You never know where your passion will take you, especially in New York. I've discovered over the years that barbershop quarteting can take you to some pretty unexpected places and you meet some interesting people on the way. Full Story...
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Every harmony group knows a special bridge, train station or urban grotto with a great echo and a passing crowd to draw. Sure, We've performed at weddings, July 4th celebrations, corporate event, historical societies functions, old time concerts and a lot of contests and such.
Being part of Manhattan's Chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society even afforded, guys in our chapter the privilege of performing in a quartet in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall and recently Symphony Space. I've even had my 30 seconds of fame (but no fortune) doing an a cappella version of theme music for WABC-TV's World News Tonight as a Polka for satirist, writer and producer, Barry Mitchell, filmed in a barbershop.
But I never expected that my modest hobby of barbershop quarteting would land me singing, for example, to a loving couple having there bared rear-ends tattooed while broadcasting on New York drive time radio, or that I'd be backing up an electrified bohemian grunge band, in a dingy, lower east side dive appropriately around the corner from CBGB's (home of Punk Rock). Yup, green Mohawk haircuts and straw hats making music side by side for a seriously pierced crowd!
Then too, there is a fortuitous association and friendship I made, through barbershop quarteting with jazz musicians, like arranger, bandleader, impresario and street-learned American ethno-musicological scholar, Dan Levinson. Dan's interest in and recordings of popular American music from the 1920ts and my experience, with him, recording in two quartets (with Eddie Holt, Larry Bomback, Brad Verebay, Scott Brannon, Paul Santino, and Bob Kelly) gave me an understanding about barbershop I music never anticipated. He also introduced me to a lot of great, but overlooked American popular songs, New York and Jazz history.
There have been tender moments in intimate places too that I never though I'd be singing: Like delivering a private singing Valentine to newly engaged college students in their basement flat or a private birthday performance for an unbelievably appreciative elderly couple who didn't appear to leave their home much anymore. I've had a glimpse too of how the other half live, while singing for New York blue bloods in their posh Upper East Side penthouse. And forget about the reception we four men got while singing a loving birthday song to a gay designer in his busy, chintz draped, garment district showroom!
This month my new quartet, Beer & Roses, had the distinct honor and unusual pleasure of being part of New York's seriously aspiring avant-garde art scene. Joe Montgomery, a painter and developing installation artist hired our quartet as part of an MFA degree thesis he is completing at Hunter College. The quartet (with Steffi Weisman substituting on lead for Kevin Feltes) sang old fashioned barbershop standards in an art gallery jam packed with vibrant art cognoscenti, surrounded by Mr. Montgomery's paintings, photographs, objects de art including a unique video recording devise he created for the installation and used earlier in the week to film the quartet (with Feltes on lead). .
Mr. Montgomery, with counsel of performance artist, Constance De Jong is examining the influence environment, context and perspective has on the viewer's response to his work. " It's like the way a movie is changed by the addition of a sound track". Not that our songs directly related to any specific subject in his work but the hip visitors (all clad in black) seemed to like his work and the effect our singing had at the happening.
His art and his earnest use of barbershop are not entirely divorced from his experience. He was an undergraduate at Yale (where a cappella groups -including barbershop quartets - abound), his father is in the ministry and his musical surroundings, growing up, were in America's musical heartlands: New Orleans and Nashville. Heady as the air and art may have been, Mr. Montgomery and his work are idiosyncratically romantic, sentimental and sincere; not unlike our music. So maybe it wasn't such an odd place for us to be singing after all.
Every year, and perhaps as many as 3 times a year, a chorus goes into competition to find out how it 
Guests and first time visitors to the Manhattan Chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society don't usually know just how deep and wide the iceberg below the surface is that anchors it's shining top, The Big Apple Chorus. In fact, the Big Apple Chorus is a small part of an amazing, expansive and tremendously supportive organization filled with talent, tools, resources and opportunities for the avocational male singer of every age. It's a little hard to get your arms around just how vast (yes, vast) the opportunities are in just a few casual, Monday night visits.
