On Friday and Saturday, June 3 and 4, Snap Judgment LIVE gave two sold-out performances at the theater at the Oakland Museum of California. This is the third Snap Judgment LIVE -- local storytellers/poets telling their tales, accompanied by my compositions, as performed by me and the genius musical mind-readers David Brandt (percussion) and Tim Frick (bass, and arch-top guitar), and DJ.
There was less than a week to compose music, work with the storytellers, and make it all happen. They kept adding stories, and we wound up with an hour and 20 minute show.
Somehow it all came together. The stories were phenomenal, moving, upsetting, and hilarious. Host/storyteller Glynn Washington programmed the stories perfectly, so that it gets heavier in the middle and by the end everyone is ready for the catharsis of humor.
Like life itself, there's a ethereal quality to a live performance like this. You meet strangers, and by living with and scoring their stories, a week later, you feel that you know them. This time we had the pleasure of working with Joshua Walters, Joyce Lee and Jamie DeWolf for the second time, so we shared a short-hand that shows.
You share the connection of climbing on a stage with limited rehearsal, and using every bit of creativity and professionalism you have to make the performance work. The audience was laughing, crying, laughing again. Both nights there were standing ovations. The band walked out of there in a daze, and sat on Broadway in Downtown Oakland eating food from a street truck. Did that happen?
Well, it DID happen and the radio show that airs on NPR this week, and the TV show above (unexpurgated, folks) is the proof. I feel privileged to work with these amazing storytellers and poets, and the whole Snap Judgment team.
You can watch the TV show in HD here, or listen to the radio show here, or check out the Podcast on iTunes.
