The Viper and His Famous Orchestra, Millennium Park, Chicago (July 12, 2009)
The setting was one of the great pleasures of playing with The Viper and His Famous Orchestra this past Sunday, July 12, at the Great Performers of Illinois 2009 festival in Chicago. The festival was held in Millennium Park, and our stage was right next to the Cloud Gate sculpture by Anish Kapoor more familiarly known as the “bean.” (That’s us playing to the right of it in the picture above.) Just beyond the bean was Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain in which my daughter, Kip Rainey’s daughter, and daughters and sons everywhere could play when they got bored with us. Behind us was Michigan Avenue and the Chicago skyline. And in front of us was Dan Peterman’s 100-ft.-long bench and picnic table, which proved indispensable to getting a crowd to hand around while we played.
The picture above was posted to Facebook by Erica Mueller O’Donoghue. More photos to follow.
I’m finally getting around to chopping and screwing some material I recorded on December 12, 2008 in the cabana behind Mike Paul’s house in preparation for a show The Viper with playing with the Paint Branch Ramblers at the Home Grown Coffee House in Accokeek, Maryland later that evening. I also recorded the show. But in a misguided bit of engineering, I pointed the microphone directly at the ceiling and, so, captured a lot of crowd murmuring and vocal reverb and not much else.
In any case, here’s a rehearsal track of my opening song from that set, “The Viper’s Blue Yodel no. 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd” or “A Mole of the Blues”:
This is recorded live straight into Audacity using a single microphone for both the vocals and the baritone ukulele.
I’ve been doing versions of this since as early as 1997 or 1998. But in its finished form, I performed first at this same Home Grown Coffee House venue in February of 2007. At that point, my talk of leaving Maryland for Wisconsin and the danger of adjustable rate mortgages was purely speculative. But before all things must pass, all things must also come to pass. And that was the case by December 2008 when this song served as an actual goodbye to living south of the Mason-Dixon line.
You heard right. After many orchestra-free years, the universe will once again be subject to the dulcet tones of the full Viper and His Famous Orchestra band: Riley Broach, Ryan Jerving, Edward Burch, and Rob Henn, representing four cities and three states. But most of all representing downstate Illinois.
We have at least 5 shows set up at the moment, the most public of which are the following:
Sunday, July 12, at the Great Performers of Illinois Festival 2009, at Millennium Park (stage T.B.A.), 201 E. Randolph St., Chicago, Illinois, 12:00 noon – 3:00 p.m. The show is free and will feature a special set from Edward Burch, flown in like a secessionist lobster from Texas. For more, see the event announcement the event announcement on the Millennium Park site
Friday, August 7, 2009, Mike ‘N Molly’s , 105 N Market St., Champaign, Illinois, 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.
See Mike ‘N Molly’s
Friday, August 9, 2009, Mike ‘N Molly’s, special matinee show, 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. You know, for kids.
It looks like the July show, and likely the August shows, will feature an expanded version of the orchestra, with Tangleweed’s Kip Rainey and Rectangle’s Victor Cortez filling out the sound. Other special guests have been promised and will be delivered. Let’s hear it for all the great performers of Illinois.
So now you’ve got everything you need to enjoy Hanukkah with some “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke”: a recording by the Paint Branch Ramblers, a cheat sheet for singing and playing along, and even the lead sheet if you want to play the melody. What’s next?
Well, for the fourth night of Hanukkah, I’m posting a scratch track that I made very simply (recorded straight into the computer’s built-in mic) for the Ramblers to be able to hear and practice with when we were learning it. This is a slightly older version of the melody with one phrase that turns a different direction in the 7th bar than we do it now (see yesterday’s post for the details).
The instrument you’re hearing is the skin-head banjo ukulele I picked up some years ago at an antique shop in Kewaskum, Wisconsin.
In fact, the song was written not for the mandolin/violin tuning I use on the cümbüş, but for the basic D ukulele tuning (A – D – F# – B) of the 1927 Regal tiple that I used to have. A tiple – at least the early-20th-century American instrument that was called that – is a 10-string ukulele (four courses of 2 – 3 – 3- 2 strings each) that sounds like something halfway between a mandolin and a 12-string guitar. I’d found the instrument on e-bay and arranged to meet the seller in person on his way through Effingham, Illinois, at a Cracker Barrel restaurant (his idea). So, like the banjo ukulele, and like the vast majority of every instrument I’ve ever owned, I bought it without ever playing it first.
I’ve had pretty good luck with that, actually.
The melody of “Heyse Latke” falls very nicely into the ukulele tuning, and I’d written the song for the set I was going to play at my George Washington University Writing Program office holiday party, probably in 2005 or 2006. At that time, it was just an instrumental.
But while I was in another room socializing, I heard the the tiple, which I just had propped up against a wall, falling to the floor with a sickening sound. When I went in, I saw that the headstock – as heavy in relation to the body as you’d imagine a headstock on a 10-string ukulele-sized instrument would have to be – had very cleanly snapped off in just such a way that no one was ever going to be able to fix it.
So “Heyse Latke” had to wait for the Ramblers to come along to get a public hearing. (From the set list notes we keep on our band’s wiki, it looks like the first performance of it may have been on July 31, 2008 at the Riverdale Park farmers market. Nothing like Hanukkah in July.)
A while ago, after I’d written my Presidents day salute to two of our least remembered, least loved presidents, “The Fillmore & Buchanan March,” Riley Broach took the lead sheet I’d uploaded and scored the piece in Sibelius. (For the background on the piece and the primary documents in question, see my February 20, 2008 entry)
When I asked him if he meant in the style of the Finnish composer, he laughed uncomfortably and wrote:
While an arrangement in the style of our favorite Finn, Sibelius would be hilarious, I was only referring to the program which is entitled, in fact, Sibelius. But you probably know that and are being hilarious as always, though one never can be so sure with you.
Well, he can be sure, because here I sit right now, whistling Sibelius’s Fifth like I’m Morton Feldman or something.
Anyway, here is the arrangement of The Fillmore & Buchanan March in some style arranged using Sibelius.
It sounded great, and really funny. But I was stuck. Because the file exists in a format that this blog doesn’t seem to recognize, it wasn’t until I was living in this backyard cottage I call Ainola (though if I knew the difference, I’d probably call it Shainola) and figured out that I could record streaming sound using Audacity that I also realized I’d finally be able to share Riley’s gift to the world.
So here it is, in all its scored glory, “The Fillmore and Buchanan March.”
The Viper & His Famous Orchestra 