Vincent Connor, the new General Director of Opera Orlando, appeared on my WPRK radio show, Zero Crossings, to talk about Opera Orlando, their One Voice Orlando concert on September 11, and Opera Orlando’s upcoming season. What follows is an excerpt from a two-hour conversation.

Charlie Griffin: You’re the General Director of Opera Orlando, and it’s a bit of a phoenix story. Tell me about the genesis of the newest incarnation of opera in Orlando.

Vincent Connor: Yes. Yes! We rose from the ashes! Opera is very dear to my heart. I grew up here, in Winter Park, and came back here after twelve years. I grew up with Orlando Opera, which was the prominent opera company at the time, and saw magnificent productions there. They did more traditional opera. I can arguably say that the reason I went into opera was because of Orlando Opera. They closed in 2009 during the recession. In its place grew up the Florida Opera Theater, which had been growing by about 20% every year. Some of the board members reached out to me, because they had been following my career and knew that I was from here. I had been directing and singing opera and they contacted me about this opportunity.

So they actively recruited you. That must feel good.

Yeah! It’s always great to be able to go back where home is. So many directors and singers and professors of opera never get the chance to work where they grew up. To come home was like dream come true, after I’d been performing all over the world.

Where had you gone during those twelve years?

I went to Florida State University in Tallahassee for my undergrad and got my master’s degree at the University of Arizona. I loved the desert landscape, I loved the heat, I loved everything about Arizona. I was there for three years. I started focusing on directing as well as singing. Knowing that the life of a singer was a tough one, I wanted to get educated in two realms.

Is there not a benefit to be a male singer, though? There’s a lot less competition.

Yes, there is. It doesn’t take away how hard the lifestyle is, though. The formula is scary—there are about ten women auditioning for every one male at Opera Orlando. It’s a tough business.

Going on, where were you when the board members from Florida Opera Theater recruited you?

After Arizona, I went to the University of Missouri at Kansas City for my doctorate. After I finished my coursework, I moved to Philadelphia to teach voice and opera at the University of Delaware. It was while I was in Philly that I got the phone call.

Why do you think that Orlando Opera didn’t survive the recession?

From a business perspective, there were some poor administrative and fiscal decisions made, regarding their endowment. From an artistic standpoint, Orlando Opera had taken a more traditional approach, and it can be argued that they weren’t willing to change with the times. Opera America (a national service organization that supports opera and the musical arts internationally with education and awareness programs) is so wonderful. I just got back from a two-week seminar in New York. And Opera America is all about really learning your audience; what makes them tick. If you don’t do that research to see what excites them, invigorates them, then the organization will falter.

There has to be a certain amount of experimentation. You’re trying to strike a balance between multiple factors: educating versus pandering to versus alienating your audience. How do you find that pocket, and how was the seminar in New York trying to address dwindling audiences?

What I just went to in New York was called the Opera America Leadership Intensive Program. They identify young, aspiring administrators who want to make a difference. There were people from Sweden, London, Vancouver, Houston, San Francisco. It was such an honor to be chosen to participate because Opera Orlando is such a small company compared to the rest. But what I learned is that it’s about balance. We can’t just aim at one demographic or one type of opera production. It’s hard to find, because so much of this relies on subjective taste. In the main, though, the seminar was about governance, fiscal responsibility, board management, storytelling, and public speaking.

Gabriel Preisser, Opera Orlando’s Artistic Director, is also a singer. How common is it for the main administrators at an opera company to also be singers?

It’s actually not very common. We’re trying to lay a foundation for the future, and so we are both taking active roles in performance and direction. But it won’t go on indefinitely.

Going back to my initial question about its rebirth, why is Opera Orlando popping up now? You stated earlier that the recession was a factor for Orlando Opera’s demise. Is it because the recession is over? If so, how vulnerable is the organization to a fresh economic downturn?

You know, in the arts you really have to take calculated risks. And I felt like, with the rebranding of Florida Opera Theater into Opera Orlando, it was time, because all the variables were in place. It had been ten years since Orlando Opera had closed; Florida Opera Theater was doing really well and there was growth there. And, I was at a place in my career where I could really afford to take a chance, and I felt this calling, like I really needed to do this.

Speaking of a calling, talk about One Voice Orlando and the performance on September 11.

I actually moved back here the week of the Pulse shootings. It wasn’t quite the homecoming I expected. Opera Orlando’s email inbox was just exploding. Singers from everywhere, directors, and conductors were all asking what they could do to help. And we did immediately respond—we were part of Beautiful Together, and we organized a benefit with singers at a church and raised $4000 for the OneOrlando Fund. We wanted to do more, and identified six charities that we really wanted to help, who have done amazing things since the Pulse tragedy. Those are Orlando Health’s Level One Trauma Center; the first responders, doctors and nurses. They did so much and their resources are just depleted. The Zebra Coalition, a wonderful organization that is geared toward helping underprivileged gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens. The Orlando LGBTQ Community Center has been huge since the tragedy and they’ve done so much. Interfaith Council of Central Florida and the Holocaust Center’s UpStanders: Stand Up to Bullying Initiative both really spoke to us. And one of the organizations I’m really proud of is Proyecto Somos Orlando, which is a hispanic organization that has done amazing things in the community. A high percentage of those who were killed wasn’t only LGBTQ but also Hispanic. They were on the forefront of the tragedy and they realized that Spanish wasn’t being spoken, and some survivors and victims’ families needed translators. They also offered counseling and legal services—whatever was needed. We were inspired by them.

Let’s continue with the idea of experimentation and risk-taking. Mr. Preisser has participated in a lot of contemporary opera, works by Kevin Puts, Tobias Picker, Ricky Ian Gordon, Daron Hagen, Mark Adamo, and Dominick Argento. Is there a possibility of new work being done here?

Both Gabe and I are really passionate about new work and we both believe that to make opera relevant, we have to focus on what’s happening here and now. So many opera companies are geared towards producing new work, and that is absolutely on our docket. But it’s also often expensive and we need to have the finances in place to make that happen.

What we’ve decided to do for our first season is Donizetti’s Don Pasquale on November 18th and 20th, a comedic tale, directed by me, about an old bachelor who refuses to get married; Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors on December 11th through the 20th, which is sort of our Christmas tale, directed by Eric Pinder; and Mozart’s Don Giovanni on March 24th-26th. We’re going traditional with Don Pasquale, family oriented with Amahl, and “high concept” with Don Giovanni.

Have you mapped out multiple years of activity?

Yes, but I can’t talk about it yet. I can tell you that we want to be really active in things like the Fringe Festival. We’re interested in adaptation, like Peter Brook’s adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen, which cuts the opera down to 90 minutes but retains its compositional integrity. We’re also interested in playing site-specific works in unconventional spaces, like doing Le Nozze di Figaro in a mansion because that’s where the opera is set. I love “high concept” treatments of opera—our current season’s Don Giovanni is the story of Don Juan, the old Spanish tale, and we’re going to have it take place on a college campus. So, we’re going hit a few hard issues: we’re going to talk about date rape and womanizing. We’re trying to take social stereotypes and tell the story in a completely different way.

You can see more at:

http://www.vincentconnor.com/

Stanley Almodovar III, 23 / Amanda Alvear, 25 / Oscar A Aracena-Montero, 26 / Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33 / Antonio Davon Brown, 29 / Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 / Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28 / Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25 / Luis Daniel Conde, 39 / Cory James Connell, 21 / Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 / Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 / Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31 / Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 / Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 / Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22 / Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 / Paul Terrell Henry, 41 / Frank Hernandez, 27 / Miguel Angel Honorato, 30 / Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40 / Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 / Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30 / Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, 25 / Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 / Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 / Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49 / Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25 / Kimberly Morris, 37 / Akyra Monet Murray, 18 / Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20 / Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, 25 / Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 / Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 / Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 / Enrique L. Rios, Jr., 25 / Jean C.Nives Rodriguez, 27 / Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35 / Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 / Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, 24 / Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34 / Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 / Martin Benitez Torres, 33 / Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24 / Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37 / Luis S. Vielma, 22 / Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50 / Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37 / Jerald Arthur Wright, 31

Part of being human means that the aftermath of death and tragedy is almost always accompanied by bursts of sexual or creative activity. These affirmations of life, love, connection, and community are a show of strength to ourselves, reminding us that while death will inevitably come for us too, we are undeniably and powerfully still here. When the scope of death and tragedy is broader and more profound, so too is the creative impulse in response to it.

On June 12, 2016, at approximately 2AM, a young, troubled, questioning man from an Afghan immigrant family opened fire in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub with legally purchased weaponry, killing 49 people and injuring 53 more in the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in U.S. history, the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, and the deadliest attack to occur on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001. The American poet Theodore Roethke, in his poem “The Far Field”, asserted that “All finite things reveal infinitude… A ripple widening from a single stone / Winding around the waters of the world.” And what a stone the shooter, Omar Mateen, turned out to be. But he’s not the only stone in this metaphor. The dead, the wounded, the survivors, the witnesses, and the first responders all played a role that night, creating wave after wave of effect that started in the Orlando community but quickly went worldwide.

There have been several big, beautiful, creative responses to the shooting. In addition to at least 24 vigils in and around Orlando and fundraisers both great and small in scale, art exhibitions and benefit concerts have multiplied. Venues such as Parliament House, The CFE Arena at UCF, Hard Rock Live, and the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts (DPAC), have hosted concert events in the months immediately following the shooting. Perhaps the the largest event, the monumental Beautiful Together, combined the efforts and talents of more than 60 local arts organizations at DPAC.

Let me introduce the first-tier set of stones in this metaphor: I have the good fortune, through my participation in The Landmark Forum, of knowing singer Andrea Canny (Music Production Supervisor at PerformerStuff.com, a locally-based website that sells audition materials for actors and singers), who, along with Joyce Arbucias of The Imagination House (a local heavy-hitting production company, and parent company of Performer Stuff), Chris Yakubchik of Forster, Boughman, and Lefkowitz, and Tony Award winner Kenny Howard (of the Florida Theatrical Association), formed an LLC called Imagine Orlando, for the initial purpose of putting together an enormous benefit concert, From Broadway with Love: A Benefit Concert for Orlando, in response to the Pulse shooting. Imagine Orlando partnered with Seth Rudetsky, James Wesley, and Michael Moritz Jr., who, themselves, partnered with Van Dean of Broadway Records to produce From Broadway With Love: A Benefit Concert for Sandy Hook.

I mentioned The Landmark Forum because her experience in their course encouraged Canny to dream big about what the event could become. She believes deeply in the power of music to provoke both thought and feeling, reinforce community, and to heal. She enlisted and enrolled her team, and got the ball rolling. Once these two parties got together, the next step was to get the talent on board, namely the Broadway performers, and a who’s who of Broadway answered the call, including six Tony Award winners and lead performers in current shows. Once the solo talent was secured, the team set about getting the infrastructure in place, all of it pretty much donated or underwritten: flights, hotel rooms, a commitment from DPAC, materials and incentives for an auction, back line equipment, printing, sound, video, and stage technicians, and many other countless gestures of support from coffee and water to security personnel, ushers, transportation coordinators and Pulse Survivors at the auction table.

An orchestra was put together, primarily comprised of musicians from the Orlando Philharmonic—a sort of blind date between them and a rhythm section that flew down from New York. A 100+ voice choir, Orlando Voices United Choir, was formed for the event, comprised of singers from Disney, the Orlando Gay Chorus, and elsewhere. New orchestrations were created for the event, which also required the services of a copyist/librarian to assist with getting individual parts to all the musicians. The list of phone calls and emails exchanged to make this all happen must be impressive.

I got to witness the rehearsals for the two sessions before the July 25th performance, first at the Plaza Live, and then at DPAC. The atmosphere at the Plaza was a mixture of enthusiasm, freneticism, stoicism, or professionalism depending on where I focused my attention. Rehearsals can be a festival of groans and eye-rolls when things are not going well, and the Plaza rehearsal was stalling repeatedly. The guitarist was the only member of the rhythm section present. The Orchestrator, Kim Scharnberg, was giving notes and comments to Music Director Michael Moritz who was doing heroic double duty as pianist and conductor. “I’m in a bad dream with no rhythm section,” Moritz said. The copyist/librarian Don Oliver, muttering and cursing under his breath, with his shaggy dog nearby, struggled as valiantly as the legendary Little Dutch Boy trying to plug each new leak in a Haarlem dike with his finger, as musicians seemingly at random declared that their individual notated parts were nowhere to be found, all while trying to prepare and tape together parts for the songs yet to be rehearsed. The always professional, get-it-done-with-grace concert mistress for the Orlando Philharmonic, Rimma Bergeron-Langlois, quietly discussed bowings, phrasings, tempo changes, and changes made on the fly with the other violinists. Composer, pianist, and musical force at Imagination House, Mike Avila, who was working behind the scenes along with Andrea Canny and Imagine Orlando, stepped in to play the bass parts on a synthesizer, and suddenly everything started gelling in a way it hadn’t before.

Ultimately, everyone was doing what they could to help solve the myriad kinds of problems that inevitably come up when trying to accomplish something big. But not just something big–something big with an emotional and personal stake, and everybody involved has a stake in this. Locals feel the Pulse shooting deeply because Orlando is our home. These were our people, our friends, our children, our family. The people coming down from New York are no strangers to tragedy. They know what September 11 feels like. And they know how the LGBTQ+ community feels, too. Broadway has been on the absolute front lines in the cultural conversation on sexual orientation and gender identity for many decades.

By the time the Broadway soloists, choir, full musical ensemble, and all the necessary technicians were in place for the rehearsal at DPAC the next day, everything seemed to be running like clockwork and there was a buzzing excitement backstage. The show itself was a heartfelt, hopeful, soaring, melancholy, raunchy mixtape chosen by the soloists to both play to their strengths and thematically tie the lyrics to some aspect of the tragedy. But this isn’t about the concert itself. This is about the powerful choice to create in response to death. And it’s about loving each other the way that the people we lost would want to love us if they could. What the world needs now…

The beneficiaries of From Broadway with Love are the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida, a gathering place for more than 20 support groups that also offers free HIV and Hepatitis C testing, among other services; the Hope and Help Center of Central Florida, which services and supports those dealing with AIDS; and Zebra Coalition, a network of organizations which provide services to LGBTQ+ youth, ages 13 to 24.

To pre-order an audio or video recording of the event, please visit FromBroadwayWithLove.org

What we surround ourselves with matters. Interior designers know that the flow of a space, its colors, textures, and materials can affect our feelings as we navigate an airport, bus or train terminal, our digestion in a restaurant or dining room, or our energy level and behavior in the workplace, a dance floor, or our bedrooms. Sometimes traits in design coalesce long enough and consistently enough for a definitive style to emerge. Industrial, Mid-Century Modern, Shaker, Moroccan, French Country, Shabby Chic, and many others all have their own hallmark approaches to materials, palettes, lines and symmetries.

Musical styles emerge in much the same manner, through the emergence of common practices. Approaches to musical timbre, texture, form, tempo, melody, harmony, meter and phrasing have always been the principal elements of musical style throughout history. Additionally, technology influences music making. The development of publishing in the mid-15th century, experiments in tuning systems that eventually led us to the equal-tempered system we use today, and the development of new instruments all have influenced composers for centuries. Some events become game changers. The rise of the piano approximately 300 years ago is a good example. Its dynamic capabilities alone were immediately recognized as superior. Composers abandoned the harpsichord and never really looked back. The 20th century has seen several game changers: recording technology at the beginning, amplification and then analog synthesis in the middle, and digitization near the end.

Digitization has gone hand-in-hand with democratization and dissemination. Massive libraries of professionally recorded music samples of any instrument imaginable, affordable software with a wealth of processing possibilities that would have filled an entire recording studio a few decades ago, and a plethora of both professional and home-made on-line how-to videos (many of admittedly questionable quality) have led to musical experimentation (and imitation) on a scale never seen before. It resulted in an explosion of musical genres and sub-genres, particularly in styles that rely on digital means for production.

New technologies often create new niches to occupy and new opportunities. One artistic career path that never would have existed without these revolutions is that of the DJ, a role which itself experienced an evolution over time, having crossed the divide from analog to digital, from vinyl through CDs and on to binary-coded data within a software program. One of the software go-to’s for DJs is Traktor, an offering from the German hardware/software company Native Instruments. Traktor can take musical audio files and perform tempo and tonality detection. It can layer on effects such as filtering, delays, and reverbs, or it can slice a sound file up based on its transients (basically its clearest, least-difficult-to-manipulate fragments) so that a DJ can re-order them, loop them, or otherwise get playful, using paired external interfaces or iOS devices designed so that DJs can still maintain a tactile relationship to what they’re creating.

And what are they creating exactly? Interior design is a good analogy for what many contemporary DJs do because they arrange found musical objects in personal ways, aiming to create an enticing flow of energies, textures, and moods. Kathryn Correy, or DJK8, the force behind WPRK’s Halcyon Radio show (91.5 FM in Orlando or WPRK.org for streaming) Saturdays from 7-9pm, is a specialist in Liquid Drum & Bass. This is an emotional, more reflective sub-genre of Drum & Bass which was originally a hard-hitting, fast tempo electronic style that emerged in England in the early 1990s and relied on syncopated drum grooves and focused attention on bass and sub-bass lines. Characteristic of both genre and sub-genre is the existence of tempo layers. The hi-hat and snare drum typically express a tempo of 150-180 beats per minute, while the rate of change in other parts happens at half or even one-quarter that speed. Think of a Rubin Vase, the image that is both a chalice and two faces in profile facing each other. You can hold one image in the foreground at a time, not both. Similarly, you can focus your perception at the faster or slower tempo.

Correy compares her Halcyon Radio sets to journaling. She designs two hours of cathartic, emotional experience, often using the show to help process her own feelings that built up over the week, though she also embraces diversions to fulfill a listener request on the fly or to showcase something new. I shadow a Halcyon set and watch DJK8, with laptop, Traktor, and a digital hardware interface that resembles old-school turntables. Syncopated bass lines rumble under ethereal pads that evolve as the filters on them open and close like breathing. Breaks filled with glittering arpeggios and reverberant vocals with taunting phrases about empty love slam into tightly tuned snare drums. A nearly constant presence is the hi-hats, the mated pair of sizzling cymbals that press tightly into each other most of the time like lovers who can’t get away from each other if they tried. Aggression has a place too as the set nears the 90-minute mark, with smoother, sine-wave bass lines getting replaced with heavier, harsher sawtooths. Despite the relatively hypnotic, static rhythmic surface, the under-layers undergo nearly constant change. An avid supporter and vocal advocate for other DJs and producers she loves and admires, Correy intersperses her set with song ID’s, shout-outs and promos.

Correy is a mother too, and a full-time hairdresser, but music is never far from her thoughts. She devotes most of her free time to research, listening, podcasting, set preparation, and performing. With two DJ brothers and a singer/songwriter father, Correy increasingly felt the pull to perform, and by 2011 began entering the DJ scene in and around Orlando, hosting SceneOrlando Live and performing in venues like Spacebar or Sandwich Bar. In live settings, DJK8’s journaling approach gets tossed out the window, though her starting point always focuses on love: empty love, unconditional love, spiritual love, nostalgic love. Performing live, she prefers making on-the-fly choices based on the energy she gets from the dance floor, which for Correy is the most addicting aspect of what she does. It’s all about being completely and utterly present with and for the crowd, feeling the love and loving the energy.

Listen to DJK8 at https://soundcloud.com/dj-k8-1.

Amongst mathematicians, cosmologists and sci-fi nerds with a willingness to dig a little deeper than a bong-fueled conversation beneath a mote of stars on a June night in the Catskills Mountains, there is the Drake Equation. This probabilistic argument is used to estimate the number of intelligent alien civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy and the likelihood of an E.T. visit or communication. This is based on three main variables: the number of habitable planets, the evolution of intelligent life on those planets, and the capacity for civilizations to survive long enough to achieve interstellar communication or travel. The Drake Equation relies on lots of conjecture and little observation and thus results in a wide range of answers. Many are playful or combative extrapolations, and occasionally innovative re-applications. One such retool of the Drake Equation was used by male physics students at Harvard University to address a mystery closer to home: how many eligible single women their age are living in Boston? They arrived at a depressingly sober estimate of around 2,500.

Frank Drake was a young radio astronomer when he formulated his equation in 1961. His intention was to catalyze an orderly search for alien life. Radio telescopes had been in use since the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that radio telescopes – like the one built at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico – became powerful enough or sensitive enough to possibly detect an alien radio signal amidst the noise of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This noise is the low-level, leftover fluctuating glow of thermal radiation from the Big Bang that streams at us from every direction in the microwave region of the radio spectrum.

Eventually, large arrays of radio telescopes were employed. One was featured in the popular 1997 film “Contact,” based on the novel by Carl Sagan, where Dr. Eleanor Arroway, a SETI scientist played by Jodie Foster is chosen to make first contact with an alien civilization after compelling evidence is discovered of an extraterrestrial radio signal.

It is quintessentially human to create and use equations and formulas to prove or predict. We are creatures obsessed with our knowledge of time. We want to understand our past and know our future. Einstein’s E=mc2 helps us understand the very nature of space and time on a universal scale, while the Pythagorean Theorem (a2 + b2 = c2) links algebra, geometry, and trigonometry and made navigation on Earth possible in the first place.

On a more immediate, earthly, less math-y level: predictive formulas have emerged behind the scenes to powerfully manipulate consumer behavior, from food to clothing to music. The addictive nature of most junk food is no accident. Food researchers relentlessly test subjects to find “the bliss point” for their products: the optimal palatability where the synergistic combination of sugar, salt, and fat produces an endorphin rush run by the neurotransmitter dopamine that has us suddenly staring at the bottom of a bag of chips like an addicted casino slot-jockey in Atlantic City with a cup of dollar tokens wondering where it all went.

It doesn’t stop there. In the age of data mining and digital streaming, companies like Echo Nest use software to analyze a song’s basic musical characteristics such as beats per minute, tonality, and loudness, but also more refined elements like texture, timbre and perceived brightness. This is all in an effort to create hit-predicting algorithms and serve you tailored listening suggestions on services like Spotify or Pandora. Songwriting teams now search for a musical bliss point, serving you copious hooks and ear candy, with greater homogeneity of tonality, timbre and loudness.

I want my music scene to be more like the Drake Equation and less like the Bliss Point. This column will be dedicated to finding signs of intelligent musical life in Orlando, of the non-bliss-point-data-mined-group-think variety. I’m going to start with a local 8-piece funk-slash-jazz combo called Ism. Led by vibraphonist Ian McLeod, he and the majority of players are all faculty members in Full Sail University’s Bachelor of Science in Music Production degree program. Full Sail launched that degree program in 2010, and with it came an influx of composers and musicians both local and from around the country.

Like a toddler with a machine gun, Ism’s sound doesn’t aim in one direction for long, and they don’t care, spraying in the general area between funk and modern jazz, with tight rhythm changes, unconventional instrumentation, and forays into mixed meter. Occasionally Hip-hop and Salsa wind up casualties of war too. The consistent strain, though, is that this is music in motion, party music that may relax its pace a bit, only so you can catch your breath for the next up-tempo romp.

Ism is a young group, but they have the experience and attitude of seasoned professionals, trained to read music. Ready to play and ready to learn, they are musicians’ musicians, without the drawback of diva tensions. Individuals have played throughout the country for years, done hard time at Disney, recorded albums everywhere and engineered them too. As their backgrounds are diverse, so their eclecticism derives in part from the writing and arranging styles of its members.

Ian McLeod did a lot of the early arranging and writing. But Scott Dickinson, Ism’s trumpet player who was hired by Full Sail just shy of his doctorate at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music for his facility with arranging, has contributed tunes too. Increasingly, writing credits expanded to include more and more members of the group, reflecting McLeod’s easy-going leadership style. Individual contributions are welcome, and the group gives all ideas an earnest shot.

Veit Renn, Ism’s German-born keyboard player teaches mixing at Full Sail and was recruited in part because he has written and produced for artists such as N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys. Under the name F8te he recently released “Overdue”, an R&B album of his own songs featuring himself as vocalist. Renn is the mix engineer for Ism’s yet untitled album that will be released at a performance party at Will’s Pub on July 14 at 9pm (1042 North Mills Avenue, Orlando).

Ism:
Ian McLeod – Vibraphone/MIDI Vibes
Scott Dickinson – Trumpet
Jeremy Fratti – Tenor Sax
Derrick Harris – Trombone
Veit Renn – Keys/Vocals
Greg Jungbluth – Bass
Nik Ritchie – Drums
Bob Patterson – Guitar