I’m looking for recommendations on noteworthy a cappella groups to listen to. So far I’ve only been listening to Rockapella and some college a cappella groups, and they’re mostly arrangements of existing songs. Any suggestions on other a cappella music/groups to check out would be very welcome!
BTW, one of the items on my wishlist is to be able to listen to really good a cappella groups live sometime soon. CD recordings pale in comparison. But seeing as I’m really far away, it looks like I’ll have to make do with live performances by local a cappella groups. Oh well
An a capella collection that I love is the soundtrack to a program that was on PBS in 1990 called “Do It A Capella!.” I believe Spike Lee produced it or something like that, I just know he was involved. Rockapella’s on it, as are The Persuasions and The Mint Juleps among others.
Don’t discount the Flirtations. Yes, they’re a gay group, and generally present their renditions on a bit of an angle (“Mr. Sandman, bring me a he. Make him gargle and brush with Gleem. Give him legs like Greg Louganis, but make him public about his gayness…”), but they’re VERY good. And incredibly funny!
[ur=http://entertainment.msn.com/artist/?artist=229898]MSN’s artist page for the Flirtations
Also look for Sweet Honey in the Rock, an incredible female African-American near-a-capella (they use traditional hand percussion instruments) group. Absolutely beautiful music.
I happen to love “Take 6”. They are a Christian group which might or might not turn you off but the arrangements of the vocals are to die for. Their greatest hits disc shows their range quite well and has the added bonus of Stevie Wonder singing on a track with them. Worth a listen in my opinion.
Zap Mama the Belgian/Pygmy group do amazing stuff with nothing but 5 female vocalists on Adventures In Afropea and Sabsylma although later albums include instruments. Absolutely unique and thrilling even if you won’t understand a word.
Isn’t Chantacleer a cappella? I haven’t listened to them in a while, but shortly after 9/11, I listened to their recording of Steal Away quite a bit and was comforted by it. I also like some of the things the King’s Singers have done.
I’ve sung in an a cappella group consisting of 10 people. We sang some “traditional hymn arrangements”, some barbershop quartets and some arrangement sung by GLAD. (GLAD is a Christian group, 5 men with a tendancy to interesting harmonies and rhythms. For example, their bass often does not sing the root of the chord, but sings some other note. The other types of songs I list often involve the bass singing nothing but roots of chords)
The hardest part was probably hearing each other and staying in tune. Groups singing a cappella have a tendency to go flat.(Note: this is not neccessarily a tendancy that you will notice on a recording, but is a tendency that is true of many a church or school choir in live performance.) Our group was as often inclined to go sharp on a couple of our songs(for reasons I can’t explain clearly, this is much less common among groups in general). On our GLAD arrangments, we sometimes divided the parts so that no two people had the same part throughout the entire song. (Especially since GLAD has a tendency on some songs to go back and add extra tracks in the studio, and we did not have that option). It meant we had a very specific order we had to stand in, so that everyone would be able to hear the parts they were used to hearing to stay in tune and stay together rhythmically. The hardest part for me to sing was on one song when I had to make a couple of jumps (I don’t recall the first interval, but from that odd note I had to jump up a fifth. No one else was singing anything remotely related. I totally could not hear the jump and had a tendency to not get it right. I knew I had sung it correctly in performance when one of the guys with better ears gave me a thumbs up).
One of the most light-hearted things that group did was when we sang a couple of traditional hymns around a campfire. We warmed up and check that we all knew our parts. We’d sing a verse then our leader,a bass, would say “Any problems, Eureka?” Nope, we were singing traditional hymns and I had the melody the whole time, easy. Then he’d check with each other part in turn, ending with the other bass, who did not read music and was not one of the more skilled musicians in our group. He sometimes had questions, but mostly just followed the leader who had perfect pitch. We then walked out around the campfire singing Pie Jesu (the Monty Python version).
I’m fond of InsideOut a capella. Most of their stuff is just arrangements of existing stuff, to be sure, but a) even so, it’s GOOD (I’m especially fond of their versions of Crazy (by Seal) and Rubber Ducky), and b) they have some amusing parodies. Squirrels (Girls) and The Stalking Song (Happy Together) crack me up.
Chiming in to second don’t ask on Zap Mama, who are favorites of mine. Only this morning, I was singing along with them [phonetically] at the top of my lungs as I drove to work. I prefer their earlier a capella work to the accompanied stuff; but on all of it they do luscious harmonies.
You will probably like almost anything by The Swingle Singers or any of the offspring groups spawned by the original. Hard-core stunt acapalla work of the most demanding kind, and for the most part stunningly beautiful.
Unimportant aside: for years I wondered how they got their name. Then I learned the beautiful truth that they were called ‘The Swingle Singers’ because (duh!) the group was founded by a guy whose name was ‘Swingle’. I love the world for many reasons, but the fact that someone’s name can actually be ‘Swingle’ is one of them.
I’m no true expert, and I happen to like covers of existing songs, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but two of my favorite college groups are Tufts’ Beelzebubs and U Penn’s Off the Beat.
