Backing For Cabaret Acts
It's a great solution for venues who want to put on a live show but are on a tight budget and can't stretch to providing a full backing band to play for all their singing acts. By employing me, it's only one musician to pay and one person providing all the music for each act, yet it still sounds like a full backing band, thus preserving the energy and atmosphere of each singers' live on stage performance.
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I generally provide the backing accompianment by playing my keyboards while reading from the cabaret acts own dots (i.e. sheet music) which they usually bring with them. However I really don't mind if an artiste doesn't have any sheet music at all - as long as I know the songs they want to sing I'm just as happy to play for them without sheet music.
This ability to play with or without sheet music has actually become an essential skill for keyboard players like me nowadays as the number of venues who put on regular live cabaret shows has dwindled in recent years and as a result of this so too has the number of cabaret acts who carry sheet music about with them to their gigs.
HOW I STARTED BACKING CABARET:
In the late seventies I decided to broaden my musical horizons so I took a course of music reading lessons with a wonderful teacher and professional trumpet player by the name of Eddie Clancy. Eddie was a real character and a bit of a legend in the Glasgow orchestra scene. Eddie had his work cut out when it came to teaching me because I came to music reading from the opposite direction of most people. You see, instead of the normal chain of events where a student learns to read music and then moves on to playing their instrument professionally, I had been playing professionally for years before I ever so much as looked at a piece of music manuscript or knew what the little dots meant!
Thankfully Eddie persevered with me and around 1981/1982 I began working as a backing musician, backing professional cabaret acts in a social club called The Auchinraith Club in Blantyre, a little village just outside Glasgow.
Back then drum machines were very primitive devices and sounded plain awful, a bit like someone hitting some old knives and forks against a tin can! So, if I was to be backing live professional cabaret acts, I needed a live professional drummer to work with me. A genial young man by the name of Ronnie Leckie had just quit a well respected local band called "Odds & Ends" and was available for the job so we became the resident backing band/duo at the Auchinraith club every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.
I know it sounds cliched, but working with 150 cabaret acts per year while having no more than 10 minutes to study each artistes sheet music before we went on stage and performed it was a fabulous training that stands me in good stead to this day.
In 1983 I left Scotland to live and work in Spain where I became an act in my own right but my love of backing other acts and working with other professional entertainers never left me. In fact, on many occasions, I organised concert events for local Spanish charities where I would provide the sole backing for a host of local entertainers who would give up their time to help me support these worthy causes.
I'm now back in Scotland and have been for many years and to this day I can sincerely say that it's still always a pleasure to walk on stage with a fellow professional and accompany them (even if we still only have 10 minutes to go through their sheet music or set list beforehand)!