, but this specific company is interesting in that they perform what are essentially revue shows with a plot, and the chorus has a lot to do. The musical selection is pretty up-to-date too; the last show had Sailing from A New Brain and some stuff from The Light In The Piazza, and this time round it's clear the director has just seen The Drowsy Chaperone. He also enjoys ridiculing pretentious songs; I get to sing the dismal I Believe My Heart (from The Woman In White) in a yokel accent, with the chorus adding overly-hysterical backing vocals.
It's a bit of a hoot, all told. We've been going there for a couple of months, and the new show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables is four weeks away.
If I haven't been posting regular entries here then that means I haven't had a chance to complain about our self-inflicted schedule of death. You could ignore my pleas for sympathy on the basis that this is all our own fault. But please don't, as you're supposed to be our friends, you bastards ;)
- Mondays: "chroma", Brian Tate's gospel choir
- Tuesdays: Broadway Chorus
- Wednesdays: Sarah's had another acting course, and I've had High Spirits choir, but as of tomorrow Sarah will be back at High Spirits too
- Thursdays: open mic at Myles Of Beans every other week, alternating with a songwriting night
- Fridays: "carlyle.4", our extremely pretentiously-named quartet (it's the only way to fly!), currently rehearsing stuff
- Saturdays: often free, but then we see shows in the evenings
- Sundays: often free in the daytime, with an open mic at Urban Rush Cafe every other week
What else can I tell you? On Monday we discovered a brand of chocolate called Toffifee, for people who can't stop spelling toffee. We also discovered yet another destination which we can reach on the 22 bus. That bus goes everywhere! (And soon we'll have a song to prove it...)
And there's a new Mystery Case Files game!
And a new season of Sam And Max!
Life is good!
Blog TARDIS: "Everything's Better With Monkeys" (September 2007)
We came back from Swing Jazz Camp all energised and enthused with the spirit of music... particularly ours. Sarah wrote the music and most of the lyrics for our slow-dance song, Just A Moment. We played some gigs, gave CDs to various people, and sent MP3s to people. Sarah continued to do voiceover work for VoicePrint, reading the news and magazine articles on Canadian radio (here's an example of her in action). On August 25th we had a High Spirits performance party, and Panda became a singalong!
It's worth mentioning one of our best songs up to this point: If We'd Never Met. This is the uplifting and fun-packed tale of a young woman widowed by a drunk driver. I know exactly whence the idea for this came, strange as the story may sound; I was in my bathroom, brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror, knowing Sarah was in her bathroom doing the same thing, and I thought, "I wonder how I would feel if I went into the main room and there was no Sarah." A couple of hours later we had the song, and we were very pleased with it. (There's a sample of it here if you'd like to listen, and it's also on our album (merciless plug)).
At Swing Jazz camp Sarah took this song to her vocal masterclass, where a couple of professional singers were commenting on people's delivery and performance of a chosen song. She reported afterward that she sang through the first verses and chorus, stopped, and waited for comments. The response was: "Oh! We were listening to the song because it's so good. Er, can you do it again and we'll pay attention to your technique this time." So she did it again. Response: "Yessss... and what needs improving about how you sing this? Anything else?" "Well," quoth Sarah, "I often get a break in my voice when I'm trying to sing high." "Oh! Well we can listen to that. Do some scales." Sarah does some scales, which are pretty much perfect because of the amount of singing she's been doing through the week. "... yesssss... that sounds fine. Anything else? No? Oh well." I was very pleased for her because so often she feels that she's not the 'singer' of the two of us, because she prefers me to sing the songs (even though on the album I think she has more vocals than me, tee hee). And to get such praise from a couple of pros must have been very satisfying. I'll take credit for the song lyrics being gripping, mind you...
Looking at our song list, I see that September produced three songs:
- Other People's Business, a comedy song which frankly I'm still not completely sure about... we've performed it once, but it didn't feel right while I was singing it, and I'm not sure I can get behind the anti-Bush message which emerged in the third verse. Not because I'm pro-Bush, more because I want it to be less specific.
- Get Out Of My Sky, a guitar song - written largely because I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a "singer-songwriter" song. (Most singer-songwriters who show up at open mic nights have a guitar slung on their back and a bunch of overly-personal songs about breakups and so forth, and I detest them, so to prove to myself that it can be done right, I wrote some lyrics about a breakup, using a James Blish novel title which I've been wanting to use in a song for years, and handed them to Sarah with the instruction "On guitar, please".)
- Everything's Better With Monkeys, another comedy song, which we wrote for Alexis.
And that brings me to talking about our brief return to England in mid-September. Sarah had already gone back to Ireland for a week when I caught the plane to England and met her at Gatwick.
Did we enjoy seeing everyone? Oh, god, yes. It was a Posse rave. In fact, it was several of them. It was groovy to see everyone, to catch up, to spend so much time with Phil, Jacqui, and Alexis, and to get in some hardcore gatherage both at restaurants and in the form of All Back To The Twines.
But England still sucks. We'd forgotten just how we don't like Perfidious Albion. The air quality was atrocious: Sarah's asthma deteriorated to the point that she had to go back on all her drugs for a month when we came back to Vancouver. The crowds were rough, especially in London - they complain about the number of people here on Robson Street, but it's nothing compared to the raw fury of Oxford Street. I lost my temper at the toilet attendant at Victoria Station because they charge 20p for access to the loo. It occurred to me almost immediately that I was Verbally Abusing British Rail Staff, which could be construed as a crime, and Sarah wasn't getting any happier about my making a scene so I calmed down after a while, but sheesh. It all feels so small-minded and petty over there. It's not ideal here, but we didn't feel anything to make us want to come home.
Still: Posse!
And because Alexis used to spend a lot of time announcing "Aww, monkeys!" whenever she banged her elbow off a table or suchlike, we had written a song for her called Everything's Better With Monkeys. In fact we wrote it on the train back from London on the Wednesday after we'd been up there to see Parade (he cut Big News! the cad!) and our attempts to sing it quietly for practice purposes were obviously confusing the woman sitting opposite us. We unveiled it for Twiney that evening and it's proven a big hit with people over here since our return... most recently Kim, who almost stopped breathing from laughing at it so much. Exactly the effect we want, really. (Nothing personal, Kim!)
When we left England in January - ten months ago - we were sad, scared, nervous, and committed. Since then we've learned a lot and blossomed a lot. Leaving England again was easy. We'll go back, because England is where our friends and my family are. But that's the only reason.
It's worth mentioning one of our best songs up to this point: If We'd Never Met. This is the uplifting and fun-packed tale of a young woman widowed by a drunk driver. I know exactly whence the idea for this came, strange as the story may sound; I was in my bathroom, brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror, knowing Sarah was in her bathroom doing the same thing, and I thought, "I wonder how I would feel if I went into the main room and there was no Sarah." A couple of hours later we had the song, and we were very pleased with it. (There's a sample of it here if you'd like to listen, and it's also on our album (merciless plug)).
At Swing Jazz camp Sarah took this song to her vocal masterclass, where a couple of professional singers were commenting on people's delivery and performance of a chosen song. She reported afterward that she sang through the first verses and chorus, stopped, and waited for comments. The response was: "Oh! We were listening to the song because it's so good. Er, can you do it again and we'll pay attention to your technique this time." So she did it again. Response: "Yessss... and what needs improving about how you sing this? Anything else?" "Well," quoth Sarah, "I often get a break in my voice when I'm trying to sing high." "Oh! Well we can listen to that. Do some scales." Sarah does some scales, which are pretty much perfect because of the amount of singing she's been doing through the week. "... yesssss... that sounds fine. Anything else? No? Oh well." I was very pleased for her because so often she feels that she's not the 'singer' of the two of us, because she prefers me to sing the songs (even though on the album I think she has more vocals than me, tee hee). And to get such praise from a couple of pros must have been very satisfying. I'll take credit for the song lyrics being gripping, mind you...
Looking at our song list, I see that September produced three songs:
- Other People's Business, a comedy song which frankly I'm still not completely sure about... we've performed it once, but it didn't feel right while I was singing it, and I'm not sure I can get behind the anti-Bush message which emerged in the third verse. Not because I'm pro-Bush, more because I want it to be less specific.
- Get Out Of My Sky, a guitar song - written largely because I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a "singer-songwriter" song. (Most singer-songwriters who show up at open mic nights have a guitar slung on their back and a bunch of overly-personal songs about breakups and so forth, and I detest them, so to prove to myself that it can be done right, I wrote some lyrics about a breakup, using a James Blish novel title which I've been wanting to use in a song for years, and handed them to Sarah with the instruction "On guitar, please".)
- Everything's Better With Monkeys, another comedy song, which we wrote for Alexis.
And that brings me to talking about our brief return to England in mid-September. Sarah had already gone back to Ireland for a week when I caught the plane to England and met her at Gatwick.
Did we enjoy seeing everyone? Oh, god, yes. It was a Posse rave. In fact, it was several of them. It was groovy to see everyone, to catch up, to spend so much time with Phil, Jacqui, and Alexis, and to get in some hardcore gatherage both at restaurants and in the form of All Back To The Twines.
But England still sucks. We'd forgotten just how we don't like Perfidious Albion. The air quality was atrocious: Sarah's asthma deteriorated to the point that she had to go back on all her drugs for a month when we came back to Vancouver. The crowds were rough, especially in London - they complain about the number of people here on Robson Street, but it's nothing compared to the raw fury of Oxford Street. I lost my temper at the toilet attendant at Victoria Station because they charge 20p for access to the loo. It occurred to me almost immediately that I was Verbally Abusing British Rail Staff, which could be construed as a crime, and Sarah wasn't getting any happier about my making a scene so I calmed down after a while, but sheesh. It all feels so small-minded and petty over there. It's not ideal here, but we didn't feel anything to make us want to come home.
Still: Posse!
And because Alexis used to spend a lot of time announcing "Aww, monkeys!" whenever she banged her elbow off a table or suchlike, we had written a song for her called Everything's Better With Monkeys. In fact we wrote it on the train back from London on the Wednesday after we'd been up there to see Parade (he cut Big News! the cad!) and our attempts to sing it quietly for practice purposes were obviously confusing the woman sitting opposite us. We unveiled it for Twiney that evening and it's proven a big hit with people over here since our return... most recently Kim, who almost stopped breathing from laughing at it so much. Exactly the effect we want, really. (Nothing personal, Kim!)
When we left England in January - ten months ago - we were sad, scared, nervous, and committed. Since then we've learned a lot and blossomed a lot. Leaving England again was easy. We'll go back, because England is where our friends and my family are. But that's the only reason.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Blog TARDIS: "Can you, just, like, not come in right at the start?" (August 2007)
Don't mention the war. Don't mention how Barb Wire is a remake of Casablanca. And particularly don't mention anything to the effect of "who the hell are you and didn't you used to write a blog?" Clear?
So: VWORP, VWORP, VWORP, and the Blog TARDIS lands splat in the middle of three months ago. Let's step out to discover what the Jaysmith timeline was up to at that point...
... and it appears they were just getting ready to go to Sorrento, which is about five hours' drive north-east-ish of Vancouver. Susan from choir took us in her van. I had two Red Bulls in swift succession so I was just a leetle hyper. A running commentary on the excellence of the scenery was soon followed by nonstop mockery of the ludicrously small city of Merritt - Canada's Country Music Capital, I'll have you know - but it was as well that Susan and Sarah didn't give me the bullhorn I demanded, or let me roll down the windows to mock the citizens of Merritt at high volume, because one of the van tyres turned out to be flat and we had to stop off at a garage for a quick fix. Brilliantly, Merritt advertises itself on the highways with big signs saying (across the top) Tourist attractions (and then underneath on the left) The Walk Of Stars! (and then underneath on the right) Reserved for future tourist attraction. Yes, folks, Merritt will be twice as interesting - sometime real soon. For now it looks like a mile-tall child threw a bunch of buildings at a mountainside in a tumpy fit after being told to put his village away. Let's go back there!
But wait! Why were we going to Sorrento? The presence of Susan is a clue. Any guesses? Bah, can't hear you, so I'll just tell you - Ieva (who runs High Spirits choir) had gone on non-stop about the Swing Jazz Camp run at Sorrento every summer, and eventually she'd persuaded us to come along. The idea is you immerse yourself in music for a week; there's convenient accommodation on-site and you wander around taking various courses and linking up with your fellow musicians for fun and jamming. The course tutors are professional musicians, songwriters, choir leaders, or what-have-you. So OK, Ieva by her own admission wasn't going to shut up about it, so we figured it would be interesting, and the networking potential would help with our overarching goal of hitting Canada hard, so let's do it. We booked a shared cabana with Ieva, Susan, and Callum (also from choir) to cut costs a bit, and off we went.
The good things about Swing Jazz Camp:
- the quality of some of the pro tutors. Sarah signed up for a daily jazz piano course run by Michael Creber, and I signed up for daily drumming with Phil Belanger, and we both joined a choir class run by Brian Tate (remember that name).
- Band Lab - a daily experiment in random band formation... each day those interested would assemble in the hall and the organisers would make six or eight bands out of us, assign us one of the two songs of the day, give us an hour to figure out an arrangement, and then recall us for a concert
- nightly concerts and dances - two chances to be singers in front of a 40-piece big band (with some very good soloists), a chance to perform our own material (I Want To Be A Panda went down a storm, and the five of us did a blistering version of Sing Sing Sing from last term's High Spirits repertoire)
- generally, we learned a lot about how jazz music works. Well, I say jazz, these are still normal songs, often in 4/4 or 3/4, not so wildly experimental jazz... more, it's that they're frameworks for singers and musicians to stretch themselves, improvise, and generally try things out with the support of other musicians
The big bad thing about Swing Jazz Camp:
... it turns out I don't like jazz or musicians ;)
That might sound like a sweeping statement, so I'll be more specific. And first I should stipulate that the professionals there, and the band, were very good, and when performing on their own they had plenty of understanding of what was necessary to make the music sound good, or at least listenable. However:
A lot of this music has two aims which are somewhat in opposition to what we think about music, with our show tunes background and specifically with my liking for pop. This music is (1) for people to dance to, (2) all about the musicians rather than the song (I feel).
There you are on the dance floor, most likely with your "baby" in your arms. You hear a song start. Ah, how you love this song. You hear the singer singing it once through; the lyrics are usually short, maybe 12 or 16 lines total. You dance a lot as the entire song is repeated several times with various soloists taking the place of the singer. Then you hear the singer again, repeating the entire song form one last time. This is your warning that the song is about to end. They play the tag a few times - e.g. the last couple of lines, or whatever - and then they finish. Lovely. A song one minute and thirty seconds long (at a pinch) has been made to last seven minutes, given the musicians several chances to show off their improvisational skills, and crucially, you've been able to dance in the same style for seven lovely minutes.
But suppose you're not on the dance floor? The kindest way I can put it is: it takes a certain frame of mind to appreciate the typical jazz jam, and I either don't have, or more likely refuse to spontaneously operate in, that frame of mind. If you're just sitting there listening to a song going on for seven minutes, including five repeats, even with different soloists, it's really boring, unless the improvising players are really good. And even then, there's a limit to how many such songs you can listen to before they start to sound the same. Most of the songs sound the same by design anyway; while I might admire them as pioneering and/or skilfully done in their way, they're all a bit old and they aren't really very adventurous lyrically or musically. (Sarah's chord sequences are much more interesting than the average old-school swing-jazz song.) Also, I'm strongly lyric-oriented, so it bugs me that the lyric is short, often quite abstract, more often horribly dated, and is overwhelmed by the song being treated as an instrumental for 80% of its duration.
The problem with jazz musicians jamming is this: they won't stop playing. For me good music is all about when instruments aren't playing. It's the arrangement, the decisions of who will be creating emotional effects, the space left for the singer... it's all about the planning, about making sure that the right sounds are reaching the audience. It's a special kind of audience indeed which will appreciate technical virtuosity for itself, rather than in the service of a creative or emotional goal. If a random band is jamming, I think that's the start of the creative process which ends with a good song, and the results might be worth listening to in order to review which bits worked really well, and if you were one of the musicians contributing to that process then at least you'd have something to do during it. But as a listener? No! I don't want to hear hours of monotonous comping turfed out by everyone playing at the same time. I want to hear the results of a creative director selecting what's best for the listener. I want to hear a finished song, and finished songs do not sound like this, and I am not interested in hearing the intermediate stages.
During Band Lab this was particularly painful. (Ever wanted to hear two songs played five times each by amateur musicians with an hour's rehearsal? Then come along next year, when I will be bringing my earplugs.) A couple of times when we were contributing to the arrangement process, we tried to persuade apparently competent, intelligent musicians that they should not play at certain moments, for effect. I swear, they looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. "Trust me, come in later, it'll sound cool." "What? What is this 'come in later'?"
So a lot of the time I felt quite frustrated, because as a singer I can't actually do a whole lot in the part (the very long part) of a song when I'm not singing. I could scat-sing, but this is basically taking a solo, so that's still only maybe one-sixth of the instrumental section covered. The rest of the time I'm standing there as bored as the audience should be. (Except of course in a jazz camp setting like this the audience, all musicians too, is watching carefully to see how they can learn to play as professionally boringly as the musicians currently on stage.)
There was a joke quoted at the camp: "A rock musician plays three chords to an audience of a thousand people, while a jazz musician plays a thousand chords for an audience of three people." And why is that joke funny? Because usually you're not in the audience of three. When you are, it becomes a matter of not gnawing through the body of the person in the next seat in order to escape after twenty minutes.
Our own songs, even the ones with jazz chords, are not "jazz songs" in this sense, and I feel kinda pleased about that, and I think that that's why people like them. Maybe jazz musicians wouldn't like our songs because there's no room for soloing; we've mostly locked down the song structure in the service of the emotional effect of the song, which is driven by the song motifs and lyrics, and more importantly the need to make our point and not be boring. Maybe we aren't mature songwriters who understand the value of leaving space for musicianship, but my mature and considered response to that is "Feh."
In the student concert, what got the biggest responses, and not just from me? I Want To Be A Panda, because it's funny, it's been crafted very carefully for maximum amusement value, and we stick to the script. Sing Sing Sing, bursting with energy channelled into a really tight arrangement. The gospel choir, again all to do with energy and doing the song right, having rehearsed it every day that week. And a couple of songs written by their performers which had good lyrics and/or excellent and well-rehearsed arrangements. The elephant in the room is that even jazz musicians don't really like jazz!
Rant over. And if anyone from Sorrento is reading this, well, there were exceptions to the above, but statistics say that you were probably not one of them. Unless you were one of the people we made an effort to talk to, in which case we probably did that for a reason.
What else can I tell you about Sorrento? Well, despite the above fulminations, we did kinda like it. It was educational - in positive and negative ways! - and inspiring - we got a song out of it, Just A Moment - and I bought some brushes and have been doing very light drumming-along to songs, and Sarah has experimented with improvisation, although she still prefers planning her improvisations out in advance. We met some interesting people, and we certainly met some excellent professionals, even if in Sarah's case the benefits she might have gotten out of studying with Michael Creber were somewhat limited by his having to deal with other people in his jazz piano class who just weren't up to it. Finally, Brian Tate, who used to run the Universal Gospel Choir (which is apparently really big here but of course we'd never heard of it) has now set up a new choir for Monday nights in downtown Vancouver which we've joined. More on that in a later Blog TARDIS.
I'll leave you with some photos from that week - all taken by Guy Smith, the photographer on site - and next time we'll catch up on what we did in September. Enjoy.
The piano class, including Sarah.
The drum class, including me.
The dance class, including Ieva (top row, third from left), Callum (top row, far right), and Susan (seated, second left).
Michael Creber (left) and Brian Tate (right) performing.
The three professional jazz singers (Jennifer Scott, Karin Plato, and Kate Hammett-Vaughan).
Drum tutor Phil Belanger.
Brian Tate leading the choir class - Sarah and Susan taking full advantage of the "seated" option.
The choir class in full effect outside the refectory, singing something noisy no doubt. Susan and Sarah in the front row in shades, Panda lurking at the back.
And lurking no longer!
What a cool bunny :)
An exhuberant Susan...
I Want To Be A Panda, of course!
The gospel choir's contribution to the Thursday night student concert. Susan and I had solo lines.
Susan in action during her solo.
... and me during mine.
Sing Sing Sing
Band Lab - Sarah and Callum on vocals.
So: VWORP, VWORP, VWORP, and the Blog TARDIS lands splat in the middle of three months ago. Let's step out to discover what the Jaysmith timeline was up to at that point...
... and it appears they were just getting ready to go to Sorrento, which is about five hours' drive north-east-ish of Vancouver. Susan from choir took us in her van. I had two Red Bulls in swift succession so I was just a leetle hyper. A running commentary on the excellence of the scenery was soon followed by nonstop mockery of the ludicrously small city of Merritt - Canada's Country Music Capital, I'll have you know - but it was as well that Susan and Sarah didn't give me the bullhorn I demanded, or let me roll down the windows to mock the citizens of Merritt at high volume, because one of the van tyres turned out to be flat and we had to stop off at a garage for a quick fix. Brilliantly, Merritt advertises itself on the highways with big signs saying (across the top) Tourist attractions (and then underneath on the left) The Walk Of Stars! (and then underneath on the right) Reserved for future tourist attraction. Yes, folks, Merritt will be twice as interesting - sometime real soon. For now it looks like a mile-tall child threw a bunch of buildings at a mountainside in a tumpy fit after being told to put his village away. Let's go back there!
But wait! Why were we going to Sorrento? The presence of Susan is a clue. Any guesses? Bah, can't hear you, so I'll just tell you - Ieva (who runs High Spirits choir) had gone on non-stop about the Swing Jazz Camp run at Sorrento every summer, and eventually she'd persuaded us to come along. The idea is you immerse yourself in music for a week; there's convenient accommodation on-site and you wander around taking various courses and linking up with your fellow musicians for fun and jamming. The course tutors are professional musicians, songwriters, choir leaders, or what-have-you. So OK, Ieva by her own admission wasn't going to shut up about it, so we figured it would be interesting, and the networking potential would help with our overarching goal of hitting Canada hard, so let's do it. We booked a shared cabana with Ieva, Susan, and Callum (also from choir) to cut costs a bit, and off we went.
The good things about Swing Jazz Camp:
- the quality of some of the pro tutors. Sarah signed up for a daily jazz piano course run by Michael Creber, and I signed up for daily drumming with Phil Belanger, and we both joined a choir class run by Brian Tate (remember that name).
- Band Lab - a daily experiment in random band formation... each day those interested would assemble in the hall and the organisers would make six or eight bands out of us, assign us one of the two songs of the day, give us an hour to figure out an arrangement, and then recall us for a concert
- nightly concerts and dances - two chances to be singers in front of a 40-piece big band (with some very good soloists), a chance to perform our own material (I Want To Be A Panda went down a storm, and the five of us did a blistering version of Sing Sing Sing from last term's High Spirits repertoire)
- generally, we learned a lot about how jazz music works. Well, I say jazz, these are still normal songs, often in 4/4 or 3/4, not so wildly experimental jazz... more, it's that they're frameworks for singers and musicians to stretch themselves, improvise, and generally try things out with the support of other musicians
The big bad thing about Swing Jazz Camp:
... it turns out I don't like jazz or musicians ;)
That might sound like a sweeping statement, so I'll be more specific. And first I should stipulate that the professionals there, and the band, were very good, and when performing on their own they had plenty of understanding of what was necessary to make the music sound good, or at least listenable. However:
A lot of this music has two aims which are somewhat in opposition to what we think about music, with our show tunes background and specifically with my liking for pop. This music is (1) for people to dance to, (2) all about the musicians rather than the song (I feel).
There you are on the dance floor, most likely with your "baby" in your arms. You hear a song start. Ah, how you love this song. You hear the singer singing it once through; the lyrics are usually short, maybe 12 or 16 lines total. You dance a lot as the entire song is repeated several times with various soloists taking the place of the singer. Then you hear the singer again, repeating the entire song form one last time. This is your warning that the song is about to end. They play the tag a few times - e.g. the last couple of lines, or whatever - and then they finish. Lovely. A song one minute and thirty seconds long (at a pinch) has been made to last seven minutes, given the musicians several chances to show off their improvisational skills, and crucially, you've been able to dance in the same style for seven lovely minutes.
But suppose you're not on the dance floor? The kindest way I can put it is: it takes a certain frame of mind to appreciate the typical jazz jam, and I either don't have, or more likely refuse to spontaneously operate in, that frame of mind. If you're just sitting there listening to a song going on for seven minutes, including five repeats, even with different soloists, it's really boring, unless the improvising players are really good. And even then, there's a limit to how many such songs you can listen to before they start to sound the same. Most of the songs sound the same by design anyway; while I might admire them as pioneering and/or skilfully done in their way, they're all a bit old and they aren't really very adventurous lyrically or musically. (Sarah's chord sequences are much more interesting than the average old-school swing-jazz song.) Also, I'm strongly lyric-oriented, so it bugs me that the lyric is short, often quite abstract, more often horribly dated, and is overwhelmed by the song being treated as an instrumental for 80% of its duration.
The problem with jazz musicians jamming is this: they won't stop playing. For me good music is all about when instruments aren't playing. It's the arrangement, the decisions of who will be creating emotional effects, the space left for the singer... it's all about the planning, about making sure that the right sounds are reaching the audience. It's a special kind of audience indeed which will appreciate technical virtuosity for itself, rather than in the service of a creative or emotional goal. If a random band is jamming, I think that's the start of the creative process which ends with a good song, and the results might be worth listening to in order to review which bits worked really well, and if you were one of the musicians contributing to that process then at least you'd have something to do during it. But as a listener? No! I don't want to hear hours of monotonous comping turfed out by everyone playing at the same time. I want to hear the results of a creative director selecting what's best for the listener. I want to hear a finished song, and finished songs do not sound like this, and I am not interested in hearing the intermediate stages.
During Band Lab this was particularly painful. (Ever wanted to hear two songs played five times each by amateur musicians with an hour's rehearsal? Then come along next year, when I will be bringing my earplugs.) A couple of times when we were contributing to the arrangement process, we tried to persuade apparently competent, intelligent musicians that they should not play at certain moments, for effect. I swear, they looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. "Trust me, come in later, it'll sound cool." "What? What is this 'come in later'?"
So a lot of the time I felt quite frustrated, because as a singer I can't actually do a whole lot in the part (the very long part) of a song when I'm not singing. I could scat-sing, but this is basically taking a solo, so that's still only maybe one-sixth of the instrumental section covered. The rest of the time I'm standing there as bored as the audience should be. (Except of course in a jazz camp setting like this the audience, all musicians too, is watching carefully to see how they can learn to play as professionally boringly as the musicians currently on stage.)
There was a joke quoted at the camp: "A rock musician plays three chords to an audience of a thousand people, while a jazz musician plays a thousand chords for an audience of three people." And why is that joke funny? Because usually you're not in the audience of three. When you are, it becomes a matter of not gnawing through the body of the person in the next seat in order to escape after twenty minutes.
Our own songs, even the ones with jazz chords, are not "jazz songs" in this sense, and I feel kinda pleased about that, and I think that that's why people like them. Maybe jazz musicians wouldn't like our songs because there's no room for soloing; we've mostly locked down the song structure in the service of the emotional effect of the song, which is driven by the song motifs and lyrics, and more importantly the need to make our point and not be boring. Maybe we aren't mature songwriters who understand the value of leaving space for musicianship, but my mature and considered response to that is "Feh."
In the student concert, what got the biggest responses, and not just from me? I Want To Be A Panda, because it's funny, it's been crafted very carefully for maximum amusement value, and we stick to the script. Sing Sing Sing, bursting with energy channelled into a really tight arrangement. The gospel choir, again all to do with energy and doing the song right, having rehearsed it every day that week. And a couple of songs written by their performers which had good lyrics and/or excellent and well-rehearsed arrangements. The elephant in the room is that even jazz musicians don't really like jazz!
Rant over. And if anyone from Sorrento is reading this, well, there were exceptions to the above, but statistics say that you were probably not one of them. Unless you were one of the people we made an effort to talk to, in which case we probably did that for a reason.
What else can I tell you about Sorrento? Well, despite the above fulminations, we did kinda like it. It was educational - in positive and negative ways! - and inspiring - we got a song out of it, Just A Moment - and I bought some brushes and have been doing very light drumming-along to songs, and Sarah has experimented with improvisation, although she still prefers planning her improvisations out in advance. We met some interesting people, and we certainly met some excellent professionals, even if in Sarah's case the benefits she might have gotten out of studying with Michael Creber were somewhat limited by his having to deal with other people in his jazz piano class who just weren't up to it. Finally, Brian Tate, who used to run the Universal Gospel Choir (which is apparently really big here but of course we'd never heard of it) has now set up a new choir for Monday nights in downtown Vancouver which we've joined. More on that in a later Blog TARDIS.
I'll leave you with some photos from that week - all taken by Guy Smith, the photographer on site - and next time we'll catch up on what we did in September. Enjoy.
The piano class, including Sarah.
The drum class, including me.
The dance class, including Ieva (top row, third from left), Callum (top row, far right), and Susan (seated, second left).
Michael Creber (left) and Brian Tate (right) performing.
The three professional jazz singers (Jennifer Scott, Karin Plato, and Kate Hammett-Vaughan).
Drum tutor Phil Belanger.
Brian Tate leading the choir class - Sarah and Susan taking full advantage of the "seated" option.
The choir class in full effect outside the refectory, singing something noisy no doubt. Susan and Sarah in the front row in shades, Panda lurking at the back.
And lurking no longer!
What a cool bunny :)
An exhuberant Susan...
I Want To Be A Panda, of course!
The gospel choir's contribution to the Thursday night student concert. Susan and I had solo lines.
Susan in action during her solo.
... and me during mine.
Sing Sing Sing
Band Lab - Sarah and Callum on vocals.
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