Christmas comes but once a year – thank Santa and all the angels for that, most music teachers would say. Not that we’re particularly Scrooge-like or miserable, but we are worn out from the intensity of so many performances in a short time.
Last Thursday I went to the Under the Stars Christmas nightclub, where two of the bands I coach were performing. Sparkle Sistaz made their live debut in front of 450 excited clubbers, and it was wonderful to see how the girls shone in the spotlight. It was a shame that two of the band members couldn’t make it so we two tutors had to fill in. On the recorded track the girls play all the instrumental parts and sing, and they wrote the song too.
This group has only been running since February and has had a few changes; they have really developed and can now perform independently and we wanted to show that. It’s a minor consideration, really; the crowd loved the show and the band loved being stars. I hope someone took some good pictures of our musicians’ fabulous smiles.
Clubland Detectives have a few performances under their belts now, although we’d not done a nightclub gig at the Hubs before (only at the City Hall, darling). When we set up the group two years ago we only had four people and now we have ten. They chose to do only two songs this time, the oldest and newest, and it was an excellent set. We had been doing a lot of intensive rehearsal, not just of the music, and the words, but the changeover from one song to another, talking to the audience, swapping instruments and so on. This really paid off, resulting in a much tighter set and great audience response. It’s a band full of people who like jamming together, which is brilliant, but performance requires a different attitude.