Memoirs of a Reluctant Band Leader

by Pamelagrace Beatty

So, what happened was my guitar player said, “No, you lead the band!” The band consisted of me and him.  This came when I decided I was going to be a Jazz Singer and he decided he would join me as my band.  I had been taking voice lessons so I could sing better when I played my guitar, which I played badly. But I was just beginning to learn it, so it wasn’t my fault. Then, I discovered a marvelous thing!  My vocal coach used jazz standards, you know, the songs you know really well from back in the day?  Well, she used the songs to teach her students better vocal habits. I didn’t know what jazz standards were until I realized that I had grown up with these songs!  My father played them all the time. And when he remodeled the basement, so we could have parties, he put 8 1/2 x 11 photos of the musicians and singers who performed his favorite jazz music.  So, in my early teens I knew the faces of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and even the Dorsey Brothers.

I would walk along the wall and look at the faces and wonder what their lives were like? What they were like as people? I was somewhat entranced with them for some reason. Then, when my vocal coach started playing the standard songs for me to sing, that music clicked into place. The second marvelous thing that happened was when I discovered I could sing these songs when she changed the key!  You see, all my life I thought I couldn’t sing because I couldn’t sing the songs in the key they were played in on the radio.  There was a standard key and my voice was three steps lower – OK, that may be more detail than you care about, but it made a BIG difference for me. My jazz singing career was born in that moment.

The question that may come up is how did I get a guitar player?  Well, I knew him from high school, and I hadn’t seen him since then.  We met again when I talked another guitar player into letting me sing harmony for him.  He invited me to join his band.  I didn’t know he had a band because if I did, I would not have offered to sing with him.  I saw him at an open mic and thought he was just a little old guy playing all by himself. He wasn’t. I joined his band as backup singer singing folks songs and Americana (don’t ask).  Then I discovered I could sing jazz!  Goodbye “Americana.” Hello Count Basie!!

 My guitar friend and I thought we could be a dynamic duo.  Eh, that didn’t happen.  So, we found an upright-up bass player. Big basses are a crucial part of jazz ensembles (look at me using jazzy words!).  That helped a lot.  After nine months of realizing that wasn’t quite working, we found a woman who could play piano.  She didn’t really want to play in public.  She was shy. But her husband encouraged her to give it a try. Meanwhile, the guitar player was still insisting I be the band leader.  Yah, right. I knew nothing about leading a band.  So, I did some research.  I looked at movies about bands.  I searched the internet, bought a couple of books, interviewed people I knew who led bands, especially a couple of women.  All of this was somewhat helpful but there was still a lot of learning through experience.  And what an experience!  I began to think this was Karma. 

When I was a consultant, I had happily advised my clients on how to manage their people.  They didn’t always agree with me even though my advice was quite sound.  I highly recommended collaborative leadership where possible. That was good advice; however, that is not how bands are used to working.  Somebody has to take charge.  Asking for group consensus annoyed the heck out of them!  Since it was my band, I was supposed to make all the decisions.  Really?  I hadn’t learned enough from the movies and my interviews to feel comfortable telling people, who had been playing longer than I had been singing, what to do.   Putting what I knew as a consultant together with what I was trying to do as a band leader was a very challenging experience. After a while, I truly believed there was some sort of a Karma thing happening.  

I was a vocalist on a learning curve. And just ordering the band around was a little over my pay grade, or so it felt. Still, the band expected it and my guitar player kept saying, “Pamelagrace, you have to be the leader. And if you don’t step up to being a leader, somebody else will and you won’t like it!”  He was right. Still, I felt that the musicians were talented and intelligent and why should they just do what I tell them to do? In addition, my favorite passion has been to help open the door for others to grow.  I love being a catalyst for positive change and encouraging potential. That is what I settled into as bandleader. However, change can be painful. Ultimately, after teaching me all he could teach me about running bands, rehearsing my music and stage presence, my guitar player moved on to other things. My bass player went out due to surgery on his arm. It was just me and my keyboard player left.  She fixed it.  She offered up her husband and friend she had played music with for years – but only in their living room. We formed a new band, and we were on the road again! It was way fun. I was off on another growth experience, and I took the band with me. I secured a regular gig at a restaurant in West Seattle whose owner was a wonderful man. The regular gig allowed us a chance to continue to grow as a band and me as a leader.  Collaborating got easier too.  We did that for three years.

Along the way, we had acquired a saxophone player and drummer.  Then the pandemic and other circumstances ended our regular performance gig. It also ended my time with that band. But then a new band developed. My new drummer’s husband played electric bass and he had a friend who played piano.  The sax player knew them all.   The bass player in my new band found a way for us to continue to do music in a safe way. While it was warm, we played in the open air in his backyard. When it got cold and rainy, he managed to re-engineer his tool shed just in time for us to rehearse in it. We all wore masks, except for the saxophone player, and we had our own individual out-take fans. Our plan was to be ready to play in public when the pandemic ended. We’re still planning to do that.

Here’s what’s amazing about the experiences I’ve just described. I started singing when I was 67. Who does that? Well, a lot of people do things they haven’t done before, once they retire. Working with the band and singing has been the most exciting and change-inducing thing I’ve ever done. It has also been the most fun. I was used to being on stage; I’ve been a trainer, speaker, and dancer, and even an actor. Being in front of people has not been a big deal for me. Fortunately, my past experience on stage worked in my favor as a budding singer. However, besides trying to figure out how to lead a band, I also had to figure out how to get gigs. That has been challenging but I’ve done it, and so have some of my bandmembers. The scariest thing and most difficult thing for me was walking into bars by myself.

This was necessary because to improve as a singer I needed to have as many opportunities to sing in public as possible.  That meant going to strange bars (think dives) and singing with groups of musicians who may have just met each other when they walked onstage. They also might be very good or very not-so-good. It meant politely turning away drunk men who, well, you can guess.   To this day, the very thought of going to bars by myself and singing at open mics turns my insides to jelly. So, once we have more freedom to move about, I will do fewer open mics. Singing in front of strangers, with a band I don’t know, is not my idea of total bliss. But it was a very good way to get better as a singer.   Another thing that expanded within me was my ability to meet and greet people during performance breaks and at the end of the gig. Many who know me don’t believe that was hard. They don’t realize I am actually an introvert and talking up close and personal to total strangers gives me hives. Talking from on stage, easy. I love it. I’m on stage.  The people are in the audience.  They aren’t that close…until I get off stage.  Then, that’s another story.

What I think is most important about my saga with learning to sing, leading a band and meeting the public, is that I did it all in my golden years. I did it when we think “OK, now it’s time to settle down and take care of the grandchildren, or watch TV.” But this is not necessarily that time, unless taking care of the grandkids is truly all you want to do! Instead, now is also an opportunity to try new stuff, learn new things, and use all the knowledge and skills we have gained along the way for something new and different. Just saying…