Month: October 2009

Wedding Jazz Orchestra Diary: It’s Supposed To Swing!

Let’s talk about the best wedding band in America.

Huh?

OK, let’s talk about reality.

Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Dorothy Fields and Nelson Riddle would all be rolling over in their graves if they’d heard what I just heard….

Fields wrote some of the best live music for weddings, Astaire sang it..and in later years Sinatra did, too, with arrangements by Riddle.

Did they “do” weddings? Probably.

If you were a friend to them, definitely.

How about today. Is there such a thing as the best wedding band in America?

Who knows?

One thing’s for sure: there certainly are a lot of bad ones.

People tell us that finding the right music for their wedding or event is the hardest part of the planning experience.

To be a seriously good wedding band it’s important to have a great repertoire — and actually understand the history and the lyrics of the songs, not just the titles. That’s where DJ’s fall apart, after the most obvious selections. So do many bands. Phrasing counts, and musicians who are out of their element in all but one or two of the genres they’re playing probably don’t have the phrasing skills needed to put over the others with any credibility. Maybe they are a “cover band” that plays 80’s rock. Standards? Please….

I was just on the website of one such band, and listened in horror as as the singer absolutely had a field day — and not in a good way (please pardon the pun) — with the Dorothy Field lyrics to “The Way You Look Tonight,” adding words and cute little phrases and completely screwing up the time and the meter.

Even worse, it took a twenty piece group of them to do it. Screeching, out-of-tune-horns, dated arrangements… and while they weren’t down in the bottom-feeding element of bands that use tracks and just look like they’re playing, it was still awful. There was no musical phrasing. These guys couldn’t swing if Benny Goodman jumped up and kicked them in the butt.

Who could dance to that?

The videos are all staged, by the way.

It’s entirely possible that there are a lot of people who don’t know how to find a good band, or think that such a thing even exists anymore. I’m beginning to think they’re right.

Limited repertoires, reading from books on music stands. Amateurs trying to imitate Frank Sinatra.

Lester Lanin and Meyer Davis would roll over in their graves, too.

I think people who hire a live band deserve better. I think they deserve the real deal, a bunch of terrific musicians who play a lot of styles of music very well. Just like it used to be.

2010 Wedding Trends: What’s Hot & What’s Not

2010 Wedding Trends – What’s Hot and What’s Not….A Style List for Modern Brides

My friend Sheryle Ulyate, who is one of the most elegant women I know, suggested that we compile a list of what the editors of Modern Bride might well be touting as their trendsetter ideas for 1010…if only there were still a Modern Bride, which there isn’t.

Sheryle knows a thing or two about trendsetting; she was one of the founders of Three Day Blinds, a company that nearly single-handedly revolutionized the window covering industry.

Like me, Sheryle is a believer in the old less-is-more Oscar Wilde adage that puts style into perspective. He said, “I am a man of simple taste. The best will always do.”

Here it is, our “What’s Hot and What’s Not” list of wedding trends for 2010 brides. In simple good taste, of course:

HOT………………………………………NOT

Live Wedding Music ……………………iPod
Bandleader ………………………………M/C
Deco………………………………………Disco
Mid-Century Moderne…………………..Punk
Doo-Wop…………………………………The Blues Brothers
Garden Fresh Blooms……………………Flower Towers
Food Stations……………………………Ice Carvings
Natural Makeup………………………….Eyelashe Extensions
Poolside Lounge………………………….Banquet Hall
Family Table……………………………..Sweetheart Table
Home-Baked Sweets Table…………….Cupcake Tree
Organic Everything………………………Fake Anything
Event Designer…………………………..Timeline Police
Swing Band……………………………….Cheesy DJ
Wedding Orchestra………………………Cheesy Wedding Band
Canapes…………………………………..Cheese Platter
Standards………………………………….Top 40
“The Way You Look Tonight”……………”Brick House”
Ballroom Dancing………………………….Rocking The House
Your Backyard……………………………..Harbor Cruise

Gourmet, Modern Bride & Print Media

Gourmet and Modern Bride are gone. This is not good.

I was one of the first “content providers” trained by the Los Angeles Times to write for the internet.

Years ago, ok?

Keep it short and sweet, they told us. Nobody wants to wade through more than a hundred words.

Over a decade of writing content for online news sites, I moderated a message board for Cox Interactive Media.

In depth? Hardly.

In its first foray into online news, the LA Times hired a whole bunch of people, trained them and then fired them. One morning, with a story assigned by each in the works, I called three of my editors who had been in their offices the day before and was told that each was “no longer with the company.”

And that was before breakfast.

There are so many kinds of viral media these days that wading into the melee has become a full-time occupation. Sneeze, and you miss the juicy news of the second. But in this new democracy that encourages everyone to be a critic, anyone with a computer qualifies.

The more free content the viral sites attract, the more they can charge for advertsing. Write hundreds of reviews and you get to be an “elite” reviewer. No matter that you don’t know a truffle from tartufo.

Sauces? Who needs ’em? Or at least who needs to be electrified by descriptions of what’s in them, or how they’re made.

Nobody, evidently.

Vintage Live Music: A Lifetime of Listening and Learning

You’ve heard of never playing the same thing twice?

We never play anything the same way once.

That’s because we are literally the finest improvisers in the world, and can turn a hip hop song into a wedding processional — or a classical tune into rock and roll in an instant if we want to.

Most of my musical colleagues started making music professionally when they were about thirteen years old.

I was a “band singer” at that age. Stand up, sit down…

We’re a little more creative these days.

It’s Benny Goodman meets Bobby Darin, Lena Horne…and Shirley Horn.

Throw in the best of Anka, Sinatra, Bennett, Buble…and vintage doo-wop.

Peggy Lee, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, The Beatles, rocking re-mixes, soul, funk, traces of hip hop and classical, mega-ballroom and The Rat Pack…sometimes all in the same set.

What we do seems so easy now, I sometimes forget how long it took to acquire this repertoire.

A lifetime.