Hi. Well we had a good show, and had some fun but it was very knackering, we were one helper short due to personal problems and that left little time to go to the bar:( at least we had a coffee runner on the sunday. Here is my experince from the other side of the fence. THE ROOMS. The rooms (we were in the syndicate meeting rooms not the big ones) were better than some of the bedroom type used at some shows. The main problem accoustically was the suspended cielings, these rattled very badly at room resonance, I was lucky since i had chosen the smaller WB ARC speakers wich were less prone to setting the ceiling off, in our second room the ACT and Discovery speakers had to be played at lowish volume to avoid the rattle. The lighting in the rooms gave a nasty 100Hz hum from the transformers for the low voltage lighting, I had remembered this from september and took my own floor standing lamp. Room to room isolation was good through the walls but bad via the door, the narrow corridor seems to add to this, I unfortunately had a noisy neighbour and consequently had play my system louder than normal. THE VISITORS The visitor numbers were reasonable, a few more would have been nice, but there was time to spend with the serious listeners and the general quality was better than most of the other shows (you don't have hoards of people blocking your door and then saying, it's no good here there's no big screen :) ) Many faces were familiar from previous shows but there were also some fresh new ones. The diversity of the visitors was an improvement over some of the shows i've been to, there were some young people but mainly these were from the affro/caribbean sector of the community I think (especially considering the high quality of the music they brought to try) that they take their music far more seriously than the average young person of today, they were also the politest group. THE MUSIC. This is always the difficult one. I try to play a variety but the number of requests for easy listening jazz still out numbers requests for other styles. I did manage too keep Krall down to 1 track 5 times over the week end and eva only 3 times. I did manage to play quite a lot of the following, but you would need to be in the room at the right time to catch it. Peter Gabrial Phil Collins Led Zeplin - quite e few times:) Black Eyed Peas Joss Stone KC and the Sunshine Band Prince Taal - Beats of Passion - also quite a few times Guns and Roses My prefered easier listening, good for the WAF was. Sinaed O'conner Tony Braxton And the odd classical track Most of the rest was made up by requests. The worst thing is when someone enters the room and you ask what style of music they like and they say 'oh I like anything really, supprise me' you then select a track and they leave immediately, saying I don't like that much. Perhaps thats why so many people play inoffensive jazz. It was a nice show with a good atmosphere, perhaps we will do Roy Birds Manchester show this year too. Thanks to all those who attended. I must meet MartinC for a beer in southampton sometime, he's just down the road from the office. Well it's time to get to the office and unload all the stuff. Chris.
