my early years of music school were steeped in vocal jazz music. i had the opportunity to sing in a vocal jazz group that used vocal percussion, bass, lead pop singer kind of stuff, harmonies, blahblahblah. i learned a ton in that group - performing, ear training, vocal placement, etc. the people i studied with (jason smith, phil mattson) have that market cornered and understand the arranging side of things - kind of a behindthescenes look at successful vocal jazz. i was pretty into it then, and quickly fell off the wagon when i began to study saxophone and instrumental stuff post-swcc. (yet i still have a special spot in my heart for this music, albeit relatively small...)
sonja and i parked it in front of the tube with our yummy supper and watched the groups perform. i have a lot of friends who are still doing this music professionally - canada, east coast, west coast, commercial, indie - so i was secretly hoping i'd recognize someone on tv (i didn't - thankfully).
umm....barf. these groups were pretty rough. pitch was all over the place, vocal percussion left plenty to be desired, lead singers were pooping out, but choreography was good. geez, when are we going to take singing for what it is and not add the dance moves to it for credibility. and the judges....huh. not sure what to think of it. it was nice to see the boyz II men guy again, but he wasn't necessarily contributing a lot of constructive criticism (plus, he wasn't even the good guy in that group). the pussycat dolls chic was unnecessary, except for the fact that she unzipped her top to let the girls out. she reminded me of little mama from the mtv dance crew show; snazzy sort-of-current lingo with a nice outfit yet no real substance. i was really impressed with ben folds. he had intelligent comments, insightful music info, clever jokes, and delivered it all with a positive-yet-unrevealing candor.
and of course, there's nick lachey. who would i prefer in that role? mario lopez (again?) ryan seacrest (again again?) regis? rosie? with the way our country is unraveling, i sort of figured we'd see a cameo by barack obama.
you guessed it - i'm tuning in tonight.
Holy crap. You are right on the money. And while I want to rant about this on my own blog, I don't want to get into it with friends who are faithful to the the contemporary a cappella community.
ReplyDeleteThat's because I do know a bunch of the people involved in this show... the guy that did the combined group arrangement (and I suspect some of the arrangements done by participants), the group that did all the background vocal beds and bumper music (which was good), and a few others behind the scenes. And a couple months ago I got to work with Ben Folds a bit -- put together his background singers (myself included) for an Ohio show. So I was happy he came off as the only bright spot in this show.
Here's the problem as I see it...
This show comes out of the East Coast collegiate a cappella tradition -- not the vocal jazz tradition, and not anything like what Jason and others have been doing for decades. In the Ivy League men's glee club tradition, these sorts of groups were (and usually still are) student-directed, self-arranged, and more about putting on a fun show than doing great music or singing really well. Think of them as a cappella fraternities. So just like you won't find too many intermural or club football teams who can compete with serious college teams, you don't find many collegiate a cappella groups who compete with professionally taught, directed, produced, arranged ensembles.
What this show has done is take a variety of groups, none of which had to compete very much to get there -- they were *begging* for more participants to audition even up to the day they began production. Then they take these diverse groups doing diverse music and force them into the collegiate a cappella thing -- choreography, arrangement formulas, everything. This puts most of the groups completely out of their element, and for some lowers the musical bar quite a bit. For example, the barbershop group didn't sing their regular repertoire, but the songs and arrangement type picked out by producers. Likewise for the group from the Christian college, who is excellent when doing their own thing, but not so much when doing a pop cover. Then they made them all dance. Not cool.
I had a bunch of people asking me why I didn't audition my group, but I had a feeling the show would be like this. As it happens my group was at my house for an end-of-semester Christmas party last night, and after they realized how much worse than normal they'd likely have looked and sounded if they were participating, a couple of them thanked me for not submitting.
The upside is that I got the local NBC affiliate to do a feature on my group as a tie-in to the show. So I can't bitch too much.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to rant on yoru page a bit. Been a long time since SWCC. Hope you're well!