Jonathan Everett Marbry, Composer

The Great American Trailer Park Musical…

Jan 18

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Hmmm… I see that I haven’t posted in a while. I do have an excuse though. I was busy working on something that has turned out to be truly special.

‘Trailer Park’ is a huge hit. All the stars have aligned for this one. Brilliant cast, great production and design team. It rocks. Hard. It really does. We sold out the entire run before the end of the first week. Then we added shows and those sold out within hours too.

So now we’re bringing it back to town April 24th and 25th in a much larger venue — The Berger Center for the Performing Arts (map).

Tickets are now on sale at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/80464

Check out our reviews, and come see us at the Berger!
‘Great American Trailer Park Musical’ will have you squealing with laughter – Arizona Daily Star
Arizona Onstage’s ‘Trailer Park Musical’ – Tucson Weekly

Boys/Girls Club Benefit

Nov 25

Posted by Jon in Musical, Piano, Random, Uncategorized, Why | No Comments

Hmmm…. Finally, an event has replaced playing for topless mud wrestling at “The Buffalo Barn”, as my weirdest gig ever. An amazing, epic festival of disorganization, crossed-up, and pure high society bizarreness. I don’t think I can really capture the sheer hilariousness of it in writing. I mean, this was a $250 per plate, black tie event. Beautiful, lavish, expensive. And the entertainment logistics were just sooooo completely wrong.

Even so, I had a great time in the end. After a while, we gave up trying to figure out what the venue and the event people were up to, and just grabbed ourselves a corner and started playing. The PA was totally dead. I don’t know if anybody but the other musicians heard us, but who the heck cares? We were stupendous! Greatest thing ever!

Here I am, with the mighty Kit Runge, doing our Sinatra thing…

Jon & Kit, playing that cool jazz

and here’s a cellphone video of our sound check, with Jody Mullen singing. The sound is about typical of cellphone videos — horrific. But you’ll get the idea. Just… turn the volume *way* down.

Upcoming Shows

Nov 14

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Very busy holiday season so far — here’s what I’ve got on the schedule:

Nov 14 & 15th – Jewtopia (Temple of Music and Art, Tucson AZ)
A one-weekend only encore performance of this summer’s sold out show.

Nov 21 – 29th – Annual Boys & Girls Club Holiday Auction (Westin La Paloma, Tucson AZ)
Catch me in a super-rare live performance with my friends, gifted singers Kit Runge, Jody Mullen and Jacinda Swinehart-Johnson as we perform everything from classic jazz standards to the latest contemporary musical theater songs!

January 7-24 – The Great American Trailer Park Musical (Temple of Music and Art, Tucson AZ)
I’m music director for this show, and my singers are mighty. Even in rehearsal, I’m having a ball with Trailer Park. So come on out and see this show. It’s a light-hearted, high energy romp.

Quick Update: Africa Photos…

Oct 20

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…are posted in my Photo Albums now. I’m still trying to understand everything I saw on this trip — I truly loved Tanzania, and would go back in a flash. In fact, I plan to go back as soon as I can manage it. I can’t yet find the right words though, to describe the optimism and warmth of the African people, and the unbelievable amount of damage done them by their leadership.

I’m almost in a state of shock over this — I’ve seen it in the headlines all my life. But it took actually going over there to connect all the dots and make me understand just how horrific a bad government can actually be.

To be clear, I’m talking about Africa in general here. Tanzania’s current government is reasonably good, and I’m optimistic for their future — Tanzania is stable, and they’re investing in infrastructure and education. But they’re operating under a crippling handicap left by the previous government’s failed experiment in extreme socialism that nationalized most businesses, farms and homes, wiped out industry and commercial farming, and displaced a great many people.

The current government has a lot to fix, and very, very little money to work with, so their progress is necessarily slow. But at least Tanzania’s past problems are due only to misplaced idealism. They don’t have a history of murder and mayhem to overcome, as is the case with so many African countries.

Soon – very soon, I will write a longer piece on this. But for the moment, let me just say how grateful I am for our country’s tradition of civil order and for our lumbering, inertia-ridden behemoth of an immovable, but still fairly benign, government.

Kilimanjaro!

Oct 16

Posted by Jon in Outdoors, Random, Why | No Comments

Uhuru Peak, Tanzania

Just back from Tanzania, Africa where among many other things, we climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. The whole trip was amazing beyond description. Actually, at this point, I’m still recovering from 20 hours on the horribly cramped plane home (thanks KLM, you cheap bastards), and I’m not exactly coherent. Let’s just say that actually being in Africa, as opposed to seeing it on TV has changed my views on any number of subjects, and I highly recommend that everybody go and see it for themselves. More on this, plus more pictures soon. Now I’ve really gotta sleep…

Scales, Arpeggios, Rinse, Repeat

Sep 28

Posted by Jon in Musical, Piano | Comments off

Moonlight is Dust Between Us

After music school, I took a 15-year detour through corporate America. I practiced very little, and worse still, I got RSI from all that messing about with computers. Lately, I’ve been kinda wanting to do more live gigs, and that means I have to be able to actually make it all the way through a song without stopping. Several songs, even.

So right now, I’m practicing my ass off, trying to build strength, and push back the point where my poor battered wrists lock up in rebellion. That means an hour or more of pure technical practice — scales, arpeggios, Hanon, Czerny. Yuck! And after that, I just grab a bunch of music from the shelf and play ’till my fingers refuse to cooperate.

Along the way, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to spend my practice time, since I really don’t have the six to eight hours a day to practice that I had when I was in school. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

VERY IMPORTANT: Practice hands separately A LOT. I found this tip in a random forum online and didn’t think much of it. Then I tried it. IT IS SO AMAZINGLY HELPFUL. I can’t believe I wasn’t doing it before. Nobody really has perfectly equal hands. If you practice hands together all the time, you’re locking yourself into a pace that makes the weak hand sloppy, and doesn’t challenge the strong hand. Also, sight reading one hand at a time lets you read much more difficult music at tempo — important if, like me, you’re not a particularly gifted sight reader.
Scales in double octaves with wrists bouncy and relaxed — a great way to build fast, free (but precise) technique.
Spend a little time each day practicing technique, especially anything involving stretches or jumps, with your eyes closed. Anything to reduce the amount of time you have to spend looking at the keyboard.
Memorize while you’re learning a piece. Even if you have to do it one measure at a time. Again, I’ve always had to work at reading, and I find I can’t properly master difficult passages until I’ve got them memorized. Plus, the more stuff you’ve got memorized, the easier it is to memorize more.
Technique is cool, but spend a lot of time playing stuff that makes you happy. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Quote for the Day

Sep 6

Posted by Jon in Musical, Piano, Random | 1 Comment

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”

-pianist Oscar Levant

Here’s Sheila doing what Sheila usually does. During the wet season, we get a snake of some sort about once a week. The dog runs around it, barking like a mad thing. She’s *way* faster than the snake. Poor thing’s completely surrounded by Border Collie. I just go out with a shovel and give the snake a nice ride to the nearest thicket of brush, away from the menacing fangs of cute, furry doom. Long as they’re not on the porch or in the stable, house or garage, they’re fine by me.

Music? I’m between shows at the moment, so I’ve spent the week writing and practicing. Bach. Lots of Bach. It’s my week for Bach. Read through book 2 of ‘The Well Tempered Clavier” today. It’s full of moments of sublime beauty. Even though I still think that all the fugues sound similar enough to drive anybody listening into a coma.

I’m also recording a CD with a friend who’s an exceptional string player. More about that as it progresses. We might even go out and do a gig or two together, which would be an Event for me, since I’m back in spoiled studio baby mode — haven’t been playing live very much of late. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Welcome!

Aug 23

Posted by Jon in Admin, Musical, Theater | Comments off

Hello and welcome to my new and improved web site. I’m sure there are still bugs to work out, but it works well enough that as of this moment ***I now pronounce it launched***

Here, you will find my thoughts on music, musical theater and whatever other things I think are cool or interesting. And since I’m using WordPress, it’s a blog and soon as I fix all the bugs in my SPAM filter, you can write right back to me! (the SPAM has really got to go. I’ve seen about all the male enhancement product ads that anyone needs to see.)

Today, I attended AOP’s “The Bible Belt”, a well performed and worthwhile coming-of-age story, and a darn good piece of storytelling as well.

I use an 80/20 rule for theater — 80% of it sucks. “The Bible Belt”, is in the good 20%. Good enough, that I wasn’t ready for it to end. I wanted to see more, and that’s pretty rare. It’s got one more week to run, so if you’re in Tucson and get the chance, go see it.

Afterwards, I sat in on a few of the auditions for AOP’s next musical. I’m already signed on to do sound design. It’s a big, high energy show, lots of characters and costumes, and a rock band for backup. As always with Kevin Johnson’s shows, it promises a challenge.

There’s a real art to making a rock ensemble well… rock, while balancing it with musical theater singers, and keeping the volume to a reasonable, non-bleeding-ears level. Fun!

Planning for the Kilimanjaro climb proceeds apace. More about that as it develops.

Coming Soon!

Aug 15

Posted by Jon in Admin, Why | No Comments

Yes, it’s my first complete site upgrade in years. Please be patient while I knock things to pieces and rebuild them over the next few days.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

I know, I know… I should hire somebody to do this for me, but it’s been a long time since I worked seriously with web development, and I’m having fun with CSS and RSS and WordPress and stuff — so many cool new things to learn. And all these tools for interconnecting web services will save me hours and hours, once I spend days and days getting them to work right. Right now, I’ve already got photos streaming from Facebook and blog archives from MySpace. Just gotta figure out how I want to handle the audio portion of our show, then I’ll call it done.

-Jon