Eloise is a member of the school jazz band. Watching a performance of the jazz band is a strangely surreal experience, as the various members of the ensemble, and there are many, struggle to play their instruments in time with the teacher, who plays his guitar rather than conducts. And as they are beginners, it's fair to say they struggle to play their instruments at all. In combination with this, there are several singers who struggle to stay in time with everyone else, and everyone else being out of tune with each other, they struggle to stay in tune with them.
The resulting dirges can only really be described as cacophonous. Truly, mind-bendingly, teeth-jarringly cacophonous. I have a video. I could post it. But I won't.
Generally they perform each year at the Customs House in the City apparently but this year they'd been gazumped by a fee-paying wedding so to the Brisbane Jazz Club we wended our wary way on a bright sunny day.
The performance was in an open-air area right by the river. The sun was beating down. The tide was high. When a city-cat went past its wake would lap at the feet of the performers. Some canoeists ambled by, the buzz of traffic filtered across the river from the city. All was calm and well with the world.
The calm was shattered by the Macarena, or something loosely resembling it. It struggled to recover amidst a spattering of well-intentioned applause, only to be beaten down again by a song which proclaimed that it liked to wave its hands up in the air sometime; many in the audience felt like waving the white flag, I'm sure. The Time Warp took us by the scruff of our necks, put its hands on our hips then did unspeakable things to our ears.
They're only beginners.
They are only beginners.
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