Playing the Excelsior last night gave me some pause to reflect on my experience joining this interesting group.

The Street Art of Newtown

Posted on Jun 01, 2010 - 07:08 AM

Posted on Jun 04, 2010 - 09:16 AM

Obviously whoever had recently owned it had no idea what it was. It had a crappy student mouthpiece (a 7d, like a peashooter) with a crack in it, and they had put a ‘nick’ in the tuning slide, like that was how you did it. I had to rescue it. I offered the guy a $1000 bucks cash and he took it. It had been there awhile.

Fifteen years previously I had played trumpet in bands, some popular, mostly as “what do I do with my life” after school ended. Now though I had totally no chops and I had just spent a grand. So I thought maybe I can play along with tracks at home to see if I can play again. Initially most people who heard me were unimpressed, but over a few weeks of face muscle exercise, my sound started to come back. I went on like that as a stress reliever for about 4 months.

I took a trip to Adelaide to see Mum and Dad and there was a downstairs wind and brass shop in Grenfell Street. They also did second hand stuff and in a rare but wonderful event they had (still in the boxes) Bach 1C and 3C mouthpieces. These have a nice deep wide cup and a slightly narrower but still large cup respectively. They are great firstly for classical and big sound work and secondarily for rock and session playing.  I spent up as the guy running the shop also had some second hand harmon, cup and straight mutes. I now had my full kit.

My investment was now about $2,000, and a lot of practice time, so I thought I’d better see if I could do some playing, just to see if I still could. 

The magazine for finding bands to play with in Sydney is Drum Media or online on Musolist.com. I tried both and got a response in both cases from the same guy, Daniel Morphett (El Duende).

I was invited to a gig in Surry Hills and later to Christian’s (the Violinist) house upstairs also in Surry Hills for a get together with instruments. Daniel had some trumpet parts written out and said that other parts were open to interpretation.  We played for about 3 hours, drank coffee and chatted.

The songs were beautiful. Not pretentious or ‘causy’, just well written music and lyrics about subjects that had occurred to Daniel as he was creating them. They had verses and I guess chorus structures but they had musical interludes, changes in tempo, stops and whatever devices necessary to make interesting music and lyrics. He obviously writes the song and not the band and I think their true test is sometimes I find myself humming key lines out of them in the supermarket.

The current band has an interesting sound. There are horns but they fulfil the role of polyphonic instruments most times rather than as a horn section. This way the group can provide many different combinations of the six instruments (seven if you count the Daniel’s voice), lending the subtlety or power to whatever is the demand of the song. So the lines you get to play on the trumpet can be stirringly marshal, on the edge of jazzy or my favourite being able to play the trumpet in a lyrical style more like the cornet* soloists of the late 1800s.

There are no backing vocals, the complimentary parts being provided by instruments, although the scope is there. It is as full or as empty as it needs to be. Sometimes members go offstage as the song demands. There’s plenty of variety.

The current line-up has Daniel Morphett (Guitarist, Vocalist, Composer), Garry Manley (Bass who is leaving), Christian Rosenmai (Violin), Steve Foster (Sax/The Funky Plumber), Chris Auld (Drums) and myself Virgil Reality (Trumpet).
We have played a number of gigs in many of the more indie pubs around Surry Hills, Newtown and the inner city. We’ve/I’ve added to the album ***‘Fleeting Glimpses’ (which I did the cover and album layout for) where I played on several of the tracks. Now released since Sept 2009. We’ve recorded a 3rd album of Daniel’s songs,  that is an even more orchestrated effort where I even got to play my Bb Baritone.

Two weeks ago we went out in the drizzle and later at the CAD Factory to record some footage for an upcoming video clip for the song “Creatures”.

I play in a lot of groups now and with DJs and I do it all just for the fun of it and to have something outside of my other great love my career. I meet these wonderful people, I get to be taken somewhere in my head, I’m entertained, challenged and I have to step up. Basically it’s great.

I can’t help feeling like I know something more than I did previously. Thanks El Duende.

FaceBook Photo Album: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=163609&id=678983997&l=b7f62f374c

*The cornet is a brass instrument very similar to the trumpet, distinguished by its conical bore, compact shape, and mellower tone quality. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornet

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maynard_Ferguson

***Fleeting Glimpses on iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/au/album/fleeting-glimpses/id334049956

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