| Greetings, everyone. The first thing I have to say is that I'm really glad that I'm sailing to Bermuda and not the Bahamas. The route my last ship was on is right on the path of all the hurricanes that are going through that area, and our former home port (Canaveral) experienced 120mph winds. I'm sure most of you are interested in what kind of music I play here, so here's an overview: Saturday, the first day of the cruise, is the welcome aboard show, which is pretty easy. We play a song to start things off, then Anchors Away, and then some ascending major chords while the Captain introduces people. Then we do a quick song (You Can't Stop the Beat) as a kind of preview with the singers and dancers. Sunday isn't too bad either. We do is two production shows entitled "Lights, Camera, Music." The show is mostly a bunch of songs from movies throughout history. We play songs like Hooray for Hollywood, Mr. Gable, a Moulin Rouge medley, the theme from Titanic, a Flash Dance medley, the Man of La Mancha, a Fiddler on the Roof medley, and a Chicago medley. Also included is a "Heros" medley, which starts out with I Need a Hero (which the dancers refer to as "I Need a Beer-o"), and goes through various superhero themes like those of Superman, the Batman movies, the original Batman show, Indiana Jones, X-Men, and more. Before the shows we play jazz for about 15-30 minutes as well. Monday, although light in terms of hours, actually is the night that kicks my butt. First we have two shows with a guest entertainer. For the first two weeks, we backed up Pingxin Xu, a virtuoso Dulcimer player. Born in China, he now lives in Canada. During his show we played music from various styles, including It's a Raggy Waltz, Czardas, Tie a Yellow Ribbon, and the William Tell Overture. Ping's show, however, isn't really that taxing (besides having to figure out how to double tongue on the flute for William Tell). What kicks my butt every week is our late-night Dixieland set. For this set we head upstairs to a smaller lounge and do a pretty informal hour of music. We never had a rehearsal or anything, but luckily you can get away with a lot in Dixieland music. Although we do have written out charts, with classics such as Hello Dolly and St. James Infirmary, we use them mostly as a starting point. It's definitely one of my favorite sets we do, but about half-way through my chops start to give out. Everyone's usually toast after this show. Because of other activities, there's usually not many people in the audience, but the people that are there are usually knowledgeable and appreciative. Tuesday has been a day off for the last couple weeks, but that's changing now. The only thing we had that day was to back up another guest entertainer, Joe Mulligan. His show consisited humor, where he would make songs up from suggestions of style and topic from the audience. Fortunately for me, his show only required the rhythm section. Joe is gone now, however, so we may have to back up a different entertainer next week. Wednesday is also a pretty enjoyable day. We do two early evening jazz sets, where we pretty much just jam for 45 mintues in a small lounge while the guests are waiting for dinner. I've started trying to write 3-horn arrangements for us to play, and my goal is to write one every week or so. We'll see how that goes. Later that night we have our second production show, "Jump Jive and Rock & Roll." This show starts out with medleys of big band era classics like In the Mood, Sing Sing Sing, and various others. Then for some reason we go to a Captain Kangaroo section, followed by Howdy Doody. From there we proceed to a 50's medley including School Days, and a bunch of other songs I forget the title to. After that is Shout and a 60's medley including such songs as Stop in the Name of Love, Californai Dreamin, California Girls, , Surfin USA, and River Deep Mountain High. We end up with American Pie, MacArthur Park, and the finale, I'm So Excited. Strangely, I spend about half the show just sitting there and not playing. For some reason I have even more rests than the brass players. What's nice, though, is that we only play this show once per week because of Harbor Nights, where local merchants fill the streets and hock their wares. Thursday is a fairly taxing day as well. The easy part is a presentation known as "Baked Alaska." For both dinner seatings, we go in and play fanfare-ish music for the final formal dinner of the cruise. All the servers parade around with some dessert item, and we play things like the theme from Rocky, Oh When the Saints, and Auld Lang Syne. It's kind of silly, but the guest seem to dig it, and it only takes a couple minutes. After that we have our final production show, "Broadway Classics." Songs we play include On Broadway, Hello Dolly (4 parts), Tommy, Movie Star, Grease (3 parts), 42nd Street, Cats, and finishing up with Phantom. Overall this show is quite a blow, with very few rests thoughout and lots of flute and clarinet work for me. Friday, the last day of the cruise, is pretty easy as well. All we do is play at two farewell shows, which usually consists of a band feature (such as St. Thomas), a play on song or two, and backing up the guest entertainer (which was Ping). Overall, the playing schedule isn't too bad. One thing that's somewhat annoying though is how we always have to do rehearsals around noon. This also includes the production shows, which some of these guys have been playing for three months already. The brass players just sit there and read a book, but we're working on being able to leave after a short sound check. Even including rehearsals, though, we never work more than 5 hours a day, probably totalling 20-25 hours a week range. I can't really complain. So, there's my long-winded but mostly complete overview of what I do here. More on other stuff later. Brian Einstein Lassiter |