🤝 Meet The Team

[behind the scenes of our new touring show, week two]

Welcome back.

Last week we talked about what an MD does.

Like a film director, the Music Director coordinates a creative team.

• Today, we’ll meet that creative team (and have a look at how each of their roles fits into the larger whole).

• Next week, we’ll talk about our team’s tech stack—the DAWs, music notation programs, project management tools, and work cadence.

• The week after that, I’ll review a new music tool I had to learn just for this project.

But first…

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A heavily abridged backstory:

• In the beginning:

  • The musical Jersey Boys ran eight shows/week for over two years in Chicago.

  • On their one night off, the four leads of Jersey Boys put together their own band (eventually called Under The Streetlamp). It was a 60s rock/doo wop review—matching suits, choreography, horn section… the works.

• Which lead to:

  • When Jersey Boys closed, Under The Streetlamp filmed a live concert for PBS.

  • When they began touring in support of that PBS special, I was brought on as guitarist.

  • That was 2012. In 2021, I took over as MD.

• But:

  • Bookings have been way down, never recovering to pre-pandemic levels.

• And then this happened:

  • Multiple concert promoters said to us:
    “hey, can you make a Frankie Valli tribute show? I can book waaaaay more gigs for that than I can a generic 60s rock/doo wop thing.”

• And so:

  • We’re overhauling our entire show.

  • Used to be we did two standalone Frankie Valli songs + one four-song medley.

  • Now we’re adding seven more Frankie songs…

  • …plus another four songs that he covered in his career.

• That’s ELEVEN songs that need:

  • rhythm section parts:

    • audio demos

    • charts for:

      • guitar

      • keys

      • bass

      • drums

  • vocal parts:

    • audio demos

    • charts for four singers

    • “plunks” (each singer’s part played on piano)

  • horn section arrangements:

    • charts for:

      • trumpet

      • tenor sax

      • trombone

  • choreography:

    • video

…aaaaaand we’ve got 25 days left before our first gig. 😬

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Assemble your dream team

this is Voltron, a badass uber-robot made up of smaller badass robots. IYKYK

For this project, we need:

1. a music director

2. a vocal arranger

3. a music copyist

4. a horn arranger

5. a choreographer

Could we do this with fewer people? Of course. But given our tight deadline & high standards, the guiding principle here is to keep each person working in their zone of genius.

• Music director? That’s me.

• Vocal arranger? We tapped Jasper Smith—singer for Grammy-award-winning band Straight No Chaser.

• Music copyist? We brought in actor/singer/pianist/musical-Swiss-Army-knife Jordan Goodsell.

• Horn arranger? We’ve got YouTube’s trumpet king, Josh Rzepka.

• Choreographer? That’s our song & dance man Shonn Wiley.

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We’ll go deeper on this next week, but…

Here’s the bullet-points version of how this works:

• I make an audio demo of a song (without vocals) →

• Jasper creates a vocal arrangement, singing each part →

• As a team, we make adjustments until we’re 95% of the way there, then →

  • Jordan transcribes Jasper’s vocal parts

  • Josh Rzepka arranges the horn parts

  • I create the rhythm section charts

  • Shonn creates choreo for the four singers (and films it)

Next week we’ll dive into the software, organization, & other tools we’re using.

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Alright, it’s time for me to get back to work.

That’s all I got this week.

See you next Wednesday,

Josh