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I’ve just finished a gig with an Australian Balkan-elvis-impersonator. Highlights included ‘Viva Dubrovnik’ and Blue Suede shoes in 7/8.

pecktime wrote:Blue Suede shoes in 7/8.

Not many people know it was originally written in 7/8. It was later arranged in 4/4 to make it more commercially appealing!

I played at a man’s funeral. Played Come Sweet Death unaccompanied as was requested. The guy had grown up in Ohio, and wanted to be buried in Ohio (no biggie). Virtually everyone there hadn’t seen him in 20-30 years, and none of his family was present because they were all in their home state of Texas where he had lived and built his life for the previous 4-5 decades.
Additionally, the family couldn’t give me actual times for the service for about a week because they didn’t know when the service would take place due to the fact that he was still alive and weren’t sure if he was going to end up passing.

New flag pole installed at a strip mall. Brass quintet played patriotic music; mostly Sousa.

Two would count as semi-strange, I guess. Both paying, oddly enough. First was a brass quintet accompanying a carillon. The original plan - already done once by another group - was to place the players in the belfry, 120 feet up. A site inspection the day before determined my tuba would not fit through the access hatch, no way, no how. I was also not in the frame of mind to carry the horn without case or other protection, up twelve flights. So we did some hasty acoustic calculations, left us on the ground with our backs against a masonry wall, and had the audience seating equidistant. Coordination with the carilloneur was through a wireless mic. It worked, actually.

Second was with the same carillon, but this time a 1890s reenactment band, some of us had period instruments. That was a little weird. The quintet performance was more satisfying and may be worth repeating.

EDIT: It just dawned on me I had organized a TubaChristmas 12 years ago performing with this same carillon! How soon we forget...

Not me, but a friend of mine who used to be active in this group. In our university days (loooong ago), the theater dept. asked the music dept. to provide a tuba player for a play they were doing. He had to be a dancing, tuba-playing pixie in a green pixie suit. There were some, shall we say, "characters" in the drama department. None of us wanted to do it of course, so it fell to one of our freshman tuba majors. He was pretty good natured about it, and later jokingly referred to his "friends in the theatah". Not sure he ever forgave us.

My own strangest was playing with a small band for an outdoor wedding in the park. The bride wanted the "Marriage of Figaro" on the program. After rehearsing all those Bb scale-type runs on a CC tuba, I borrowed a BBb and saved my fingers. We were all invited to the rehearsal dinner of course, which consisted of hamburgers and hot dogs cooked by the bride's father on the park's public grills.

Oddly enough I have had one paying tuba gig. A singing telegram for a young man who was turning 30 and thought that his life was over. I went as an undertaker in my tails and top hat. Got him to fill out a form for how he wanted his funeral to go with al kinds of weird and funny questions, and then played taps for him. He and I had a good time which was good because nobody else showed up. I got paid so I must have done just fine.

Charlie C. Chowder

1) I play in this German band which (of course) occasionally plays Edelweiss. Only the band leader insists that every time the word "Edelweiss" comes up, that measure is in 5/4. It's actually pretty hip when everyone knows about it!

2) Famous tight-rope walker Philip Petit (walked between the Trade Center towers in 1974) was hired for a church event in Brooklyn. He wanted solo tuba as accompaniment for his 'walk', so I improvised by myself for 50 minutes to his shenanigans. Wasn't as hard as it sounds, but definitely different.

3) Being paid for "screech tuba" probably fits nicely under this rubric.

jperry1466 wrote:My own strangest was playing with a small band for an outdoor wedding in the park. The bride wanted the "Marriage of Figaro" on the program. After rehearsing all those Bb scale-type runs on a CC tuba, I borrowed a BBb and saved my fingers. We were all invited to the rehearsal dinner of course, which consisted of hamburgers and hot dogs cooked by the bride's father on the park's public grills.

Do you know if they are still married? If so, maybe playing "Marriage of Figaro" at outdoor weddings could be your little niche in the world of live music.

Hearing of the expensive tastes and tendencies of some weddings today, having Dad grill up burgers and franks in the park sounds so sensible.

Those of you who have been playing as long as I have, know that we can write a book on this subject. I think a thread like this popped up a while back and I might have posted a few stories there.

Certainly the unluckiest was a Serbian (or Croatian? or Albanian?) traditional wedding parade in downtown Cincinnati. We were to play on a cart, but I didn't find out until the last minute that the arrangement was for it to be horse-drawn. The driver had assured the booker and all who would listen (and me, who heard but did not quite believe after having dealt with a few horses in my lifetime) that the horse would be fine pulling a slavic band while it played slavic music. But within seconds the horse bolted, taking us the wrong way up 4th Street on a busy Saturday afternoon. He was kind of old, so he wasn't able to reach a whole lot of speed, but it took a few minutes to get him back under control. Several near-accidents but no real ones, nobody hurt but all plenty frightened -almost as much as the poor horse. So we ended up "hoofing" the parade route ourselves, close to a mile. I sure wish I had used a sousaphone. I hadn't even brought a strap.

I was a regular attendee of a poetry open mic in Olympia, WA while I lived there, and when the sign-up list was devoid of wordsmiths, I would often jump in an improvise a “tone-poem,” usually a minimalistic thought spiral on some short passage of an intriguing rhythm or set of multiphonics. Once they invited me to “DJ” the whole shindig, providing filler between performers by improvising “beatbox”-style. Fun stuff.

Does playing with The Scorpions count?

A heavy synth rock band once had me gig with them and improvise over them. It was an interesting experience nonetheless.

bloke wrote:I kinda forgot about this one...
The Rivermont Hotel (on the Mississippi River bluff...NOW: condos) was a Holiday Inn-owned hi-rise hotel, and Holiday Inns used to have its international headquarters in Memphis.
In the early 1980's, there was an INTERNATIONAL convention of Holiday Inn hotel managers there (they all brought their chefs with them, btw...AMAZING 6-continents buffets ) and a local guy booked only five of us to play ALL SORTS of international music. They had constructed this gigantic globe in the middle of the ball room with a Saturn-like disc around it (which rotated), we would stand on that disc (side-by-side) and play all sorts of international/ethnic music as we went around the globe.
Here's the rub: The people who hired us DID NOT KNOW that we were the same people over-and-over, and we were doing frantic costume/instrument changes back in a room, and coming back out as "another band from another country" over-and-over.

We knew how to party in the 80s!!

fenne1ca wrote:I was a regular attendee of a poetry open mic in Olympia, WA while I lived there, and when the sign-up list was devoid of wordsmiths, I would often jump in an improvise a “tone-poem,” usually a minimalistic thought spiral on some short passage of an intriguing rhythm or set of multiphonics. Once they invited me to “DJ” the whole shindig, providing filler between performers by improvising “beatbox”-style. Fun stuff.

All I can say is, “We knew how to party in the 80s!!”

Performing original Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-themed songs, with a Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-themed band, to a packed 700-seat auditorium. I hadn't (and still haven't) seen an episode of the show, but those folks definitely had.

I've done multiple weird gigs over the years.....

One of them was at a fish house (small seafood restaurant) out in the country with a pond in front. Our quintet played there several times before it went out of business. Honestly, the last time we played there the quintet did a crap job and the small audience wasn't particularly enthusiastic. It was like that most times. It was a crap gig with crap pay; it was literally a "gas money" type gig where noones heart was into it. And it felt weird playing in such a secluded spot at night. Even though the ppl working there were nice enough, the whole place amost had a "Deliverance" feel to it

The Big Ben wrote:

jperry1466 wrote:My own strangest was playing with a small band for an outdoor wedding in the park. The bride wanted the "Marriage of Figaro" on the program. After rehearsing all those Bb scale-type runs on a CC tuba, I borrowed a BBb and saved my fingers. We were all invited to the rehearsal dinner of course, which consisted of hamburgers and hot dogs cooked by the bride's father on the park's public grills.

Do you know if they are still married? If so, maybe playing "Marriage of Figaro" at outdoor weddings could be your little niche in the world of live music.
Hearing of the expensive tastes and tendencies of some weddings today, having Dad grill up burgers and franks in the park sounds so sensible.

Yes, almost 20 years later, they are still married and have careers that allow them to travel internationally. The bride was one of our students back in the day. She was a college music major at the time of the wedding but thought better of it later, which was fortunate for both her and music. Haven't had such a request since, although I've played string bass in combos for several other weddings. Playing "Figaro" on BBb tuba is a breeze; playing it on a CC requires what an old friend used to call "polio fingerings". The burger/hot dog idea was great and fit their budget. Just wish he had brought his own grill, but we survived it.

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