As most of you know I have fallen into a musical life after my retirement. That’s not to say that I haven’t been doing music before, as I have detailed elsewhere, music has been an integral part of my life since childhood. Over the last few years, however, my music making has moved out of the classroom and into a more public arena. I have joined up with a bunch of retired and semi-retired musicians from around my area and we do concerts for elderly people in the various nursing homes around our area. Funnily enough, it’s really the first time that I have performed in public for many years and it has taken some degree of expertise to become used to it.
You see, you can get away with just about anything when you’re singing for a classroom full of kids. Most children are so delighted to actually HAVE some live music in the classroom that they will forgive you all sorts of errors and faux pas. In fact, most of the time they don’t even notice anyway. In public, however, a much higher standard of performance is required, more accuracy, better phrasing and all the niceties that go along with being a performer.
This honing of my meagre skills has been achieved through some gigs at my local coffee shop as well as our group’s regular appearances at some of the local folk festivals. But it is the nursing home gigs that are the most regular and which provide the best opportunities for me to work on my game.
Our concerts are usually about an hour in length and consist of some group songs where we all play together (usually well-known songs of the 50’s and 60’s with which the residents are very familiar) and some solo spots where each of us get to sing a few songs by ourselves. It must be said that we are fortunate to have audiences who are not too critical because some of the group songs can be a bit “scratchy” at times. However, as solo artists, we all try our very best to present our solo items as professionally as we can and, even though we know that many of our audience will not be too hip with what we are doing, we believe in always doing our best regardless of the audience.
Last Tuesday we did one of our regular shows at the Uniting Care facility at Unanderra, A good crowd was on hand as the staff had switched our concert day from Wednesday to Tuesday. Wednesdays are usually a bus trip for residents who want to go and many do so as a means of relieving the boredom of nursing home life. Having our concerts on the Wednesday did mean, however, that our audiences were usually small. Tuesday definitely seems to work better. Unfortunately it doesn’t work better for Henry, one of the members of our group as he has a regular commitment on that day. So we were down one member but we picked up an extra in the form of one of Elwyn’s students who plays ukulele which made a very pleasant change from the usual fare of all guitars.
I was especially pleased with how my solo set went. I sang the old Australian folk song, “Botany Bay”, the Chad Mitchell standard, “Four Strong Winds”, “Some days are Diamonds” and finished off with the Bruce Woodley/Dobe Newton classic, “I am Australian”
I do enjoy the nursing home gigs. I’d like to think that, if I was cooped up in a home like that, someone would be kind enough to come along for an hour every now and then and entertain me.
And, on that subject, and a motorcycling subject as well, this Saturday is our regular gig at the Hammondcare Home in Horsely, just down the road from me. Organised by Elwyn, from our music group, in association with the local branch of the Christian Motorcyclists Association, we gather in town on our bikes and ride out to the nursing home where we park the bikes in the enclosed courtyard and spend a couple of hours chatting with the residents and talking to them about bikes and whatever. Hammondcare is a dementia facility so the conversations are often one-sided and repeated each time we go but it’s still worth a couple of hours of our time to go out there and brighten their day. The nursing home bungs on a sausage sizzle for lunch and we all enjoy the time we spend there. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I hope someone would do for me if I was in their situation.
This weekend is the second round of the MotoGp world championship and again it is in a awkward time zone being held in Brazil. Don’t think I will be staying up to watch it.