A California Beach Wedding with Live Music!

A recent wedding celebration at a distinctive California beach venue made good use of live music. Vintage, Old Hollywood swing and jazz, some Motown and a hefty side order of anything that was ever played in an Audrey Hepburn movie were the order of the day and evening.

I LOVED this wedding! Lots of humor and wit, a bride and groom with delightful taste in music and all-around superb communication despite time constraints….it was a great collaboration!

“No Macarena,” the bride had told me.

“Sinatra. And lots of swing music. And some Elvis, Beatles…and ‘Sweet Caroline’ as a surprise for my fiance, who is a Boston Red Sox fan.”

They would do their first dance after dinner. They wanted a gracious pace, but most of all they wanted their guests to have a lot of fun.

Both from traditional Asian families, they would be making two costume changes during dinner, and visiting with each table in the large ballroom. The music would be vintage, but also upbeat and entertaining.

With an Alice In Wonderland theme, a Mad Hatter Tea Party candy station and a lovely California beach setting, we could have gone in a lot of directions with the music.

Which is exactly what the band did!

The bride thought the guests would be dancers – and they were!

Sometimes, a vital part of our job as musicians is to “provide cover.” If the costume changes take longer than expected — or the ceremony is an hour late in starting, for instance, which has happened — nobody knows the difference because we’re there playing this great live music…..

But this wedding was smooth and flawless, from beginning to end.

The ceremony was especially gorgeous, and made wonderful use of the couple’s mutual love of old movies.

Because I knew that the bride loved Audrey Hepburn, I had suggested that they might like the theme from a movie Hepburn made in the late 1960’s with Albert Finney, “Two For The Road.”

They liked it so well that they decided to use the words from the song for their wedding vows!

More Audrey Hepburn: the bride came down the aisle to “Funny Face.”

It was fabulous!

“I was watching the whole thing,” one of the florists told me.

“It was amazing,” she said “The bride and groom and the band seemed to be working as one.”

I liked that, because it so captured the essence of what we do.

Since everything we play is completely live, we can “time” a walk down the aisle for maximum drama.

For their first dance, the copule waltzed to another Audrey Hepburn movie tune, “Moon River.”

And then “Besame Mucho” — and a bunch of swing and rock and even some old “doo-wop” like “Since I Don’t Have You.”

There was a lot of dancing, and the costume changes were a big hit.

“Sweet Caroline” was an interactive hit, just as the bride had planned it – and a big surprise to the groom. also as planned.

The band reprised “Two For The Road” for the last dance.

I can’t wait to see the pictures.

Some things are priceless.