"Whatever the character is I always try and tailor, if I know songs that would go for that particular event then I try and do those.
So I did, I came in thinking I was gonna do a lot of old, old, old, you know, 30s and 20s music, and so there I came in with all these very, very old songs and people kept coming up to me and asking me “Did I do the beach boys, did I do the beatles?”, and suddenly, to my horror, I suddenly realized that all of these grandparents were my age, which meant I was a grandparent too or I could easily be. And that grandparent music, the age of the grandparent was my generation, and it really kind of shook me up."
“Oh no!”
"Yeah, so every event I always try and come up with a different persona if possible. Spooky zoo Sunday I've done this now this is my third year that I've come back and done it and I love doing it, and I have a few Halloween songs that I do, and that’s what I do.
But I love this it's pretty much my favorite venue to play in."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah I love it."
"Yeah, I love all of the people walking around."
"Well the kids are great and the people that run it, Joe Os who's in charge of this is just a pleasure to work with, very friendly. So what else, what would you like to know?"
"Do you cater songs to various audiences, like now?"
"I do select the songs based on, I do keep in mind the age groups of the kids that come through. So I’ll thrown in a lot of songs that maybe I wouldn’t normally do like
Old MacDonald had a farm, songs like that, gear the age level down somewhat
Although I still do a lot of songs, rock and roll songs that I think have a universal appeal.
And I have found that the kids all seem to like it, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it's rock and roll, or Old MacDonald, or hillbilly music or country western they all seem to like all of it as long as its done well, and as I mentioned before I do try and look for songs that go with a particular event. That’s probably the biggest challenge, when Joe says I think one day, I'm trying to remember specifically, there was a day that was Flowers and Trees Day, so the idea was to try and come in if I knew any songs that had to do with trees and flowers to try and gear it that way, and I didn’t have a whole bunch that went with that, but I wanted to be sure that if I did any, that I’d do that."
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3 comments:
It's so cool you've gone to the zoo Trevor.
I had two things that came to mind while reading your interview.
Just how strongly associate songs and certain genre of songs to a specific generation. It can be so effectively symbolic.
Another things was whether the "kids" seem to "like all of it (the songs) if it's done well" is because their focus is on the animals rather than on the music. The purpose of music played as background and music played for performance or entertainment all differ... as you know.
After reading this interview I could get a very good sense of the purpose of Jordan Cannady's music making and the ambiance of such music in the zoo. I thought the style of the interview was also congruous with the venue (informal, not academic), and I imagine the change of location (outside of Brown campus) influenced your choice of words.
It's interesting that Jordan would say that this is his favorite venue for performance, since one might expect that musicians would prefer more of a headliner role (vs. potentially becoming musical wallpaper for the zoo experience). I'd be curious to hear how he compares his experience at the zoo with other performance experiences. Nice sound example -- you should considering using part of the interview recording during your presentation.
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