Latest from our friend Rob, with a young student

[Chesapeake]

[Chesapeake]

From Rob's Facebook:

I work with a lot of young folks who are wanting to pursue a career in music. We work on ear training, transposition, substitution theory and arrangement as well as technique, but for those who sing, we work on vocal phrasing. As poorly as I sing due to my adenoids, my work coaching vocal phrasing and harmony arrangement have always been a large portion of my business. My dad gave me great advice when I was young. He told me not only to think before I speak, but equally important, to read before I think. To apply this to music, I would advise young folks to learn the phrasing of great singers. The young lady you see here has been working on vocal phrasing and we have been studying the phrasing of many singers. Perfect pitch and great tone are wonderful things, but the rhythmic phrasing of a singer adds so much to the performance. Toria LeGris has been working with me for several years and has been very open to listening to all of my favorite singers, (Peggy Lee, Connie Boswell, Bea Wain etc.) and had done very well in imitating the essentials but we have also been working on R&B techniques and she did a great job learning Sunday Kind of Love by Etta James. I wanted to keep moving in that area and picked a song that she had never heard. As a young guy, I had an old 45 of Charlie Rich singing Mohair Sam, and though a lot of people recorded it afterwards, nobody seemed to match his performance so we went through that tune and got what she could use and then by attrition, she added her own style in parts. Since I haven’t been doing many YouTube vids lately, I thought I would film a little session we did and share it. Not exactly from the hit parade. I don’t think this tune has been popular since the 60s, but I have always been a fan of Dallas Frazier’s songwriting and I still like listening to Charlie Rich do it on YouTube. Here it is, for those who’d like to hear it; Mohair Sam.