The Jaysmiths Hit Canada: 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.