Author: Adam Johnston

sing to prevent disease

~ Adam Johnston ~ 1 Comment

We know there’s legitimate caution about coming out to public gatherings and shows while everyone is concerned about disease spread and public health. Certainly, some people may stay home more often and people should be mindful about how they’re interacting with one another. Social distancing and waving instead of hugging and hand-shaking are perfectly good ideas.

But, also, most especially, hand washing. The key ingredients include soap, water, and 20 seconds of scrubbing. But how do you keep track of the time you’re washing your hands? People suggest different songs to time your good hygiene, but here in the corporate offices of S&S we recommend the bridge of Sing, starting at about 1:20 on this track:

Just sing along to the “la la la la la, la la la la la la, la la la la la la la” line (you can’t say you don’t know the words!) three times at our tempo for plenty of washing thoroughness. Twice through will work if you’re singing it a little slower. We don’t care exactly how you do it, but we’re happy to help.

We’ll teach you the song at upcoming gigs as a public service, and we’ll listen to hear all of you putting this to good use in the restrooms. As the song goes, “Sing out loud, sing out strong.”

little and big

~ Adam Johnston ~ Leave a comment

We have gigs coming up in the coming days, all ages and free for everyone:

Cuppa: Saturday, March 7, 4-6p
This is the creatively conscious coffee/treat/food hangout with a lovely second-floor corner that has just the right space for game tables, couches, and a grand piano. Perfect little spot for an easy dinner or a snack before a bigger night out. We like trying out new stuff in this space, especially things that are good for the close quarters and ambience.

Jazz at the Station: Wednesday, March 11, 7-8p
This is our contribution to the monthly offering of jazz in a voluminous old train station. We love this place because you can hear the sounds of music resonate in the space. Sometimes the music sits in the rafters for a few moments before coming back to you; and maybe if you listen closely you’ll hear Joe McQueen’s sax still playing or footsteps of travelers from decades ago, maybe an old train whistle. It’s a nice place to just sit back and listen for an hour, no matter who’s playing.

Upcoming:
While March has a couple of free public shows, April has a string of private gigs; and then May will feature a combination of all kinds of stuff, public and private, early and late, free and not-so-free. The calendar is starting to fill up. We’ll keep you posted here and in our newsletter and on social media channels. As always, let us know if you have something in mind.

one-liner: crowdsourcing

~ Adam Johnston ~ 2 Comments

The band has started to have this long overdue discussion: How do we describe ourselves? It hasn’t been too critical to really get this exactly right, because usually we just play our music, a jazz standard you’d associate with Ella Fitzgerald to a bluesy swinging remake of Radiohead. But now that we’re going to invest $40 in some new business cards, we want to make sure we can have some kind of quick description of our music and our style. We have ideas, but I think we should crowdsource this a little. How would you describe us?

I started with what I’d put on our website: “a jazz quartet with jamming qualities and a jam band with jazz sensibilities.” But that’s maybe too esoteric, and I couldn’t honestly tell you what it means to “jam” and I’m pretty sure that isn’t what we’re doing all the time. Tim piped up with something about the range of styles, moving from jazz to funk to blues to rock as the mood strikes us, and that we can play something exuberantly joyful or painful and ironic with the same passion and volume. But then how do you fit that on the business card?

I’ve also thought of “ruining jazz traditions one remake at a time,” or “playing jazz in a way that even our family likes it.” Or sometimes I think it should just be “playing music the way we want because it’s fun.” But that might not entice someone to book us for a wedding.

So we’re open to ideas. We’ll keep working on it ourselves and we’ll try to squish it onto the little card with our webpage. If you give us something we can use, we’ll give you a free business card.

repertoire

~ Adam Johnston ~ Leave a comment

When we play tonight at Lighthouse (9:00 – Midnight, 21+, $5 cover), we’ll roll out half a dozen new songs. It’s a solid mix of good stuff, ranging from hard-hitting to laidback, jazz standards to flipped-upside-down remakes to a kind of driving grunge backed with a jazz organ.

But it isn’t the variety that is remarkable to me. It’s that we keep adding stuff, and we don’t seem to back away from things that are going to be difficult, either conceptually or technically. I was just going over a line of changes in one of our jazz standards that turns my fingers inside-out, it seems, and the vocals are no easier. It makes me wonder why we do this to ourselves.

I guess, probably, because it’s fun. And, also, I guess, because when we play at your wedding you probably don’t want us to just play 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and Mad World.

When we played our first gigs, we had about 90 minutes worth of material if we stretched out intros and added a few interludes. Working up to two- and then three-hour sets was essential to play late into the night and to have a range of things we could turn to for any given moment. Now, I’m confident that we have five or six hours of music. Creating a set list is harder because we have to make decisions. That also means that we cycle stuff in and out, go back to old stuff to keep it fresh while at the same time learning the new things that we’re adding to the overstuffed binder. I panic a little when I see something I haven’t played in a few months; and then I’m impressed when we just pick it up again.

This is all to say that there will always be something new, maybe cycling through in place of your favorite. Just let us know and we’ll rotate it back in. Come join us, tonight or another time, and see how much the catalog has grown — and if I really learned that one impossible line of chord changes.

reports & rehearsal

~ Adam Johnston ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been able to lay low for a few weeks, just settling into the new year. Besides having a new recording out, we’ve also each been tangling with new projects, jobs and babies, tasks and such. We played a secret gig for families at Cuppa right after Christmas, but mostly we’ve been hiding out.

It’s fun, though, to see that even when you can’t see us, people are still hearing us on multiple platforms. Take for example this report we just got that explained how we earned $1.01 from Apple Music streaming:

The spoils of all our recording work on Apple Music for December 2019.

Of course, the point of the recording wasn’t to make a lot of money. We’re pretty happy when you pay a $5 cover — like at our upcoming gig at Lighthouse this Saturday, Feb. 1, 9PM – Midnight. We’ll bring real CDs, too, and we’ll even sign them; but definitely the best way to hear us is live.

Now that we’re ramping back up for gigs, we’ve been rehearsing new stuff, invading Tim’s home to take over his basement and hash things out. This means that a lot of what we’re doing is not just playing to our heart’s content, but talking about everything from who leads us in to what’s the tempo to “is that the right chord?” to how to transition into the bridge to how to cue the ending . . . For a group of four people who just wanted to get together to play music, it ends up being a lot of thinking and working.

But this just means that at our next rehearsal we get to really try the new stuff out and get it polished for performances this weekend and beyond. A playful jazz classic, an unexpected cover of a rock icon, a civil rights era standard, a remade feminist anthem, and more new stuff are all on the set list. We’re excited to see what happens; and we hope you’ll be there to see and hear it on Saturday night.