Schierer Space

Our premiere performance^[1] will be Tomorrow (Thursday), 7:30pm at the pavilion at Lakeland Park in Caz. We have great instrumentation and hopefully my chops will recover by tomorrows performance. Despite the release below, we probably won’t actually start playing until 7:30, but generally the lawn is pretty filled up by then. Keep your fingers crossed for no rain (or at least for it to be cleared out by then).

Official press release:

CAZENOVIA — The Greater Cazenovia Area Chamber of Commerce (GCACC) is presenting its 14th season of summer concerts in the park. The 2010 Oneida Savings Bank Summer Concert Series begins Thursday, June 24 in Cazenovia’s Lakeland Park featuring the Cazenovia Community Band from 7-9 p.m. This popular summer series will run each Thursday evening through Aug. 19 with the exception of a special holiday concert on July 4th, featuring three bands, followed by the community fireworks.

A rain date has been set for June 25 at Eastern Hills Bible Church in Manlius. The band will also perform at the July 4th parade in Cazenovia. Under the direction of Marv Arnold, the band will present a selection of favorites, marches and show tunes including John Williams in Concert (music from Star Wars, Jaws, etc.), Percy Grainger’s “Irish Tune and Shepherd’s Hey,” Sousa’s “King Cotton” and Delibes’ “March and Procession of Bacchus.”

All concerts are free and open to the public. Bring a blanket or lawn chair and enjoy a relaxing summer evening and concert by Cazenovia Lake.

1. There was previously a Madison County / Community Band, which sort-of disbanded, but this is officially a new entity. [↩]

Last weekend^[1] we took Nate out to Darien Lake to catch the Imagination Movers in concert. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a band from Louisiana that have their own Disney Channel show^[2]. They sing what I call pop knock-off songs. Not covers really, but songs in popular styles from the 80s and later.((The band members are roughly our age, so you tend to hear influences from various bands. It’s sort-of a personal challenge to try to identify the band or songs that would seem to be the root inspiration. We’ve identified pretty strong motifs from RunDMC, Devo, REM, INXS and others.)) The songs have messages suitable for kids and are generally pretty catchy. Let’s just say there could be a lot worse things to have Nate listening to.

Anyhow, we met my parents at Darien lake and braved the scattered showers for some amusement park time. Nate enjoyed riding the rides with everybody, and really enjoyed those he could do by himself.

At one point I got in line for a roller coaster and the others went on to the kid rides, so we were separated. I happened by the stage and saw the band doing a sound check. After that, it seemed like I kept running into them throughout the park. I was second in line for the front seat of the Mind Eraser when four members of the band^[3] were given a VIP insert to the front of the line. They seemed to enjoy the ride. ^[4]

I did too.

Later on we setup for the concert and braved the rain. We weren’t terribly impressed with the Choo Choo Soul opening act. It seemed a bit rigid, but then the crowd was pretty dampened by the rain.

K&R wait out the rain.

Nate weathers the storm while Gramma and Grampa look on.

The Movers put on a pretty good show, about an hour and a half and seemed to be making efforts to satisfy the relatively wet crowd. Nate hung in there pretty well, but it was late in a busy day so he had some slow points too.

The weather improved by the end of the show and they took time after to come out and meet the fans and sign autographs. Unfortunately, the random guy who took this picture managed to focus on the background… ^[5] I’m bummed because it is definitely a good shot that got away.

1. I’m only a week behind! [↩]
2. of the same name [↩]
3. Rich, Dave, Scott and their extra keyboard player who’s name I don’t know. I can only assume that Smitty was doing other things. [↩]
4. Sorry, but I only had my phone camera. [↩]
5. Literally, the center focus point is highlighted on the background threading between Rich and I. [↩]

As you may have noted if you follow K’s twitter feed, she and I went to a Syracuse Symphony Pops concert last night (Friday). This was not just any concert, but the Syracuse premiere of “Bugs Bunny on Broadway” conducted by George Daugherty. Essentially, there was a movie screen over the orchestra where the famous musical Warner Brothers cartoons were projected with the musicians playing the score.
I have to say that it was a challenge to decide whether to watch the cartoons or the percussionists keeping up with the pseudo-sound effects. The voice acting and true sound effects were piped in from the original animated shorts.
Although this was no high-culture event, it was great fun to see (and listen) to young and old appreciating the wacky stylings of Bugs and cohorts while listening to those now famous arrangements of classical pieces.
To open the concert, the “Flight of the Valkyries” was played to set the mood, and later the conductor asked the audience how many people thought “Vagner” vs “Kill da wabbit!” (the far and away winner of course).
To hear the live performance of the “Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera Doc?” was worth the price of admission, even if several cartoons were essentially played in their original form with the orchestra only opening and closing the cartoons.
One interesting piece of trivia: The famous opening chord that modulates into the Merrie Melodies (or Looney Tunes) theme is produced by an electric slide guitar. According to the conductor, they tried many different effects to reproduce this live before the original guitar was found in the Warner Brothers studios. When matched with an antique and temperamental amplifier… the magical sound is produced. I always guessed that this effect was produced by simply turning on a record player with the needle down. In any case the critical instrument was there, and the sound was richer than any TV reproduction can achieve.

In all, great fun and a memorable night out.