03.07.2014: Seven Soul... and All that Jazz!

Are your jazz hands twitching yet?

Once again, Seven Soul was asked to play at the Cubby Bear, and it was a great night! I'll never get tired of hearing different fans tell us at each successive show, "You seriously never sounded better!" I even heard a first-timer say, "You guys can do anything!" (quickly followed by, "Do you do any Eagles tunes?"). Ah, feel the love, feel the love.


After our set, we also had a little fun over at the bar with toys! No, not those kind. We had our now infamous button-wearing monkey with us, and he got to hang out with Chester (a big plastic T-Rex) and Winner-Winner-Chicken-Dinner (a rubber chicken). See, the things you miss when you don't come to the shows??? I won't spill ALL of their secrets, but they made quite the splash with friends and fans!

And, playing with kiddie toys wasn't the only resemblance to our preschool days that night. The band lineup was a little like that old Sesame Street game "one of these things is not like the other..." Seven Soul, a cover band, was paired with three other bands who played original jazz music only. There's no problem with that, except that our audiences were a little like oil and water. 

So, I suppose this brings up a good question... what do the Chicagoland audiences prefer? On one hand, a cover band at least gives us an opportunity to hear music that is/was wildly popular (with good reason!). But, there's a very real risk of beating a poor dead horse of a song, and doing it not nearly as well as the original artist, right? Original music expands our horizons and introduces us to worlds we've never known. But, original bands sometimes don't have enough variety in their sound to keep the audience engaged for hours on end.

For me, the best is a mixture of old and new. It gives me a chance to enjoy the hits I love (hopefully in a new and interesting way) while I get familiar with the band's original work. If the band does it right, those original tunes soon become familiar. Slowly, they make their way into the list of songs I come back for again and again!
 
So, where do you weigh in?

Am I full of it, do you agree, or is there another shade here to consider? Leave me a comment... I really want to know!

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