Mantras for Blue of a Kind in 2009

Starting your own a cappella group: "Don't try this at home"

I've talked about the difficulty of bootstrapping your own singing group before. Bootstrapping any new organization takes faith, courage, planning and some luck. Once you've bootstrapped your singing group however, getting guys to join is not that hard. Every time you sing out, you are rock-stars. People swoon over you, women eye you. Being bold enough to stand and deliver in front of an audience is an exciting thing, electrifying singers and listeners alike. Not everyone wants to sing a cappella, but believe me, you'll have no trouble finding folks who want to try.

All you need is a guitar and a hairdo

You can sing easy stuff and people will dig it. You can try more challenging material and many folks won't realize you don't quite succeed. Your choir can go flat and still be entertaining; only singers, musicians and those with perfect pitch will know for sure. Everyone else will feel the sag in energy but not be able to tell you much more. You can intone your vowels like yokels, belabor your consonants, make ragged entrances and cuts and basically do all manner of no-no's and still people will love you. Hey, you're singing for them, right? That's not a bad thing right there. Frank Zappa used to say if you have a guitar and a hairdo, you can be a rock star.

And if that's what you want to do, then go do it and have a ball.

Singing beautifully together

But to take a bunch of wanna-be rock stars and teach them how to sing bel canto might be one of the hardest things in the world. I studied photography, and my teachers taught me the rules as well as how to break them. Word: you are a master when you break the rules to a purpose, but you're a fool if you don't know the rules to begin with. And you're really not a singer if you can't control your body to produce sounds to a desired effect.

In choral singing, the buzzword is blend - sounding as one. Primarily, that means vowels, pure vowels, as in Latin or Italian. It also means producing a clear tone by supporting your air flow, controlling your vocal mechanism through your range and engaging your resonators. You learn to sing around problems caused by the breaks in your registers and keep a mostly consistent sound. I think in our lifetime and maybe a few generations, only Pavoratti was born without a pessagio. "Singing on the pessagio is something akin to the feeling of holding two oppositely poled magnates together, constantly adjusting toward a point of balance under the threat that at any moment the two ends will slip apart." (Christian Huebner). Pavoratti apparently did not have to endure this, but the rest of us do. Less eloquently said, singing on the pessagio hurts.

Blend also means managing your consonants, to produce a sound with as little noise messing up those lovely vowels. The dreaded 's' must not hiss endlessly, dipthongs which just aren't pure vowels and constrict your sound can be moderated to something easier on the ear (and easier on the vocal mechanism), and those 'er' sounds can be opened up to 'ah' to sound appealing and ultimately, more natural.

As a group, you've really got to start and stop together or else it's just campfire singing. Get louder and softer as one to express highs and lows to impart emotional power or delicacy. Color your voices darkly or brightly together to express gravity or lightness. Do all of these things and stay on pitch, and you will move people. That's what you want to do and this is basically what is called bel canto. It requires more than a guitar and a hairdo. If you can cover these fine points, follow these rules, something "beyond the norm" will happen to your audience. You will get under their skin and move them more deeply. You will evoke tears, laughter and goosebumps.

Listen to your favorite performers and you will hear them breaking the rules, no question. But you will also begin to notice how they break the rules to a purpose, and how they honor those rules more often than not.

Mantras for the new year

How do you achieve this? As a director, you can rant and rave. To some extent, you need to do this to demonstrate that you are serious about your requirements. But the primary problem is breaking years of habituation. You will only get so far ranting and raving. I realized two things, and they have become my joint mantras for the new year:

1) Old habits die hard, but die they must!
2) The way you practice is the way you play.

Both points are quite obvious, as they should be. The first goes to the heart of setting standards and insisting that your singers adhere to them. This means using every trick in the book to bring the need for re-habituation to the fore. And where do you do this? Well, in rehearsal, of course. Why wait until you sing a concert recording and then point out the flaws? It's a useless way to learn.

Here's my new approach. Listen to those concert recordings and choose several aspects that need improvement or development. Don't choose too many - pick only 2 or 3. Notice how I only have 2 mantras for myself? Then find pieces in your repertoire that afford a rich opportunity to drill on those aspects, and work those repeatedly, getting the standards in the mouths of your singers. Yes, it has to be learned in the body - that's where habituation exists. You can't tell your folks they have to do this or that and simply expect it to happen. You can ask them what you want and they will parrot what you said. Then they'll go and sing it the way they always do. Their habituation is a more powerful force than your feeble rants. You have to re-habituate them in their mouths and in their bodies.

If you ever quit smoking or started an exercise regimen, you will know this is going to take a while. As the first mantra clearly states, old habits die hard. Habits take 6 weeks to break or to make. Write it down and put it on your 'fridge.

Translating to the playing field

In New England this year, we saw Matt Cassel take over for the injured Tom Brady. As Matt emerged as a first rate NFL QB in the early part of the season, he began to talk about adjusting to "game speed". Your singers face the same issue of "game speed" in performance as an NFL quarterback on Sunday afternoon. Cassel's skills and practice standards were always high; every coach he ever had has said so. When he had to take the field and lead the Pat's his practice discipline was sorely tested. He was able to do what you need your singers to do - translate good habits at practice into solid performance at game time. Look at my mantras again. Translate those into your way of doing business.

Whiffenpoof 100th gets underway!

The Centennial kickoff concert

The kickoff concert beginning the one year celebration of the 100th took place at Woolsey Hall on January 31. I rushed to put my plans together in the last weeks, knowing I just could not miss this. The original group had formed in January of 1909, so January 31, 2009 seemed the perfect date for this concert.

What a turnout! Some 2400 people packed Woolsey Hall. It took over an hour to get everyone seated. I was unable to secure reserved seating and ended up in the 2nd balcony. In Woolsey, this is the nosebleed area. But I could see everything and Woolsey's acoustics are fantastic.

As I read over the program, I saw some of my buds, some classmates, others teammates on the Songbook project, were performing. First, the Replicants, a quintet doing a handful of the songs done by the first Whiffenpoofs. My excitement about what they would perform began to grow as I realized I had only recently been asked to engrave some very early arrangements.

Waiting for the audience to filter slowly in, I began to jabber with the lovely young undergrad sitting beside me. We had a little exchange about the upcoming performance, I got to brag about working on the almighty Songbook and how my buddies and colleagues would soon be on that stage, singing music they had probably learned from my charts. She acted interested for a bit, and then her older sister leaned over and said, "Isn't my baby sister smart? She's in the eighth grade, you know!" We all had a big laugh on that one.

Finally, the show begins

And then, it did indeed happen as I expected. My buds sang the songs I had engraved. "Old Grey Bonnet" and "When Pa" which I had engraved in the run up to this concert, and "And When the Leaves" which I had puzzled over in the Songs of Yale. It turns out these were among the very first songs the founders experimented with developing this new sound. The performance flowed through the years from 1909 to the present, through all the decades with the SLOTS and other alumni groups covering the entire breadth of the 100 year repertoire. All the songs I had engraved, and essentially had learned, note for note, part by part, verse by verse, all were poured out before me. I soaked them up as few people ever could - knowing more than any man deserves to know. It was rich.

Then the Whiffs of 2009 capped the show, and again I was blessed to know this repertoire just as intimately. But this time, I also heard the inaccuracies here and there that have crept in during years of singing from unreadable charts.

Whenever the Whiffs perform on campus, one of their singers has a job to dress outrageously - he is the group "Turkey". I had not realized this tradition which began with my 1973 group had been carried on to this day. But as the Whiffs marched on stage and I saw one guy in a costume that made it appear he was crouched inside a golden cage and being carried by a gorilla. I instantly knew what I was looking at the group's Turkey. In my group, Turkey wore white sneakers to every show, which looked pretty outrageous with white tie and tails. These days, I learned a different costume is rented for  every on campus performance, and the budget numbers thousands of dollars.

Did I mention the group sang incredibly well? This is an exceptional band of Gentlemen Songsters and they brought the house down.

Singing from readable charts

In literary analysis, I had learned that when ancient texts like the Old Testament were passed along by oral tradition, passages that were complex or incomprehensible were often "glossed" over time. Scholars are able to identify these glosses through various means, one of which is comparing various transcriptions and looking for points of deviation. In any case, I could hear glossed sections in some of the music in this show. We had glosses in my time, too. There were sections of the music we just did not get or maybe could not read. We might have heard these sung in the oral tradition and sang it as we'd heard it, or in some places we invented our own glosses.

There are probably sections of some arrangements that have not been sung as they were intended since their first performance. Is any of this bad? No, not really. Often the glosses are clever inventions to fill in a gap that can't be groked by a group. But some strong and powerful intentions of the arranger are lost, and sometimes that invention is far superior to any gloss.

So our work will restore these original intentions and inventions. This is especially gratifying when I get to meet the arrangers now, shake their hands and tell them we've unearthed their original work. I met one of them at the After Glow party that evening.

Black, black, black is the color...

If you know the Whiffs, you probably know "Black Is the Color". It was arranged by the great Fritz Kinzel '58. I spotted his name tag and introduced myself. Our Songbook musicologist, Charlie joined me and we engaged Fritz in a spirited discussion of his work, of the legendary 1958 group and also discussed the stunning performance abilities of our host 2009 group. What a treat! I wanted to ask him about the strikingly modern and nearly incomprehensible chords he used in Black, and somebody brought it up before I did. Well, he said, those aren't any true chords. They are color splashes I made up. The fact that anyone can actually sing these chords is a testament to the abilities of Whiff singers over the years. Fritz is also the arranger of "Johnny One Note" and "Delia". I always loved "Johnny One Note" but did not appreciate the craft of the arrangement until I engraved it a couple months back.

My New Arrangement for the 100th

To cap the evening, I gave Pitchpipe Brian Mummert a new arrangement of mine, which I dedicated to the Whiffs on their Centennial, "Angel Eyes". I'm giving them right of first refusal on a piece I began developing a couple years ago and has evolved and been refined up to this moment. What a thrill it would be to hear the Whiffs sing another arrangement of mine, this one from the 21st century!

Whiffenpoof Songbook Driving to Completion

Marshall Bartholomew and Fenno Heath

The 20th Century was a time of expansive growth in collegiate choral singing, and particularly in the years following the Second World War. As I continue to engrave Whiffenpoofs music from across the Century, I encounter numerous post WWII pieces that capture the very distinctive ebullience of that era.

As college singing exploded in the 20th Century, the position of choral director at great universities grew in importance and impact in the wider world. Yale's Marshall Bartholomew is conspicuous in this regard, having published two editions of the "Songs of Yale", one in 1934 and another in 1953, which became college songbooks at many universities. When the late Fenno Heath took over, he inherited this rich tradition and continued to enhance and develop it.

As Yale admitted women in the late 1960's, Fenno had his hands full creating a new repertoire for mixed chorus. Yale men had this rich and deep tradition of songs, among them songs that made great good fun college life. Luckily for everyone, Fenno Heath reworked much of the cherished repertoire for mixed chorus. A new "Songs of Yale" was brought under our beloved Fenno.

Songs Every Yalie Loves

A couple of humorous songs every Yalie knows are "We're Saving Ourselves for Yale" and "Daddy Is a Yale Man". These were songs written by Yalies about being Yalies, poking fun at their college experience and made real crowd pleasers. Both of these songs came out of the Whiffenpoof repertoire, and are among a group of songs from the post war era that got folded into the immortal core Yale repertoire. Both were written by men who were likely classmates and pals of Fenno Heath, while Marshall Bartholomew was still directing the Yale Glee Club. These songs are on my desk now.

The "Missing" Link Returns!

Robert F. "Missing" Link's "Song Fest" was among this group of music, as I mentioned before. Another piece from that manifesto, "The Old Songs" landed on my desk a couple weeks ago. Some of those songs made the Yale Songbook, some made the Whiff songbook, and some just keep floating around campus.

Sacred Texts

What is it like engraving songs with this much tradition, songs that are beloved by generations of men and women for the last 60 years? It's amazing. I get to look at versions with the original markings of the arranger, songs that were later revised when folded into the "Songs of Yale" in 1953. I also consider my work will sit on pianos of some of the best a cappella singers and arrangers the world has known.

But more than anything, it means it has to be really good. The charts have to read well, express the energy and delight of the music, solve problems for singers and describe performance nuances that would otherwise be forgotten, things I don't know but things other members of the team know from being around longer and compiling massive archives. It's a job I take quite seriously. We're hoping a lot of people will enjoy a good deal of fun singing out of this book!

"To the Sky" is coming!

We're still pushing to bring home 23 cuts on the "To the Sky" CD. Like many things in life, if one thought about the enormity of this task, one would never begin. I don't mean just the recording work. Think back with me to 2004 or 2005 for a minute....

The Blue Dream Begins

In 2004, I was still dreaming of singing in an a cappella group where I could contribute my directing skills and hear some of my arrangements sung. The dream was fuzzy and back then, my life was a mess. It was a dream I'd had for many years, but one of those "Yeah, like that's going to happen!" kind of dreams. I had a few arrangements I'd worked to completion, but no idea how I would go about forming a group or building an actual repertoire. I had been singing with Polymnia Choral Society for a couple years, and the tenors I knew were interested in starting something. But you gotta have 4 parts, and that means basses! The idea needed more momentum - I needed to believe it was possible and I needed basses!

In 2005 Saki, a friend from Polymnia Choral Society, asked me at one of the rehearsal breaks if we could get a bunch of guys to sing some a cappella stuff, and it was like a spark that hit dry tinder. Saki knew the basses and had some pull with them. Yes, he could deliver 6-8 men in "the basement". So it happened. We mounted a couple songs and made them work. People heard us and they liked it. They wanted business cards and bookings. And we had two songs....

How Much Work Is it?

So like I said at the outset, it's a huge amount of work. You start meeting every week and learning stuff. Some guys drop out, others join; things change. You try to figure out how to get 40 minutes of music memorized across 15-20 people and figure out how you're going to look like something of a show.

I went for what I call the "just add water" approach: take 18 guys who need about 18 songs. Get them from ignorance to knowledge as fast as possible - from not knowing how to entertain to being entertaining - from no repertoire to a set list - in less than no time. How do you do that? I decided to fill things out quickly with sea chanties. Why? Because the ensemble needs to learn the chorus once while one soloist has to memorize the 9 verses and then you got a song. It's manly and people will sit through it. Do that a few times over, spice it up with a few spirituals, gospel and rock/pop tunes and you got a repertoire.

Then arrange like your pants are on fire and see what holds up in rehearsal. Spice up the repertoire as fast as you can with anything that sticks. Take it one month at a time. Find a few good arrangements that suit your group at the retail outlets and work them in.

Reaching Out, Going Beyond

Then go beyond. I decided to make contact with some ringer arrangers and develop relationships to foster new work or revive lost work.

First, I made contact with Walter Latzko the arranger for The Chordettes. It was a couple years ago, and my guys needed good, secular Christmas music. I had fallen in love with Mr. Latzko's work (you know him from "Mr. Sandman" and "Lollipop, Lollipop") many years ago as a child watching The Chordettes on "The Arthur Godfrey Show". I asked him to arrange "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" which became his 979th arrangement (completed in about 2 days flat!). Later, he and I reworked it to suit my group of amateurs to an excellent result.

Then, through the Whiffenpoof Songbook project and the SOB Songbook Restoration Project, I reconnected with some incredible vocal arrangers from the last half of the 20th Century whose work had largely been mothballed or retired. These guys have been incredibly generous of their time reviewing my work, but also sharing new stuff or arrangements in their attics. A few have arranged or collaborated with me on new works.

Pants On Fire

Meanwhile, with my pants afire, I worked developing pieces I heard performed by some of my favorites artists like "Eddie From Ohio", Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, Ray Charles, Son House and The Sensational Nightingales.

After a few years of this, the repertoire becomes seriously spiced up! Over 4 years, we have laid some serious pipe. We are singing some incredible music. You will hear this on the "To the Sky" CD.

There may not be 23 cuts on the final CD. But once we boil it down, I promise you you will get a solid sense of Blue of a Kind. You'll hear the roots of this entire story on the CD, and you'll hear where we are going.

To the Sky, Alice!

There are so many hours of work put in by the guys to make this CD complete; so many dreams dreamt over many years. Visions developed, ideas realized and crystallized in long hours of drill and practice, rehearsal and performance, review and reevaluation and finally, standup time in the studio. "To the Sky" will echo the expressions of men on decks of sailing ships, men who worked railroad track, men who loved women and succeeded or loved them and lost, men who longed for freedom or for salvation, men who yearned to be with their God or with their girlfriend Under the Boardwalk. It will tell a lot of stories.

But one story it will tell is that of us becoming Blue. This is the Blue foundation - the beginning of our story, years in the making. Years.

Bob

Trouble Soon Be Over

Blue of a Kind singing at the recent Mayor's Emergency Fund telethon where we offered some hope as well as a challenge to viewers to call in pledges while we sang, matching them dollar for dollar. The telethon raised money many times over its' goal to help local folks having hard times and we were proud to be a part of it.

Trouble Soon Be Over posted to YouTube

A video of Blue of a Kind performing "Trouble Soon Be Over" is available on YouTube. You can just click on the title to view it, or search YouTube for "Blue of a Kind".

Second tenor, Ron solos on a recent Melrose MA TV telethon for the Mayor's Emergency Fund. We made a challenge to callers to do a dollar match on all pledges made while we sang and the calls spiked! The telethon raised a sum more than 4 times it's goal. We were proud to be a part of it.

Blind Willie Johnson's song goes back into the 1920's. This treatment is based on Geoff Muldaur's way of performing it, with a little fancy footwork to make it work for a cappella.

Bob

Blue of a Kind CD project - Michael Clem and Eddie from Ohio

Home Stretch for Blue of a Kind CD, "To the Sky"

We're tracking the solo overdubs, doing little fix ups and preparing for the final mixing and mastering. I gathered some images and ideas and tossed them over to our graphic artist, 2nd tenor Bob Griffin. Bob drove rough ideas to realization. Once he made his presentation, we had a unanimous conclusion: the CD was going to be entitled, "To the Sky". Wait until you see it!

The imagery is stunning, and the font and design decisions were not only professional, but inspired. He connected with the concept.

A trip to HarryFox.com and I was able to secure licenses for the "intellectual property". You need to set up an account (it's free) and then you can search their database for the composer and songs. If you don't find the title or artist there, you still have to track them down. I rely on HarryFox, but there is often someone "outside the box". On the Whiffenpoof CD, this was Fred Hellerman, who wrote "Delia". On this project, it was Michael Clem of Eddie From Ohio, composer of "Walk Humbly, Son".

Eddie From Ohio Rocks!

First, let me say I'm a huge fan of this band. They are 4 diverse talents each of which composes for the "best band you never heard of". In truth, lots of people have heard of them. Blue of a Kind has been singing one of their songs, "Walk Humbly, Son" for a couple years, ever since I heard EFO sing it on a CD I bought from them at Club Passim.

Michael Clem wrote this song. It's full of his slightly offbeat humor, but has a powerful message. I had to do some heavy lifting adapting it for men. In the EFO treatment, Julie drives the melody in the stratosphere. I also wrote to EFO back then and bought the official chart so as to align myself with what Michael was doing harmonically. EFO and I had a little email exchange and they were excited that we were mounting the piece.

Now, it's going on the "To the Sky" CD. And I was not able to locate Michael Clem on HarryFox.com. So the rule is: find the composer and make a negotiation to give them their due. You can look on ASCAP, but I haven't yet figured out how to actually pay the composer there. It must be easy, but....

So I visited the EFO web site and sent an email via their "contact us" link, explaining what we're doing and how I want to pay Michael for his beautiful work.

This morning, he wrote me back. I only have to attribute the song correctly and send him a copy of the CD. He's flattered and pleased that we want to cover his song.

One of the great things about this job

Being a musical director, you get to realize projects over 6 months or a year's time. You get to herd cats, week in and week out. You get to rant and rave, and you have to keep it fun. Don't get me wrong, it is fun and I understand where my guys are coming from.

But one of the great things about this job is getting a response like that from Michael Clem. Or writing to Geoff Muldaur about "Trouble Soon Be Over" to tell him I am arranging the song after his treatment and would he be cool with that, and he writes me back saying, "Have at!" These guys just love doing what they are doing and are downright glad that folks want to cover their stuff.

And they know who we are, that we're just a bunch of guys with a couple hours a week scratching together all the money we made in the last year to make a CD, sell it and have our little place in the sun. That's pretty cool, don't you think?