The life of a musician

I have just had a typically strange and gloriously diverse weekend of being a musician. I guess this is why I love doing what I do, gets me out meeting all sorts of interesting people, especially Brighton people, and always has me on my toes, not quite knowing what I will be doing next. Prime example, a gay Brighton wedding reception at Latest 7. My brief was to simpy accompany four singers who were happy to rehearse beforehand and who had music. Simple. Turned up for rehearsal and there is one nervous guy who does indeed have music for “It had to be you”. We ran through no problem. Then the groom arrived. He had promised to sing his new groom Nina Simone’s version of “He Needs Me”. Well, typical Nina Simone, the chords, beautiful as they are only sketch out the harmony really, and so most of the time we were totally at sea. Managed to work it out between us. Then I was told that there would be a couple of other people who were professionals and so would just come up and sing a standard, and that I could wing it!

Confident as I am in my abilities as a pianist, there are few scarier things than having to immediatly accompany a singer, who usually has a set idea in their heads of how the song goes according to their backing track or regular musician! I made the tragic mistake once of accompanying a singer in a restaurant in Amsterdam on the spur of the moment. We did “I will always love you”. I proceeded to jam and wing my way through it, but omitted the painfully long and drawn out key change. Whoops. Singer and accompanyist in different keys never a good idea. That was a long time ago.
Turned out that there were no other people wanting to sing, so I played my two tunes and disappeared.

Then Sunday, I was back at Latest 7 for a first rehearsal of the very moving “Songs for the Betrayed World”, which is a collection of pieces by Bill Arnette from poems on the holocaust.  We are performing it at a venie in Essex later this month.  It was a great rehearsal but I was plagued by haunting images….of the gay wedding the previous night.  Excuse my shallowness, there were some poignant holocaust images also, but they got a bit lost in the irony.

Tonight improv rehearsal with the Maydays. Bring it on!