…Sing Sing Sing

1. We have some kick-arse jazz songstresses here in Oz.  I went to see Michelle Nicolle on Saturday, who has the brightness of Doris Day with the vocal playfulness of Ella Fitzgerald.  Another is Kristin Berardi, who brings a hint of the best possible brand of pop sensibility and playfulness to very, very smooth jazz.  And I saw Jacki Cooper a couple of years ago at Manly Jazz Festival, who can sell a song in a way to aspire to.  I wish there was somewhere in this town you could go listen to singers like these every week.  ‘Cause, dangnammit, it’s educational and I could claim it on tax.

2. Practice makes perfect - 10,000 hours of practice, in fact.  When my singing teacher mentioned these alleged ”10,000 hours”, I didn’t quite believe her.  Surely, I thought, it’s 1,000, not 10,000.  But no - 10,000 hours is exactly what the studies say. “You’ve clocked up a few this year!” she reassured me.  
I thought so too.  I did some calculation and found that for roughly 400 hours this year I have learnt and performed around 40 new songs (and still my repertoire blows – how does that work?) in four back-to-back shows, plus a few other bits and pieces.  Sounds like a lot, right?  It felt like a lot, starting the year with a shiny new approach to my voice, discovering new things, tossing aside preconceptions of the craft and of my voice,  getting ever-so-slightly better at reading music, being constantly thrown out of my comfort zone and into the deep-end, at home and overseas.  Well, if I continue THAT for a total of 10,000 hours, I’ll have all the muscle-memory, skill and stamina to “make perfect” singing BY THE TIME I AM IN MY MID-50S.  Awesome.

3. Over and over and over till I got it right.  I’ve resumed this playing-one-song-repeatedly thing I used to do years ago.  I don’t mean stuff that I have to learn – just songs that fit a mood or make me feel better or, especially, match the weather.  On a sunny day, Get-Well-Cards by Conor Oberst is one of them (FYI, I’ve just changed this link because the previous one was rubbish!).  I still can’t get enough of that song, even though the lyrics make no discernible sense to me.  It just sounds like sunshine, despite the fact that it talks about peacock people and sunscreen and wanting to wrap your head in a picket fence.