Ben Jones

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.

This is undeniably the best salsa I've ever had.

Ingredients: Organic Tomatoes (organic tomatoes, tomato juice, sea salt, citric acid), Organic Tomato Puree, Water, Organic Apple Cider Vinegar, Organic Dehydrated Onion, Organic Cilantro, Sea Salt, Organic Jalapeno Peppers, Organic Garlic Powder, Organic Cumin.

And check this out:

Find out where to buy it here.

I've been remiss... no posts in over a month!

I was sick for awhile there, with both pneumonia and some sort of flu, one after another. No fun at all. I've been playing more with my toy camera, but photoworks took a mail order and only returned my prints. They forgot the high-res scan cd, so I'm still waiting on that. I'll post them when they arrive. As well, my digital camera has been fixed (thanks, Best Buy, for honoring your no-questions warranty), so I'll post pics from that cam as they're taken.

March was busy, despite the sickness - much time in at BBB, and holy week to boot... I'm fully recovered now, and gearing up for two big concerts in May - Show Boat in concert, with the Oakland East Bay Symphony, and the Mozart Requiem with the Santa Clara Chorale. I've done both before, but I'm getting them back in my voice, or trying anyway, which isn't easy while performing at BBB. My voice seems to want to do one or the other, and not both at once. Ah, youth. I can't keep this up forever, but it's fun for now.

Took some time while I was in bed to join an activist movement of alumni from U of I, and designed a website to help them: www.savemensglee.com
It's pretty self-explanatory. The Glee Club I sang with in college is in some trouble, and we're trying to pull the ensemble back up to its former glory.

Finished a great book by José Saramago: Seeing. Read his book, Blindness, while I was in college. I would highly suggest both, if you're interested in literature at all. Saramago's insights are profound.

Fell in love all over again with Astor Piazolla last week, and I've been listening to his stuff on Pandora since.

Time flies. Thanks for reading.

So as not to clutter up the 'Audio' page on my website, I chose only to put up one of the commercials we recorded for Coors Light. Because you asked, I'll put them all here...

Props to Comma Studios, Chicago, for the recording and the mix.

Here's the 60-second "This Monday Night" spot:

Here's the 30-second "This Monday Night" spot:

Here's the 30-second "Great" spot:

Here's the 30-second "Cold-Activated Bottle" spot:

Here's the 30-second "Vented, Wide-Mouth Can" spot:

OK, I know I've been negligent here... I've been devoting quite a bit of time to this.

OK, I should have dug deeper in the first place... I found a bunch of old recordings that I'm somewhat hesitant to put up here, but I guess you'll find them interesting. Hopefully after awhile, they'll get buried in the archives of my blog, never to be seen or heard again.

Not sure what it is about keeping a blog that makes you put yourself on the line like this... I hope I don't lose any jobs over this singing...

These are the recordings I sang solos on as a part of the comedy octet, The Other Guys, I was in at the University of Illinois.
Here's Message in a Bottle, a Sting cover.

Every Breath You Take, another Sting cover

Rock with You, a Michael Jackson cover

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, a U2 cover

Waiting for You, a Seal cover

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a Beatles cover

Wouldn't It Be Nice, a Beach Boys cover

And now for something completely different...

These are recordings I made when I was a teenager... Amazing that I still have them. I wish I had recent recordings of these songs to put side-by-side... too bad.

These are excerpts of songs from the Broadway stage that I recorded with Tom Schleis, my first voice coach. You can hear how he worked on diction and effortless high notes with me... Fortunately, I think some of that still lingers in my singing from time to time...

Here's "Why God Why," from Miss Saigon

"Finishing the Hat," from Sunday in the Park with George

"Lonely House," from Street Scene

I was looking through some old files on my computer and found this. It's a video from a rehearsal in New York. I formed a quartet with three friends called The Suitors. We billed ourselves as a Professional Rat Pack Quartet. What a time this was.

Direct effect of the economic recession on a 65-member youth orchestra:

Lack of funding forces a not-for-profit organization to cancel a set of sectional rehearsals scheduled for this season.

It seems like a little thing, but it's the little things that add up to shape what this recession means for every American citizen. And for those of you who think this recession might go unnoticed by children, think again. They are as disappointed as I am. It's one less opportunity they have to get more attention from educators with smaller class sizes.