By Madeline Baker, Times Chronicle
For the past two years, MAD Jazz LIVE has used streaming video to provide Friday night concerts for an appreciative audience of homebound music lovers. Now that venues across the province have re-opened their doors, Osoyoos residents have a chance to see the group do what they do so well and in the way nature intended.
The band consists of vocalists Mandy Rushton and Dane Warren, along with piano player and sound technician Aaron Pang (the MAD in their band name is, in fact, an anagram of their first names). They met in Richmond while living on the same floor of an apartment building and quickly discovered that they all loved traditional jazz – why else? – for sentimental reasons.
“Growing up, I loved everything about Christmas,” said Warren about his early introduction to classic crooner style. “And so I got introduced to all the old movies – White Christmas with Bing Crosby, and some other holiday ones with Frank Sinatra – and I got introduced to that genre of crooners from back in the day.”
“Also, funnily enough, The Nutty Professor with Jerry Lewis because of Buddy [Love]. He sits at the piano and sings in the saloon with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth … he was super cool in that movie and I just fell in love with that.”
For Rushton, The Great American Songbook was handed down to her by a grandmother she never met, whose introduction of those classic songs to new generations helped her nurture a love of performing that she could never turn into a career. Now, Rushon says that she’s “carrying the torch of [her grandmother’s] love of travelling, performing, and making people feel good despite it all.”
Pang, meanwhile, excelled in classical piano training but felt no real passion for the music he played. While studying at the University of Victoria, he began to follow CBC broadcaster and musician Tom Power and found not only a much broader new horizon of music styles and knowledge but a love for jazz music that rekindled his love for playing the piano.
With the three of them living so close to each other and Pang lacking “bubble” mates during the harshest 2020 lockdowns, the three musicians decided to create a “family bubble” inside which they could develop their shared sound and use their love of music to survive the pandemic’s many stresses.
Photo by Dane Warren.
Promoting a new band in 2020, a year marked by such isolation and solitude could have been a doomed enterprise. Rushton, Warren, and Pang proved to have the necessary ingenuity to turn their timing into a positive by taking their performances online, where concert lovers who had been starved of live music went looking for the next best thing.
They quickly built up a fanbase on the popular streaming website twitch.com and as the lockdowns extended into another year, that fanbase became a tightly-knit community of friends who had never even met face to face.
In 2021, MAD Jazz LIVE began to find avenues that would allow them to add in-person live performance to their shows on Twitch. “In the late spring and early summer, we naturally segued into performing for [care] homes, out in their plaza or courtyard areas,” Rushton explained.
“Online, it was live but it was still separated,” added Warren. “And when we performed in front of a camera, we even piped in laughter for ourselves because we would finish a song and just be staring at a camera. I think … getting that live feedback, and that interaction, that was the biggest thing we missed.”
“Audiences were so appreciative that they were virtually silent, because they didn’t want to miss a note or a lyric. They were frozen, so entranced with live performance and real people,” Rushton remembered fondly, though she added that raucous applause, singing along, and even dancing are very welcome reactions from their future audiences.
“Now that the mask mandates have been lifted, and dancing is no longer illegal… [we’re] totally revamping our sets to allow for people to be up and dancing again.”
While Rushton and Warren have both done solo tours in the past, their hopes of building up a similar tour schedule together in the Okanagan were dashed, like so many others worldwide, by COVID-19. For them, bringing MAD Jazz LIVE to Osoyoos feels like reclaiming a piece of that dream.
“We’ve been wanting to do more stuff in the Okanagan because Mandy lived in Fruitvale for quite a while, and I visit Osoyoos every year, every summer for my entire life,” said Warren. They plan to gauge interest among local wineries and hope to put on a winery performance tour at some point in the future, possibly as soon as this coming summer.
And for anyone who believes that traditional jazz has nothing new to offer, Rushton and Warren have a few curveballs to keep them engaged should they take a chance on MAD Jazz Live: To keep challenging themselves during the lockdown, they developed several retro takes on pop songs from the past three decades in the style of popular YouTube artists like Postmodern Jukebox.
“People might hear some Metallica, some Radiohead, some MJ [Michael Jackson]…” said Warren with obvious enthusiasm.
“We like to keep people guessing,” added Rushton, “including ourselves, and I like to say that we produce the kind of entertainment we’d like to see ourselves.”
MAD Jazz LIVE will perform as part of the Osoyoos Spring Festival on Saturday, May 7, at the Osoyoos Senior Centre. Tickets are $30 and can be purchased online through the Venables Theatre Box Office at venablestheatre.ca.
More information about the Osoyoos Spring Festival and its many other performers can be found at the Arts Council website, osoyoosartscouncil.com. For anyone who would like to sample the MAD Jazz LIVE experience in advance, archives of their streamed performances can be found online at youtube.com/c/MADJazzLIVE.
