
I’ve just spent a happy Sunday with SpecsAppeal, working with them on techniques to help them build their unit sound as a quartet. I’ve known them for some years, having arranged for them a number of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually coached them. I have enjoyed seeing how they have grown as an ensemble over time, and we all came into the day with a sense of alignment between what they are currently focused on and what I felt I could help them with.
Sometimes a coaching session is all about exploring a particular repertoire, and you might have thought that this might have been the case on Sunday as I had arranged both of the songs we worked on for them. But in fact, there was relatively little they needed from me in terms of concept or shape; they had picked the songs and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them, so other than helping them execute those intentions more effectively in a couple of places, there was very little we did that wouldn’t apply to any song they might have chosen to sing.