Bad Romance
I always start my posts with a thought on how long it’s been since I last wrote. I can be a little bit of a procrastinator especially if it doesn’t involve directly playing music. So maybe this is just the rate that I will blog at. Lots has been going on and I’m just gonna put alot of it down here.
Here’s a video of The Heavyweights Brass Band playing a fairly epic arrangement (by Rob Teehan of course) of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance.
Rob is great at writing meaty versions of these meager modern pop tunes. This video has been up for about a week and has already amassed 800 hits. I’d love for this video to go viral to get some press for the band. It seems like music journalism has almost collapsed (except for blogs about indie rock) in this rapid media evolution that is going on. So if you run a website or blog, or even if you just want to put this up on your facebook or Twitter, and want to share this please do.
We have a bunch of interesting stuff coming up, but I’ll just plug our next gig. We’ll be playing at the intimate little venue The Central steps from Honest Ed’s Tuesday the 15th of June at 9ish. Nick Teehan is putting on the show, and will be singing some tunes with us. Nick is one of the most accurate and interesting singer’s I’ve ever heard, and we should be doing some interesting stuff. Definitely not one to miss.
Hmm other stuff.
I’ve been playing with the singer Johnny Favourite. Johnny had some hits in the late 90’s as the Canadian sensation in the swing revival, he has a juno, and multiple East Coast music awards. It’s interesting to me mainly as he was one of the ways I got into jazz as a kid. I can still remember flicking aimlessly through channels and stumbling across his video for “Root Beer and Licorice” on Much Music. I don’t know if it was the horns or the swing rhythm but something hooked me, likely it was the mere fact that it was so drastically different from most of the music that mainstream media pushed on people in the late 90’s. He’s taken some time off but is back with a new cd Troubador that we launched on Monday with a live concert on JazzFM check it out if you get the chance.
I’ve also been busy transcribing a bunch of Ghanaian hip-life tunes. Hip-life is the meeting of Hip-hop with the traditional music of Ghana Highlife. It’s interesting how hip-hop has had a pervasive influence on almost all forms of music, but in particular the many African derived forms of music in the western world, influencing Reggaeton, Dancehall, Funk Carioca etc. It’s very interesting to me the similarities between these musics and hip-life (between musics from the African diaspora combined with hip-hop and African music itself combined with hip-hop).
I’m doing these transcriptions for Isaac Akrong, a Ghanaian dancer and percussionist who is writing his PhD thesis on this music. I’ve been a bit of a procrastinator on it, but it’s mostly done now, and I’ve certainly gotten better at transcription, and the music notation program Sibelius doing it, not to mention what I’ve learned from the music itself. I might post a transcription and youtube video of one of the tunes in my next blog. You can read Isaac’s bio here , he say’s, ”My goal is to propagate the message of African culture, and explain everything possible about it. I am building on the knowledge that exists so that people will understand African music and dance more”, and I feel glad to be a part of that.
I’ll leave you with a little video that Wilson Acevedo did of a tune he collaborated on with Juan Carlos Cardenas (Juan-Caga Lindo). I played the trombones on it. There’s some food for thought in it, and Juan-Ca is one of the most soulful people I’ve ever met, so check it out.
