Before I started playing Soprano with the Sax Bandits, from time to time I would perform publicly at charity events, contribute to open mic nights and entertain the residents at local care homes. It is without doubt that playing in the care homes boosted my confidence and encouraged me to play to more wider and diverse audiences.
Now that I’m retired I have no excuse but to expand my repertoire and push myself to perform on a more regular basis and explore new challenges.
A good friend of ours, Gary Roman, is a very well known local ‘Elvis’ entertainer (he also sings well known songs from other legendary artists). We have seen him perform many times and even booked him ourselves for various functions. He never fails to uplift everyones spirit and always gets the audience dancing.
It was whilst meeting up with him at a friends garden party last summer, we realised how amazing it would be if we could again get him to perform at The Windlesham Club And Theatre. After discussions with the venue we were given the go ahead to organise it in the hope we could attract as bigger audience as possible. Not one for making things easy for ourselves, we decided to make it into a Christmas event by decorating the hall and tables, providing complimentary nibbles, and adding myself on saxophone as an additional entertainer during the interval to hopefully widen the interest.
As our plans developed the interval performance expanded to a 1 hour slot, with a further 30 minute set of Christmas songs to be played on saxophone prior to Elvis’s first set. Gary knew that I played saxophone of course, and every time we went to see him perform at some local pub he would inevitably ask me if I had brought my saxophone along so I could play a couple of numbers – needless to say I never did!
As anticipated he did ask me to do a few numbers from his extensive repertoire in the evening. With no preparation and no idea what key these songs were in it was with some trepidation that I went back on stage. I made sure the horn microphone was muted and tried to find the right notes whilst his backing tracks were playing. I’m not sure what happened thereafter but my improvisation over a Showaddywaddy song and a couple of his other tunes seemed to work! Since he had his guitar to hand, I thought I would turn the tables and put him on the spot so I suggested we play ‘Dakota‘ by Stereophonics as a finale.
And what about attendance I hear you ask? It seems we should have had more confidence in ourselves, as not in our wildest dreams did we expect over 140 on the night, which needless to say presented us with another problem on how to comfortably accommodate them all! In this case though, a nice problem to have. Would we do it again? Well there have been discussions about a Cliff Richard and the Shadows tribute act (one of Gary’s latest projects). The Shadows are not renowned for having a saxophonist but they might just be tempted to squeeze one in for a few tunes – fingers crossed!
Brilliant, Paul, well done, it sounds like an amazing evening!