Playing in a Virtual Music Festival: The Cachaça Experience
Authors: Hélène Knoerr and Devon Woods
[email protected]
[email protected]
Date: November 25, 2020
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of Ottawa Jazz Happenings or of JazzWorks Canada.
It's already been more than a month since our Brazilian music group Cachaça performed at the first ever online edition of Merrickville’s Jazz Fest (MJF) — on its tenth anniversary. How time flies! But in that short month we have had lots of opportunities to reflect on our experience with the way live music is likely going to be for a while. So here is our story!
It was only in August that we received the great news — we had been selected as one of only five shows that would be part of the MJF lineup. We were also really excited about the format that the festival director and artistic director had chosen: a live, unedited recording session at the GigSpace, one of the best performing spaces in Ottawa, and this pre-recorded unedited performance would then be streamed as if it was ‘live’ in the slot that we would have had under normal non-COVID circumstances. Having tried live streaming with mixed results, we were quite happy with that alternative.
The biggest challenge wasn't the fact that there would only be five weeks until the recording session, or that we had no experience with this kind of format, or that the recording would only be one single, unedited take. For us, the main challenge was that there would be no audience when we were performing. Playing to an empty room is every musician’s worst nightmare. Any performer knows that the audience is our lifeline and our sustenance. We feed off the people sitting in the room filling the space with their energy: listening, reacting, and, later, commenting. That energy shapes our playing and nourishes this wonderful conversation known as jazz. So how were we going to deal with playing to an empty room?
Well, we are storytellers, so we decided to not just play our favourite tunes from our Brazilian repertoire; we decided to tell a story. We wanted to be able to engage our future, invisible audience with material that they were not familiar with and a life experience they could share and maybe relate to. We had done something similar with other configurations of musicians, including a musical subway trip through New York City, a dedication to Georges Brassens, and a musical cruise around the Mediterranean. This time, in a period where travel has become but a distant memory, we chose to take our audience on a virtual trip to our favourite music club in Rio de Janeiro, a little hole in the wall called Bip Bip, and to recreate its ambience not only by playing the music often heard there, but also by replicating the actual layout of the bar. After all, we were going to be on stage at the GigSpace, so we were going to act!
We first prepared by going back to the photos and videoclips we took every time we visited Bip Bip in Copacabana. We also researched YouTube for videos of Bip Bip posted by visitors and read reviews and articles about the venue and its notorious owner. We selected pieces in the three styles of music — choro, bossa nova, and samba — that were actually played during the themed nights. Of course, we had to arrange the pieces to work with our configuration. With only four musicians in our group we would not be able to replicate how a table full of musicians spontaneously plays a tune! But when we realized from our photos that the tablecloth on the bar's table, around which all the musicians sit and jam, was almost identical to one of ours at home, we decided to bring our own table and tablecloth to the rehearsal room, and to set up some (empty!) beer cans and water bottles in order to recreate the scene at the bar at the GigSpace recording session. Needless to say, this was not something the staff were used to, but they gracefully accommodated our unusual request. Our four musicians spread out around the table, which had the added bonus of making physical distancing easy and less artificial.
We spent a lot of time scripting our story because we wanted it to sound and feel personal. We felt it was important to bring our virtual audience into the experience we were recounting, as if they were walking alongside us in Copacabana. So we included our own memories of little things that we witnessed or that were a part of on our visits to Bip Bip. The challenge, with a one hour concert time limit, was to keep it short enough so that we would have time to play!
One thing we were not prepared for was where to look while playing. We had practised recording our rehearsals with three phone cameras, one facing us, one stage left and one stage right. We knew that we would be staring into an empty room, but we didn't know that there would be almost a dozen phone cameras staring back at us, all remotely controlled by technician extraordinaire Mike Mullin. Now the challenge wasn't that we had no one to look at, but that we didn't know where to look!
One thing that helped us to feel more prepared for such a totally new experience for all of us was Mike’s invitation, once we had completed a sound check by playing one of our tunes, to come into the sound room and see what it would look and sound like to our future audience. The sound and the filming were superb, making us look and sound so good and giving our confidence a huge boost.
It was interesting that on the day of the gig, rather than having to pack up and take all our equipment and instruments to the location of the live gig and set everything up, all we had to do was to sit back with a glass of wine for the unusual experience of watching our own show!
A big thank you to Pierre Monfils (guitar) and Andrés Navarro (percussion) for embarking on this journey with us!
Finally, here's a taste of Cachaça at the MJF:
Receita de Samba
Carinhoso
Hélène Knoerr and Devon Woods
[email protected]
[email protected]
It was only in August that we received the great news — we had been selected as one of only five shows that would be part of the MJF lineup. We were also really excited about the format that the festival director and artistic director had chosen: a live, unedited recording session at the GigSpace, one of the best performing spaces in Ottawa, and this pre-recorded unedited performance would then be streamed as if it was ‘live’ in the slot that we would have had under normal non-COVID circumstances. Having tried live streaming with mixed results, we were quite happy with that alternative.
The biggest challenge wasn't the fact that there would only be five weeks until the recording session, or that we had no experience with this kind of format, or that the recording would only be one single, unedited take. For us, the main challenge was that there would be no audience when we were performing. Playing to an empty room is every musician’s worst nightmare. Any performer knows that the audience is our lifeline and our sustenance. We feed off the people sitting in the room filling the space with their energy: listening, reacting, and, later, commenting. That energy shapes our playing and nourishes this wonderful conversation known as jazz. So how were we going to deal with playing to an empty room?
Well, we are storytellers, so we decided to not just play our favourite tunes from our Brazilian repertoire; we decided to tell a story. We wanted to be able to engage our future, invisible audience with material that they were not familiar with and a life experience they could share and maybe relate to. We had done something similar with other configurations of musicians, including a musical subway trip through New York City, a dedication to Georges Brassens, and a musical cruise around the Mediterranean. This time, in a period where travel has become but a distant memory, we chose to take our audience on a virtual trip to our favourite music club in Rio de Janeiro, a little hole in the wall called Bip Bip, and to recreate its ambience not only by playing the music often heard there, but also by replicating the actual layout of the bar. After all, we were going to be on stage at the GigSpace, so we were going to act!
We first prepared by going back to the photos and videoclips we took every time we visited Bip Bip in Copacabana. We also researched YouTube for videos of Bip Bip posted by visitors and read reviews and articles about the venue and its notorious owner. We selected pieces in the three styles of music — choro, bossa nova, and samba — that were actually played during the themed nights. Of course, we had to arrange the pieces to work with our configuration. With only four musicians in our group we would not be able to replicate how a table full of musicians spontaneously plays a tune! But when we realized from our photos that the tablecloth on the bar's table, around which all the musicians sit and jam, was almost identical to one of ours at home, we decided to bring our own table and tablecloth to the rehearsal room, and to set up some (empty!) beer cans and water bottles in order to recreate the scene at the bar at the GigSpace recording session. Needless to say, this was not something the staff were used to, but they gracefully accommodated our unusual request. Our four musicians spread out around the table, which had the added bonus of making physical distancing easy and less artificial.
We spent a lot of time scripting our story because we wanted it to sound and feel personal. We felt it was important to bring our virtual audience into the experience we were recounting, as if they were walking alongside us in Copacabana. So we included our own memories of little things that we witnessed or that were a part of on our visits to Bip Bip. The challenge, with a one hour concert time limit, was to keep it short enough so that we would have time to play!
One thing we were not prepared for was where to look while playing. We had practised recording our rehearsals with three phone cameras, one facing us, one stage left and one stage right. We knew that we would be staring into an empty room, but we didn't know that there would be almost a dozen phone cameras staring back at us, all remotely controlled by technician extraordinaire Mike Mullin. Now the challenge wasn't that we had no one to look at, but that we didn't know where to look!
One thing that helped us to feel more prepared for such a totally new experience for all of us was Mike’s invitation, once we had completed a sound check by playing one of our tunes, to come into the sound room and see what it would look and sound like to our future audience. The sound and the filming were superb, making us look and sound so good and giving our confidence a huge boost.
It was interesting that on the day of the gig, rather than having to pack up and take all our equipment and instruments to the location of the live gig and set everything up, all we had to do was to sit back with a glass of wine for the unusual experience of watching our own show!
A big thank you to Pierre Monfils (guitar) and Andrés Navarro (percussion) for embarking on this journey with us!
Finally, here's a taste of Cachaça at the MJF:
Receita de Samba
Carinhoso
Hélène Knoerr and Devon Woods
[email protected]
[email protected]