Hello everyone!

ronfriedland — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:48:34 +0000

I thought I’d take a shot at this blogging stuff…

In this inaugural blog entry, I’d like to write a bit about choosing material for a variety band…

If you’re reading this, you know that our band is called After Babylon. We’re a group of people with diverse musical interests and lots of musical capability. We focus on a wide range of material to appeal to audiences at events ranging from club gigs to wedding receptions…

One would think it’s easy to pick songs to play… there’s millions to choose from, most people know at least hundreds, if not thousands, and at any particular gig, you’ll only need two or three hours worth of material. But, it’s not so simple!

We play music from many different genres… funk, pop, soul, blues, rock, R&B, country, etc. etc… everything from Stevie Wonder to Delbert McClinton to The Beatles to Wild Cherry to Joss Stone to KT Tunstall to Buddy Holly to The Dixie Chicks to… you get the idea!

The difficulty lies in the fact that there’s SO many great options – picking just a few tunes is nearly impossible… put five or six musical people together and ask for a list of songs to play, and without any effort at all, there’s more songs in the “let’s play” list than you can possibly learn!

And along with choosing tunes to please the audience, it’s important to have fun musically at the same time…

Yes, we play Mustang Sally… nearly everyone loves Mustang Sally, and it’s a great audience participation song … but we like to stretch, too! So we’ll also put a Herbie Hancock/John Mayer tune in the mix…

As much for our own amusement as the entertainment of the crowd, After Babylon will frequently put an unexpected twist into familiar tunes… creating a medley, adding bits or pieces of one song to another, taking a pop song and making it a bit more country, or just throwing in some extra harmonies… fun stuff!

Our song list is always evolving; trading old for new, tweaking to taste, and just keeping it fresh.

I’d like to encourage any of those reading this to feel free to suggest songs for the band to learn… it’s nice to integrate our audience into the band experience…

Thanks for checking this out… I think it went pretty well for a first effort…I’ll blog again soon!

Ron

Hello Babylonians!

afterbabylon — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:28:09 +0000

Well I promised this blog a long time ago. Finally got caught up enough to set it up. I’ll try to keep it updated. Of course the only way to do that is to put a daily pop-up reminder in the Outlook calendar. Let me start off by welcoming After Babylon’s new bass guitarist to the band Bob Green. Two Bob’s now! That won’t be confusing. Gonna need to come up with a fun nickname for at least one of them. If you’ve got any ideas, send them along. PS. Here is a picture of the new Bob at the Navy Ball. Yes, he’s still in the Navy and stationed in Colorado. Go figure.