Collage

Whew! TGI September.

Posted on 9/1/2008 at 9:39:37 PM

I’ve been away from the blog for a while because we just had the busiest month of our lives as wedding musicians and have had no time for writing - nor breathing, for that matter (except when absolutely critical for playing wind instruments)!

Update time.  August was busy in a particularly rad way.  We had a lot of really interesting special requests for music.  We did “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, I sang “I Will” by the Beatles at two ceremonies, we did an Eels tune, one from Angels and Airwaves, a Jim Brickman song, a gorgeous one by Sade (“By Your Side”), an instrumental (guitar solo) from the Allman Brothers, another instrumental from Tom Petty that was originally part of a soundtrack, another soundtrack number from Shelter Surf which was totally lovely.  We learned the Celtic Alleluia, played Sweet Child Of Mine a couple of times, Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely”, a lot more Beatles tunes, and then just this last Saturday, we did the main Star Wars theme for recessional.  Awesome.

All this unusual (meaning, not from our normal existing repertoire) has been interesting and fun, and has been possible because David and I have combined forces to make the arrangements for all these tunes.  He has an incredible ear and can listen to anything and figure it out, and then I’ll add my knowledge of classical musicians and what they/we need to see on the page in order to make sense of it and play the song, and somehow out of that we end up, eventually, with an arrangment.

Meanwhile, we’ve also been striving to improve our regular repertoire.  I did a major overhaul of the string/flute quartet books: took out the stuff that we never play (cause we hate it and you would too), added better stuff (including two Stephen Foster songs arranged for quartet and about six or seven Mozart quartets - great stuff for a classical cocktail hour!), color-coded the pages and reorganized the entire contents.  Now we are seriously ready to RAWK with the string quartet!!

We also went to the studio this week for the first round of recording.  This time it was holiday music! You can hear what we did if you go to the Collage Music homepage and click the blue banner to get to the holiday page.

Next up in the studio sessions:  Our new vocal jazz trio which will involve me on vocals, sax, and flute, and Bret on guitar and vocals, and Owen on bass and vocals.  This is gonna be hot!  We’re also going to record a couple of vintage holiday jazz standards to finish up the holiday sessions.

I will leave you with a couple of pictures from our varied August exploits.

• This is a chamber music “reading party” (something classical musicians do from time to time - just hang out and read stuff together. We read a LOT that night.  This photo was taken during a reading of Schubert’s Octet for winds and strings:

• And this one is an example of what unruly classical string players do during a wedding ceremony, if left to their own devices. This is Adam and Justin, who play viola and cello respectively, at Mt Hood Bed and Breakfast. I love these guys.  The next thing we played was Guns n Roses’ “Sweet Child Of Mine” - I think they were just gearing up for it…