 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Alphie
Date: 2004-12-11 23:37
One nice side effect as a musician is to play at interesting events where you wouldn't be if you didn't play.
Yesterday we did our yearly Nobel Price Ceremony in our concert hall. Even if there's not much for us to play other than ceremonial music and two additional pieces it's just as interesting every year to visit this event with the highest concentration of intelligencia in the world at that moment.
Alphie
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Author: Terry Stibal
Date: 2004-12-12 01:32
Award ceremonies? Bah....
Happiness is sitting in the baritone player's chair on the bandstand on New Year's Eve. A close up rear view of the delectable Grace, singing her heart out in a fabulous evening gown, and a near distance view of sixty young women showing off on the dance floor. The little black dress never looks so good as it does on ladies striving to one-up each other...
And then, when you get hit on by the more inebriated of these during the last band break...
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Author: ron b
Date: 2004-12-12 04:40
Now I remember why I stopped, so many years ago, doing
New Year's Eve gigs....
- r![[cool]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/cool.gif) n b -
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Author: msloss
Date: 2004-12-12 20:26
I didn't have the sense to stop even after the NYE gigs. Many years ago, I played a society party New Year's Eve at the Field Museum in Chicago. A well pickled lady came up to the bandstand to make a request, and was good enough to lean over and spill her scotch down the bell of my tenor sax. What better way to connect with the people...
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Author: DougR
Date: 2004-12-12 21:58
Amen to the original post; I got called for a big-band gig at a huge gala to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launching of the USS Intrepid, and ended up doing the usual Miller/Dorsey/etc. stocks ON the Intrepid...on the hangar deck, watching while the celebrants--mostly former Intrepid service personnel and their families--had a great old time. Behind us, a big opening thru which you could see New York Harbor. Never to be forgotten!
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Author: Terry Stibal
Date: 2004-12-13 07:00
Another benefit of playing quality gigs is that you often get a decent meal with them in the bargain.
Here in the Houston area, there is a great call for music for society benefits and weddings. Some of the venues are typical dumps (one weird hall out in Fort Bend County I recall in particular...all the barbecue you could eat (and I didn't eat any of it)). But, the big time events at the Houston Polo Club or the major hotels like the Houstonian, the Icon or the Derrick dish up a first rate banquet meal that my group gets as part of the bargain.
I eat a lot of banquet fair in the performance of my regular job (USDL, OSHA, giving a lot of lunch and dinner time speeches), and usually it's some form of chicken, potatoes and vegetables. At the band jobs, however, it's usually steak or some form of beef...mommas and charity chairs have to impress their guests, and the catering managers are happy to oblige.
Last month, we played a job at the Icon (a downtown "boutique" hotel for those with too much money for their own good) and got to browse the wonderful multi-station buffet between sets. (They also had a thousand dollar bar (i.e., the bar was made of slabs of carved ice, set up for that event only and torn down afterwards) with free booze that I suspect some of the trumpet players had bellied up to at one point...damn'd brass jockeys...) From the information furnished to me by the promoter who "did" the event, we each ended up with a forty dollar (wholesale cost) chunk of food in addition to the payroll for the job. Not bad...
Many, many years ago, I provided the wind players for a pit orchestra for Fiddler On The Roof, put on at the Scott Air Force Base officer's club. In addition to our pay, we also drew the perk of a free full meal every night (rehearsals and performances), even though it was a non-union type event. We would see the roast beef joint and serving line being erected as we were getting the night's notes, and then would settle down to a huge late supper, all complements of the moral fund. I never had much use for the Air Farce while in the Army in RVN, but that job left a soft spot in my heart for their social events at least.
And, working on the old Cunard Line cruise boats meant that you got to visit the midnight buffet after the last set each night. A steady diet of lobster (broiled, creamed, or stewed) sounds like a great idea, but at the end of a month you find yourself longing for a hot dog.
And then there's the "free" special equipment that the occasional customer will "have to have" and will pay for but leave it in our hands at the end of the job...the gifts just keep on coming.
But, the half plowed women in dresses cut down to there are the ones that stoke your ego the most...
leader of Houston's Sounds Of The South Dance Orchestra
info@sotsdo.com
Post Edited (2004-12-13 07:03)
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Author: Brenda Siewert
Date: 2004-12-13 13:35
In the years I've played I've been many interesting places--but the concert that tops them all was the year in Jerusalem when Benjamin Netanyahu came the evening after riots broke out on the Temple Mount. I'm thinking it was 1995, my memory isn't so great without looking at the video from the event. Security was so high it took about 4 hours for us to get into the concert hall. CNN and everyone else was there that night. I had joked to my kids before we left the States that if tensions got any higher between Israel and the Palestinians they could look for me on CNN. I didn't know that was exactly what would happen.
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-12-13 20:54
Alphie ... one of the lovely things about being in one of Scandinavias most beautiful capitals.
Without music, the world would be grey, very grey.
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