Vocal Blog | The Vocal, A Cappella & Choral Music Online-Mag

by Florian Städtler

This story begins in the middle of 2010. On our way to another European a cappella network meeting, Tobias Hug (Black Forest-raised & London-based bass with The Swingle Singers) told me of a new all-female vocal group he discovered in London.

OK, this pic does NOT show the band, but four Swingle Singers (Tobi’s the one on the right) with an unknown die-hard fan.

Where was I…ah yes…Tobi, the world’s greatest vocal and a cappella networker and also a highly talented scout told me of Bellatrix, the female beatbox world champion.

This video of Belle Ehresmann, Guildhall doublebass student, has gone viral quite a while ago. But Belle is not only a human beatbox and lipbuzz virtuoso, Tobi told me. She put together a five-piece all-female, vocal beatbox group. “You’d better check out these insanely talented girls before someone else does”, that’s what Mr. Hug told me. But I was busy as always and already taking care of booking for five international a cappella top acts, so I just didn’t manage to follow up right away.

But my old choir buddy Tobi can be persistent if he really thinks that something is worth being like that. And so he kept me updated on a regular basis until I searched the web, found rough, but fascinating videos of The Boxettes and was finally hit by their sensational video single “Free” . That was – if I remember it right – in the beginning of January, and I had decided much earlier to do two things: See and meet the group at the London A Cappella Festival (12-15th of January) and bring them to Germany’s top showcase events, the Kulturbörse Freiburg.

To make a long story short, it was a great night at King’s Place: Neo, Alyusha, Harriet, Yvette and Bellatrix are young, sexy, charismatic (despite their age) and most importantly: truly talented and musically original. We have nothing like this in the EU. Nor in the States. Probably not in Asia, Australia either. Well, to be honest, their show is far from being perfect. This group is a raw diamond yet. But the singers are 100% authentic and there is only two ways that you can leave a Boxettes concert: Confused because this doesn’t fit into your world of vocal and a cappella music. Or enthusiastic that there is a band that seems to bring a whole new groove and sound to this art form.  I generally love artists who make at least 20% of the audience look like living question marks and shake their heads in doubt and disbelief. Because these are the same bands that make 80% of the people dance and bang their heads in pure joy. That’s what the Boxettes will soon be doing to many more people all around the world. And probably/hopefully they will reach a much broader, pop audience.

Naturally7 live on stage

Speaking of a vocal group aiming at a mainstream pop audience, there’s one group that has been going that way for years and is probably today’s most successfull vocal group: Naturally 7, led by vocal music mastermind Roger Thomas. What happened after my London A Cappella encounter with The Boxettes (+ The Swingle Singers, The Real Group, Witloof Bay and many more aca-people from all over Europe), is a kind of fairy tale. Or maybe a science fiction. Yes, it reminds of the incredible space ship “Heart of Gold” in Douglas Adams’ cult novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The engine of the ship is based on a technology called “The Infinite Improbability Drive”, which makes it possible to cover unbelievable distances in no time. But it has a second effect. On their journey from the place where the Earth used to be (before it was destroyed to build a hyperspace byway…) to “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, the most improbable, unbelievable and mind-boggling things happen.

Why am I telling you that? Well, read on what happened.

When we were checking our diaries to make The Boxettes’ continental premiere happening, I discovered, that on the two days before the Freiburg showcase, Naturally 7 had two gigs very close to Freiburg. When I told Tobi about that, he acted very quickly. Of course he and Roger Thomas met before (there’s a video on YouTube with N7 singing a song backstage at a Michael Bublé show at the O2 in London – the The Swingle Singers being their audience) and so Tobi tried to get in touch with Roger right away. But nothing happened for 5 or 6 days. We had to book flights as they became more expensive every day…and right after we had booked the air tickets from London to Basel/Freiburg Tobi forwarded me THE E-MAIL. It said: “The girls can do a half-hour show at Denzlingen and Stuttgart opening for N7.” Well, rarely did I change flights so happily…

Naturally7 & The Boxettes, Stuttgart/GER

The rest, they say, is history: The Boxettes flew into Basel, met the boys and more than warmed-up the Denzlingen crowd. After the show we celebrated Roger’s birthday with a very special birthday cake (no alcohol, no nuts) served by the ultimate N7 fans Vera Yu and @Laydee_Tea who probably saw their 693rd show of Roger and the boys. On the next day I had the pleasure to be the band bus driver to Stuttgart where the girls rocked the sold-out house and jammed with Roger backstage before saying Farewell around midnight. We arrived in Freiburg around 4 am, knackered but happy. Find many more pics and a backstage video of the Naturally Boxettes meeting at the Vocal Blog Facebook group. And be sure to check out the blog post Roger Thomas dedicated to The Boxettes shortly after the two shows in Germany.

Finally the group had the opportunity to present their show at the Kulturbörse Freiburg in the 1st A Cappella Special presented by SpielPlanVier and magenta concerts. The triple showcase featured Freiburg local heroes Acoustic Instinct, a beatbox-impro-comedy duo, The Boxettes and Dutch a cappella comedy pop act, iNtrmzzo (currently participating in the Dutch version of The Sing-Off). What a night! The house was packed, the stage looked great and the audience was enthusiastic how different and colourful contemporary a cappella can be. It goes without saying that this all ended up in a nice little Dutch-German-British after show party.

On our way home we were so hungry that we stopped at the nearest fast food restaurant and when we had eaten, we realized that the girl’s wireless equipment was gone…you should have seen Trevor’s face at that particular moment. But two phone calls and a friendly chat with a Freiburg cab driver later made him all smiles. All the stuff was found and returned, which meant that The Boxettes weren’t broke before their career took off.

And that’s  the end of this first chapter of my Boxettes story – great stuff (quote Neo)! And thanks so much, Tobi, for keep pushing me. Let’s keep pushing vocal music to ever new areas and helping talents like Neo, Yvette, Belle, Alyusha and Rhiannon to  get on with their careers.

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Have you seen The Boxettes live? What do you think makes them special? Would you call their music a cappella at all?

Let me know what you think, I’m looking forward to your comments!

reflections on George Chambers’ blog post at Cham Chowder

Introduction by Florian Städtler, Vocal Blog.

This discussion is far from old, our American aca-friends, twenty years ahead (compared to most EU scenes) in reflecting on the art form, have debated this again and again: As singing a cappella is an art form including styles, compositions and sounds from the Middle Ages to Electro, from the Baroque miracles of Bach to post-modern beatbox urbanism, will this extraordinarily diverse form ever attract more attention by mainstream media and audiences?

(Oh my God, I used the terms “art form” and “mainstream” in the same paragraph!)

So let’s be a bit more precise: We certainly don’t expect Take Six to be on page one of the tabloids, it’s not our goal to see King’s Singers centerfolds in teen magazines and we probably won’t see The Sing-off replacing football, baseball, hockey news.

But what we sure want is (more) media attention. Without media exposure it’s hard to sell anything. So it’s all about getting the music into mass media, which is not exactly easy for three main reasons:

Firstly, everybody wants to be there. Never have there been more pr agencies (with much bigger budgets than yours and mine) and pr departments pushing and shoving to get their message across. Secondly, people simply can’t take more information. You can call it information overload or filter failure – people just can’t consume more bits and bytes and if they try to, they will forget very quickly. The third reason is the basic problem of the a cappella scene already mentioned above: Singing unaccompanied is not a style. It’s a technique. And listeners don’t really care how the music’s made they hear on their radios, iPods etc. – as long as this music makes them feel good.

That’s why despite the difficulties explained above there are huge opportunities for the art form of contemporary vocal, a cappella and choral music. It sounds like bad (business) news, that this music is and will probably always be a micro-niche of the national and international music markets. The good news is: This micro-niche is huge, as today we live in a global village. Also – with beatboxers and studio gurus pushing the limits of a cappella singing further and further – listeners will soon not be able to tell if this is “really a cappella”. Just listen to Naturally 7’s “Vocal Play” and you know exactly what I mean.

Come on, singers, arrangers, conductors, composers, agents, managers, promoters and all the other a cappella activists, I want to see you join forces and go for new ways of communication using the power of the internet, international travel and the growing cross-border a cappella network.

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Find below an article written by George Chambers, a member of the English University a cappella group “The Oxford Gargoyles”. The article is George’s premiere as a musical blogger and it reflects nicely some of the aspects that make it difficult even for a well-known vocal group like The Swingle Singers to get their piece of the media action.

(See one of the things, the group did, to show what it can do: The Swingles promo video “Snapshots”.)

And here comes George’s post, thanks for sharing!

George Chambers, singer with The Oxford Gargoyles, first-time VB guest blogger

George Chambers’ blog post, first published November 22, 2010

The Swingle Singers are one of those established musical institutions that the music world seems to have forgotten. And why do I start this first blog on a rather Victor Meldrew-esque statement? Because last week I witnessed what has to be the best concert of my a cappella life… and yet nothing has appeared in the press. In fact, UK a cappella gets hardly any press coverage whatsoever. I suppose part of the problem lies in its placing in the media – where do you list a cappella concerts? They sit awkwardly on the fence between pop, classical and jazz, but surely that is so often their charm.

Personally a couple of numbers really did it for me – Sara Brimer’s haunting solo in Nick Drake’s ‘Riverman’ effortlessly ebbed and flowed its way around a simple but haunting waltz-like accompaniment. From my Gargoyle arrangements I’m always worried of over-arranging… but this proved quite the opposite. I don’t know the arranger, but I know they’re probably prime Swingle stock. In comparison I’m a bit dubious about the Swingles’ and Richard Niles’ new ‘Romeo ♥ Juliet’ project which is a reworking of Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’. Do we need a reworking of West Side quite yet? Hm, I do wonder. I’m still actually quite enjoying the original. The Swingles performed the two complicated arrangements with vigour, but ‘complicated’ is where I think a problem is brewing. I’m all up for experiment, but I couldn’t help listening thinking ‘that’s Bernstein’, then hearing a flurry of crunchy extended chords thinking ‘that certainly isn’t Bernstein’. It may prove to be a blessing, who knows. At the moment it sounds jilted, and often complex for the sake of adding extra 9ths or 13ths to perfectly acceptable Bernsteinian chords.

I’m excited to see what the Swingles pull out of the bag for the next few instalments of  ’Romeo ♥ Juliet’. What cannot be argued is that no other a cappella group can claim to have such vivacious variety as the Swingles, or so I believe, anyhow. From traditional folksong arrangements to Corea with some well programmed Beatles pit stops along the way, the group provided the audience with a good two hours of toe-tapping tunes. This is there the Swingles really excel – they give the audience exactly what they want: highs of Glee-esque a cappella in the tour de force numbers such as Alexander L’Estrange’s arrangement of Quincy Jones’ ‘Soul Bossa Nova’ and ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’, followed by a few blissfully serene (with, of course, wonderful mood lighting to accompany) homophonic ballads to balance it all out.

The Swingles show how a cappella should be done, and to add to it all they are lovely people as everyone found out post-gig… We should be proud of our Swingles – I may have not seen any reviews, but for a performance like I saw, i’d be happy to give them five gleaming stars any day.

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You can reach George Chambers via http://chamchowder.blogspot.com/ or follow him on Twitter: @geocham. And – as always – I would be delighted about you commenting here at Vocal Blog, thanks for joining the conversation!

by Joanna Goldsmith-Eteson, The Swingle Singers

When we heard that the amazing Naturally 7 would be in good ol’ London town supporting Michael Bublé at the O2 (May 23) – we thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Having seen them twice before at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank and Fairfield Halls in Croydon we can safely say that you will have a night to remember.

Going to the O2 itself was an experience as none of us had actually been there before. It turned out to be a little like Disneyland for adults! Little ‘streets’ lined with planted trees and too many bars and restaurants to count. We even joked that we felt a little bit smug and important being in there for free as the lovely N7 guys had given us complimentary tickets! As we found our seats (in prime position no less!) we noticed the incredible range of ages around us from the young children behind us to the elderly couple in front of us. I personally don’t know Mr Bublé as well as I could so it was lovely to see the variety of audience he attracts.

When N7 came out they were of course as fantastic as ever. The sound was crystal clear – something we had wondered about as the venue was so huge. But they were completely at home in front of so many thousands of people. They were so humble and gracious and just a pleasure to watch. They even managed to get EVERYONE on their feet and dancing along – I have never seen warm-up/support group ever manage to get more than just polite clapping out of the crowds let alone people up out of their seats and grooving (young children and elderly couple included!).

The most wonderful moment for me was when they sang The Beatles classic ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. I am still in shock about Jamal’s incredible range and very jealous that he can sing a good 5th higher than I can! (When you’re a soprano it hurts that a man can beat you at what you supposedly do best!)

As for Mr. Bublé, he was very entertaining; a real showman who could probably be a stand-up comedian if he tried! His Michael Jackson impression and Ferris Buller moments were particular highlights. We were very impressed by his banter with the audience, very charming! And of course his chocolatey voice isn’t half bad…

Since the show, Naturally 7′s latest album Vocal Play has been given a good few runs on all our iPods – if you haven’t heard N7 yet you should definitely make it your mission to catch them as soon as you can. These guys are GOOD. VERY GOOD! ’nuff said.

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