Vocal Blog – all about vocal and A cappella music

Video improview by Florian Städtler

The House Jacks, American a cappella pros have toured Europe on a regular basis. This time we saw them in Freiburg, Germany where they did a showcase at the Internationale Kulturbörse, a convention of artists, agents and buyers.

For three days, the Kulturbörse offers hundreds of showcases on three stages, the mini-shows restricted to 20 minutes of performance for each artist. Most of the groups or soloists try to press a maximum of their assumed highlights into this slot to impress their audience. Not the House Jacks.

The a cappella quintet (including CASA luminary Deke Sharon) completely surprised the audience by using up the oh so precious showcase time for a interactive musical request programme.

So we heard unique and completely improvised (!) versions of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal”, an untitled song by Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young and Austin (Willacy), musical gems like Falco’s “Amadeus” and – hard to believe – German pop singer Herbert Grönemeyer’s “Flugzeuge im Bauch”. Jake Moulton, the group’s beatboxer did the lead vocals on the quickly translated “Airplanes in My Stomach.”

The crowd went wild and Sebastian Schröder (www.kulturbeutel.net), the Jacks agent was quite busy after the show. Half an hour later I went to see them with my video camera. Although the quality of my camera work is very modest, we thought we should share the meeting with you, hope you enjoy it!

Did you like this article? Do you think there are groups or people who should be featured in the Vocal Blog interview series? Do you want to interview someone for Vocal Blog?

If so, feel free to comment to this post or send your ideas to info@vocal-blog.net. I’m looking forward to your feedback, let’s present remarkable concepts and people of the vocal music scene and get it all connected.

FSt

Florian Städtler

Video Interview with Swiss-Columbian Beatboxer Camero

Hi everybody,

this is the first in a series of short video portraits of great vocal an a cappella groups. At Europe’s hub of culture marketing, the Internationale Kulturbörse Freiburg we had the pleasure of seeing a showcase of another rising star in the growing European beatbox community, Swiss-Colombian beatbox and comedy virtuoso Camero.

If you know great singers, vocal groups or choirs, make a comment, send a mail so that we can get in touch for a another volume of “3 Questions, 3 Answers, 1 Song”. And if you think you have something to say (and to sing) what the Vocal Blog community should know about – send us an e-mail to info@vocal-blog.net.

If you want to share great ideas, concepts or offer practical help to other singers, arrangers, composers, producers and promoters, post it at our facebook group Vocal Blog and become a member.

And if you can’t get enough and are already using twitter, you can find us there, too: www.twitter.com/vocalblog. We’re happy about so much positive feedback, so many great artist joining the network. Thanks for your contributions!

Florian Städtler

Vocal Blog evangelist