London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Go Downtown. Get Funky.

Yesterday’s post brought me up to my last pro gig before Christmas. (I shall forebear to write at length about playing for fun at Christmas carol services at my own church (on the same day as the second Euston job, but in a pub function barn) and upcoming at my mum’s church on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.) But by combining the two Chapel of Life events, I skipped over one more important write-up before I knock off for Christmas (coming back, of course, not quite in 2018 as I still have a new year’s gig to play). In other words: up yours chronology, go thematic organisation yeah!

first-rehearsal-montage

What was I doing in a somewhat chilly large rehearsal room near Upminster on Monday 12 December? Well, that requires a bit of backstory.

Allow me to introduce Joe Fryd. Joe is an almost insultingly good-looking working dad and ex-copper from Essex who has built up a very good business for himself over the last few years singing swing / Rat Pack / crooner / etc. material for classy end functions, essentially as a solo singer with backing tracks. And I do mean a very good business in terms of frequency of booking and actually making a decent living at it with relatively little ‘other work’ on the side.

From that position of dealing with substantial-budget corporate, wedding, agency, etc. clients, the next step Joe both wants to take artistically and thinks is a viable business plan is to do some gigs ditching the tracks and instead bringing in a full live band.

And being that sort of guy, he isn’t going to sit around waiting for that to happen, he’s going to tap musicians he knows and get them to tap other players they know and pull something together sooner rather than later, because everything comes to him who hustles while he waits (according to Edison). I don’t know how he got hold of my oft-time freelance colleague Graeme Hollingdale (someone I mostly know as a classical double bassist), but he did, and Graeme very kindly put me forward for the planned violin chair.

Enter the Downtown Funk. This was the first time of getting actual people in a room to play music and talk plans, and it wasn’t clear to me from email discussion in advance whether we really had a solid basis to make it gel or not. I had put together violin parts for a handful of vocal swing standards to give a live hint of the string sections added to big bands favoured by Bublé et al; I knew we were looking at reduced horns compared to the original (very) big band orchestrations; that was about it.

Actually I think we all walked away thinking this is a project that will go places. Partly because Joe has the energy, people skills and marketing ability to make what we wants happen commercially. But just as much because, even with keys and/or guitar chairs empty (this will be soon fixed) and playing mostly straight off stock charts that would work better with a little doctoring to the specific line-up, it worked musically. That chilly converted farm outhouse swung, with the combination of energy, freedom and precision that is the demanding tightrope of successful big band jazz (believe me, I have heard just as good arrangements be wooden and lifeless, or sloppy and slack). And I’m confident that, when we start varying the swing with soul and funk, that will be just as taut. What we really need is audiences to reflect some of that energy back.

So I’m moderately confident that, barring unforeseeable accidents and acts of God, 2017 should see me playing some events that I almost certainly could never afford to get into, for fees and with a class of ensemble that will make a significant difference to my musical working life.

But, before I get carried away with hypotheticals, I do have one gig left before the Great Working Musicians’ Desert of January (seriously, this is when all the musos tighten their belts, because the punters have massive credit card debt / accumulated hangovers / new year’s resolutions to go to the gym instead of licensed venues):
Kindred Spirit Duo play 2016 out and 2017 in at the Fish in Sutton Courtenay, with a full 2 hours of live music alongside Michelin guide listed cuisine and appropriately late opening. See you there for the last gig of the year, and the first of the next!

Let’s go to meeting

The last two Sundays, I was at Friends’ Meeting House over the road from Euston station in central London. Working as a hired musician, not for the Quakers (Friends), but for another church who had hired space there as well as a bunch of session pros. I would describe them as a Nigerian independent evangelical charismatic church, but it might convey more to readers with roots in the music business and not the Christian church to call it a somewhat modernised gospel church.

The brief and situation for the afternoon of Sunday 11th was fairly straightforward: a more or less concert setting, albeit with interspersed live and video presentation connected with the Christmas story. Musical direction, rhythm section and core singers (soloists and parts of gospel choir) from the church’s own people, boosted by hired hands bulking out the choral parts and supplying seven-piece strings and the same number of horns (in the jazz / soul sense: flute, two saxes, trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba the one ‘house’ interloper in the ‘orchestral’ sections). Played and sung more or less by the charts, with tweaks here and there but little that would surprise any one with any big band or pit experience.

I should say that there was never any expectation of, let alone condition upon, the session musicians being spiritually aligned with the clients (so long as, obviously, we raised no objections or conflict!). In fact I think that side of the situation (a potential minefield!) was admirably sensitively handled by all concerned.

That didn’t prevent a fair amount of cultural and musical adjustment being required on many sides over the course of the engagement! I’ve stated often enough that the jobbing pro musician’ experience is generally of spending about as much time performing as rehearsing, if not slightly more. For a concert of perhaps 90 minutes’ music, the majority of the orchestral players had 13 hours of rehearsal scheduled. Admittedly, that included pizza breaks (pizza and sides provided!), but I still have to admit I struggled to adapt to stated start times not even seeing everyone needed in the room, and to a generally much more relaxed rate of progress than the slightly frenzied focus of a paid classical rehearsal with 5 hours from first downbeat to doors opening to the public.

Lest it be thought this was a one-way street, the gentleman (in the best sense of the word) doing the sizeable job of integrating the whole musical picture had to put up with being asked (a couple of times) for a clearer downbeat and indeed a more precise beat generally than his home territory of shaping a gospel choir and band called  for during one complexly scored coda with no rhythm section. Nonetheless a few rocky moments in the performance stemmed from songs starting very sharp from a previous item, the rhythm section not quite picking up the first bar and the house musicians being more comfortable picking up how long the intro would now become than the session players, rather more tied to the structure of their written parts.

But nonetheless it was a good atmosphere and, as I say, a fairly familiar broadly performance-type environment. And the crowd were certainly having a great time, especially in the bookending ensemble set pieces: a chunk of through-composed gospel lifting some musical motifs from ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory’ and taking its lyrical cue from the angels’ song in Luke’s nativity story, and a pretty direct cover of Quincy Jones’s reworking of the Hallelujah Chorus. (Seriously, watch it now. You won’t regret it.)

Yesterday posed somewhat different challenges. A carol service it may have been (well, there were some carols; and some gospel-Christian rock-worship songs; and one of last Sunday’s big numbers), but most importantly this was definitely a church service, and the elements of charismatic Christianity that had perhaps been more reference points the week before were now of course the core of the event.

The hired musicians were just a quartet of strings this time. And the charts we had were clearly central to the traditional carols; not so much to the other songs, where the order of sections followed by the lead singers bore I suspect only a coincidental resemblance to the one in the PDFs emailed 24 hours before! (No rehearsal at all for the service by the way.) Structure of the service was also decidedly fluid and heavily dependent on the time taken by the guest preacher for his sermon and the direction by his moving from speech to song to call to what I would describe as congregational ritual action – evidently unforewarned but followed fluidly by rhythm section (especially keys players supplying improvised ‘mood music’ a lot of the way) and congregation. I would probably have found this a lot more interesting, and less tense, had I not been under a microphone that might or might not have been muted when I wasn’t playing and on a stage right behind the lectern in the congregation’s eyeline. Expectations or not, I felt decidedly visible sitting out most of the congregation participation!

I need to repeat that in many ways these were a fun pair of gigs (because both were ultimately bill-paying gigs for me; one of the strangest things about them), and that the appreciation of what we were doing was truly touching and the welcome faultlessly warm. Nonetheless, for all my roots in (certain particular parts of) the Christian Church, it felt like an excursion to a foreign culture, with all the internal tensions that are apt to be part and parcel of cultural exchange for the conscientious left-leaning liberal Westerner. Which said, would I play the gig again? Absolutely – even if all the more so for being the better prepared for the local norms by doing it once …

Double whammy

Last week saw me rehearse in London Tuesday to Friday evenings, the last two required to be on site for 5 hours straight, while (thanks to running out of holiday) also doing 4 hours a day at a desk (plus lunch break) in Oxford Monday through to Friday. I’m still feeling the effects now, though there wasn’t exactly a let-up come the weekend.

However, only exceptional rehearsals get blog posts, especially when I’m this tired. So performance wise I’ve come to last Saturday, 10 December. When I managed to fit in two gigs, not something most professional musicians manage unless they’re playing cruise ships. Otherwise, the sets tend to be too long, the setup and packdown time similarly, and too many of the performance opportunities in the same time slots (Friday and Saturday nights, basically).

The first slot this day was a wedding, a local job in an Oxford hotel (close enough to bike to, which makes a change from incurring coach or train fares). The party had opted for chamber strings in the earlier part of the day, covering arrival of guests at the venue, guests moving into a separate room for the (civic) ceremony, the signing of the register and the drinks reception separating the ceremony from the main meal.

So far, so standard; and similarly for the fact that mostly we were left free choice over repertoire, with a few requested / suggested classical ‘lollipops’ and pop songs. (I can confirm a slightly ‘slushy’ taste on the couple’s part: Coldplay, Air on the G String, Pachelbel; they suggested but, for reasons which will become clear, we didn’t attempt the Barber Adagio and Nimrod.)

The distinctive feature being that, faced with the price of wedding musicians, this client had backed away from the usual quartet and booked just a duo of strings, myself and long-term collaborator (mostly in the String Project) Ben Mowat. Now there is a fairly substantial upper string duo repertoire, particularly from the Classical (sensu strictu) era, much of it quite easy on the players and the ear, and we filled up the non-requests part of the time with Messrs. Mozart, Mazas and others, Petrucci coming into its own for supplying parts and me swapping between violin and viola to support Ben’s violin as occasion demanded.

Classical requests were lightly rearranged or rejected depending on suitability, but the pop song side of things required a little more ingenuity. Having sight of overall harmonic structure is generally more important than a fixed set of notes for accompanying pop tunes in a hurry, except for the odd lick so characteristic that its absence from the backing would be felt. So while Ben used MIDI transcriptions and lead parts of published arrangements to get playable prompts of melodies, I would like to claim a Guinness world first of the rhythm viola part as my response to this situation:

hey jude rhythm viola.jpg

Of course I did fine with that as a ‘part’ and one run-through. I don’t know why you even need to ask. No, genuinely it was fine, and I think any problems over the day can be attributed to the ability of a large crowd of people in small, low-ceilinged rooms to make it literally difficult to hear the acoustic string player next to you clearly over your own playing – something which surprised even me!

belle vue 161210 band.jpg

I had a few hours off, amazingly, between finishing this (and getting soaked in the downpour that had emerged from drizzle since I left the house) and heading to High Wycombe for almost the last gig of the year with Kindred Spirit. This was at the Belle Vue, a nice pub-venue with an excellent draught ale policy and a generally appreciative clientele but, as you can see, ‘cozy’ in every sense of the word. Despite the difficulties of where to put an IEM pack without a coat pocket, 2 45-minute sets, a couple of encores and some broadly successful experimentation getting overdrive ‘lead guitar’ sounds out of a slightly temperamental multi-effects pedal involved shedding not just the velvet jacket but some fairly copious quantities of perspiration:

belle vue 161210 me late on.jpg

Well, I guess I needed some way of working off the pizza supplied as dinner in those 5-hour rehearsals without having time for a gym membership! The effort was well rewarded by the audience response though – and we’re already booked for a return next year.

That’s the last of the full Kindred Spirit band till February 2017, though Elaine and I are playing in the new year in the outer vicinity of Oxford – my actual last gig of the year!

That was Saturday. Read on whenever I next have time, access to a computer and energy to write to find out what I got up to on Sunday (hint: it wasn’t a lie in and a PJ day).

Not as Irish as you might think

It has been quite some week for music-making (not least in terms of sheer hours spent on it). As always when I’m very busy playing, I’m rather behind blogging. So let me go back 10 days to Saturday 3 December, and catch up from there.

northampton.jpg

The Filthy Spectacula played out 2016 in our schedule at the Northampton branch of O’Neill’s. Yes, that O’Neill’s. The Irish pub chain. If you’re a little wrong-footed by the booking, so were we. Frontman Mr E unsurprisingly asked the manager who had booked us (while he was setting up the PA) ‘So what sort of bands do you normally have here?’ He unsurprisingly answered ‘Oh, mostly covers bands, folk-rock, that sort of thing, you know.’ It would have been logical to ask ‘So why did you book us?’ – but I’m afraid we didn’t.

The answer might be to do with educating the clientele in the mysterious subgenre of rock called ‘Other / Unclassifiable’ which lurks threateningly down the bottom of alphabetical drop-down lists. Judging by the staff’s behaviour, I think it’s more likely the answer would have been along the lines of ‘Because we can … and because if we hear Whiskey on the Jar one more time when we’re on shift, never mind Hotel California, it’s going to be their funeral and our trial.’

The bloke who asked, also while we were setting up, if we knew any Christy Moore was presumably rather disappointed. The glass of Guiness prominently visible in the photo probably constituted our biggest concession to the surroundings of the night. However, most of the crowd seemed very much the reverse of disappointed. I treasure two testimonials from this gig. One the woman of central European origin who said we were the best entertainment she’d seen in Northampton in 5 years and wanted to get us booked in a bigger venue up the other road. The other a bloke looking about as little alternative as it’s practically possible to be, who shook my hand and said he mostly listened to drum and bass but he absolutely loved what we did and the way we put on a show.

You’re never going to get a packed house of adoring fans playing essentially a function type set in a chain pub in Northampton. But I’ve played to emptier and less appreciative rooms, and we probably could have broken even on the albums, T-shirts and badges bought by the bar staff alone (one of whom was very interested in trying to buy the case our merch is sold out of too … ).

Just, for the love of God, nobody infect the Dreadful Helmsman with novovirus on the day of a gig again. Filthy Spectacula gigs with no bass are seriously tough!