Ben Jones

Digging more, I've found some more old recordings, and wanted to share them... Hopefully you'll smile as much as I did upon finding them.

These are a bunch of recordings from (much) younger days, when I was a part of a barbershop quartet called "Perfect 4th," with friends Cody Whitlock (Tenor), John Muir (Baritone) and Andy Isbell (Bass). This was our first ever performance. We only performed one other time, if my memory serves me correctly. These are truly "rare" recordings!

Good morning! Welcome to my weekend. It's a brisk Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and I've decided to start my day with a post here.

I have some out-of-town followers that work "normal hours" (what's normal anyway???) who would like to know just why it is that Tuesday is my weekend. Well, here you go. I'll break down a typical week in the life of Ben for you here.

My week starts on Wednesday. Most days, I wake up, eat breakfast and work out (that's probably not true - we all work out less than we would like to...), listening to whatever podcasts I haven't listened to yet. I warm up in the shower or at the piano, and try to get some practicing in, which doesn't always happen. (A sidenote: my father always says that the most difficult thing about your twenties is finding the time to continue practicing your craft. It's very easy to let oneself ride on the work one did in conservatory... Counter that with what most conservatory students and teachers will tell you: We all finally learn to sing/play/perform once we're out of conservatory. Huh. Someone's lying here... [Sidenote to the sidenote: For a great article about conservatory life and what it entails, click here.])

In the afternoons, I'll read or take care of any office business that was left undone on previous days. There's great sun both on the couch in the living room and through the West-facing office window of my San Francisco apartment, so at some point I'll usually try to settle in with a good book in the afternoon. Otherwise, it's out for coffee and errands. Each day is different, but follows this general schedule: careful diligence in the mornings, energy conserved in the afternoons, and then performances or rehearsals in the evenings. Of course, if Beach Blanket Babylon is doing a rewrite, daytime rehearsals will get in the way of everything, and I'm off to North Beach for an afternoon with my favorite cast. This schedule took a bit of getting used to, but I'm still up with the sun most days, and trying my best to get the most out of this great city while I'm here.

St. Dominics Church

Show Boat concert from last week was reviewed in the Chronicle. Read the article here.

Saw Seal perform awhile back in the Bay Area, and I gotta say, I was impressed. I've broken down the concert into parts, and I'll discuss each here:

Music:
Seal has appealed to me since college, when I would "pregame" while listening to Seal and other artists with upbeat songs. I like his songwriting, but it's really his style that pervades even in the covers he does. This was no different at his live concert. I think it was the third song when an extended brass riff led to a silence, broken by his voice: "This is a man's world..."

...and the audience lost it. It was a well-planned and well-executed moment in live entertainment -- something for which I have a great deal of respect.

He performed a bunch of songs that night from his new album, "Soul." I have since downloaded and familiarized myself with it. It's a pretty good album of covers from the soul era in American music. There are alot of safe choices on the album, and it's not exactly as long as I would have expected, but it represents his vocal and musical taste and style well.

Visual Experience:
The concert was performed by Seal and a band of three. There were video screens behind the four, and multiple platforms for them to perform from and jump on and off of. Seal's microphone stand was an architecturally beautiful piece of curved metal. What most struck me, though, was Seal's performance. He acted the lyrics more than any other pop artist I've ever seen, and I've seen quite a few. One got the impression that the lyrics he wrote were also deeply felt, and that he wanted the audience to come away from the concert with new ammunition to use in the fights for Seal's favorite issues of the day... It's difficult not to be political these days, I suppose. But sometimes correlations between the sixties and now are just too much to think about while you're trying to enjoy a concert.

Wardrobe:
Seal was dressed neatly: tailored black jeans with a white button-down, striped tie and tailored vest. For his encore, he removed the tie and unbuttoned the buttons of the shirt down to the vest's collar. The sleeves of the shirt were messily rolled throughout. I really liked his outfit, and I've since yearned for the opportunity to wear something similar onstage. It seemed a sensible and comfortable choice for a long live appearance.

After a week of heavy lifting at Beach Blanket Babylon, I'm working this week on getting la voce back in legit shape for next week's concert with the Oakland East Bay Symphony. As a "crossover" artist, I have to stretch myself constantly just beyond my comfort zone. What I mean by that is that I have to find ways to sing what directors want in a way that is comfortable and healthy for me. Everything gets easier with time, and I'm finding healthier ways to sing "pop" all the time.

I was having a conversation the other day with a cast mate about Stephen Schwartz's Wicked, and the lead-female role that seems to be eating up singers left and right. We're hearing about friends who are in productions across the country and the vocal rest they're on because of this role. It's too bad, but composers are always trying to stretch the limits of the human voice, some more successfully than others.

Next week, I'll be singing a Jerome Kern concert with the Oakland East Bay Symphony. Ticket information can be found here.

As well, I'm preparing the solos from the Mozart Requiem for a concert with the Santa Clara Chorale later in May. More information on that can be found here.

It's always a difficult either taking time off (two days on for every day off...) or switching gears vocally, but it's getting easier each time I do it... Just have to stay healthy.

In other news, there's a choir I know of that's having tuning issues. I'm not an expert on ensemble tuning problems, but I do know that with my youth symphony, I face this problem particularly with the Woodwinds and Brass. The tendency, interestingly enough, when one is having trouble discerning one's own tone from that of a fellow musician (usually due, ironically, to successful blend) is to play or sing out of tune, in order to differentiate one's own sound from the other musicians'. Further, the tendency is usually to the flat side of the pitch, rather than the sharp side. I can imagine that losing one's hearing with age only exacerbates this problem, and so we find older singers singing increasingly flat, despite solid technique. I find that alerting intelligent students to this helps them to grasp the problem and attempt to solve it methodically. Hopefully this helps, if you're facing similar issues.

Back to the keyboard. Tonight it's Chabrier, at least, with the Youth Symphony!

I know. I can't believe it either, but I'm blogging about salsa.

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