by julia | Dec 7, 2018 | Diary, Front Page, Singing, Uncategorized
In a dingy Viennese coffee house, the woman behind the bar isn’t just enjoying her playlist on the PA system – she is joining in, her grainy voice (Austrian accent fully Americanised) rising above the whoosh of the milk frother, ‘So rockabye, rockabye…’ I admire...
by julia | Dec 7, 2018 | Diary, Front Page, Singing, Uncategorized
I’m on holiday in Argentina. A steamy day in Buenos Aires and I spot a beautiful girl wearing headphones and little else shimmying down the street singing ‘I’m in love with the shape of you’. I am struck by the incongruity of the carrot-top Brit Ed Sheeran inveigling...
by julia | Jun 1, 2018 | Diary, Front Page, Singing, Uncategorized
It was her carer’s idea: at the day centre she could see that Paula became extraordinarily animated in my singing sessions – clapping and stamping and surging out of her wheelchair with pleasure. The worry was that soon enough her hat-trick of disasters...
by julia | Mar 17, 2018 | Diary, Front Page, Singing
I took ages introducing this Doris Day number into my repertoire – just too schmalzy, in my opinion. But once it was printed out, and I’d slotted in its three chords in the key of A, I felt as though I had always sung it. Since early childhood, I had known...
by julia | Sep 9, 2017 | Front Page, Singing
“You can muffle the sound of the drums, you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who can stop the skylark from singing?” Kahlil Gibran Over the summer I’ve been making music round campfires, in streets and churches. In churches there’s been...
by julia | Jul 21, 2017 | Front Page, Singing
IMPROV Last week was a good singing week – bounded at either end by a good solid Latin Mass (the first of which was a 4-parter by Palestrina, bliss), in the middle I did two pub gigs and a Cole-Porter afternoon, plus a day improvising in London. The improvising...
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