The Vocal Workshop

8478 Tyco Road
vienna, VA 22182
thevocalworkshop@gmail.com

A Note from our instructor, Chris Grasso

If you're just joining us, welcome! Here is a bit about the structure of our sessions.

For the first 4 sessions, we'll try to work on a variety of songs to give you a chance to try things out, see what you like, and learn as much as possible about singing in a jazz setting.

You should bring 2 songs to work on each week -- you can repeat material, or do new songs each time.

In the fourth week, I'll ask you to narrow down your songs to 3 selections that you'd like to perform for our show at Twins.

A couple of guidelines for song selection:

I strongly encourage people to choose material from what's known as The Great American Songbook. This basically means jazz standards composed by people like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rogers, Duke Ellington and many more.

While some current jazz singers sometimes sing original material, or songs from the pop/R&B world, all good jazz singers learned their craft by studying the standard repertoire, so that is what we focus on. If you are short of ideas for material, I recommend spending some time on www.youtube.com and doing searches for Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and others. You will find a treasure trove of performers and songs to choose from.

For the performance, I also ask that you select at most one ballad to perform. The other two songs should be more uptempo -- either a swing tune or a Latin tune. It's my belief that you learn only a limited amount about jazz if you limit yourself to singing slow songs.

8478 Tyco Road
vienna, VA 22182
thevocalworkshop@gmail.com