$8.99
Sold by music on Tradebit
The world's largest download marketplace
3,250,841 satisfied buyers
The world's largest download marketplace
3,250,841 satisfied buyers
MP3 SMQ - Reel
9 MP3 Songs
JAZZ: Jazz Vocals, POP: Beatles-pop
Details:
We all learned some jazz standards so that we could get gigs. The guys brought their fakebooks and realbooks. Joe and some other folks lent Stephanie some cd''s: Ella, Anita, Miles... so that she could wrap her mind and her voice around this unfamiliar genre. It took thirty songs to do a three-hour show--a neat five minutes each. We weren''t much for rehearsing; we relied on shorthand charts and our growing improvisational skills (musically and lyrically) to learn the new stuff on the fly. We made fast friends with some hot young swing dancers. Ever-increasingly, we swung.
We didn''t articulate a plan to dig the depths of our musical backgrounds. It just happened. On our eighieth-some-odd gig, Bill hip-hopped the bridge, or Mike bowed something, or Chuck played a Van Halen lick, or Steph changed the phrasing. Like a vice grip on some tunes, more subtly on others, the style took hold.
The dancers more than kept up.
There was no real conceivable way to bottle it in a studio. Besides, we were broke. So, how to capture the energy? Live rooms are noisy and chaotic. But Mike borrowed the other Mike''s 20-year-old reel-to-reel and set it up at Tressa''s. He set up a mic for the vocal, a mic on a bar towel inside the piano, one mic for Bill''s entire drum kit and fed the bass directly in from a pickup. He told the band the machine might record something or might not, and we''ll just see how it goes. So we weren''t nervous.
The machine worked, so Mike set up again, for one more show, in case one of our experiments on a particular song caused a sad little train wreck that we didn''t want to immortalize. Captured here is the first version of "Fever" we ever played this way; some third-grade banter between Bill and Steph at the beginning of "All of Me;" an epic version of "Ain''t No Sunshine," fed poignantly by the moving away of two dear friends; some killer dance sequences in "Them There Eyes," and a grand and fantastical rendition of "My Favorite Things," the end of which was eerily and mysteriously decided by the reels.
Where are they now?
Stephanie Morgan, vocalist, is the singer for Stephanie''s Id (https://www.tradebit.com). She is engaged to Chuck, the pianist. They live with their dog, Coley, in Asheville, NC.
Chuck Lichtenberger, pianist, is the keyboardist/Fender Rhodes Bassist/melodica player for Stephanie''s Id (https://www.tradebit.com. He also teaches piano lessons. He is engaged to Stephanie, the singer. They live with their dog, Coley, in Asheville, NC.
Mike Alexander, bass player, is exploring life. He is currently on indefinite hiatus from gigging and the like, but embracing the moment with all of his energy.
Bill Smith, drummer, is the driving force behind the Firecracker Jazz Band (https://www.tradebit.com He will soon be moving to Los Angeles, CA, to work with former band Scrappy Hamilton (https://www.tradebit.com).
The four remain true friends.
File Data