Whatever you do: don’t call them The Disney Big Band.
They are a big band and they play Disney songs, but on the advice of an entertainment lawyer wary of offending the world’s most recognizable mouse, they opted to find another name.
They could’ve been the Bippidi-Boppidi-Band or the When You Wish Upon a Starlighters, but bandleader and pianist Matt Grinke decided his band should be The Happiest Big Band On Earth.
As the group of primarily Capilano University musicians prepare for their June 1 and 2 concerts at Presentation House Theatre, Grinke explains the lure of the mouse and the music.
There was a time, after he saw The Lion King as a child but before he knew which Sherman brother was which, when he pledged fealty to the magic kingdom.
“I can’t remember why Disney music came to be such a thing,” he says.
It’s an odd sentence from someone sporting a stressed Mickey Mouse t-shirt and possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of Disney’s composers and arrangers (You can always tell when you’re listening to a Danny Troob arrangement, Grinke says excitedly.).
There’s a universal appeal to those folk and fairy tales, he explains.
“Everybody has an attachment to Disney in some way,” Grinke says. “You can ask anybody in the world what their favourite Disney song is and everybody will have an answer.”
Grinke recently left Capilano University. He didn’t exactly finish, he says, but he’s finished with it.
Asked if it was an intense program, Grinke replies that it was. “Intense, angry people, too,” he adds.
One of his last CapU assignments involved picking a song and giving it a new arrangement.
Grinke immediately began to procrastinate.
“I was so passive at that point,” he says. “I just didn’t want to do anything.”
He could do a jazz standard but that didn’t feel right.
But then he considered a song with some “punch, pizazz, yahoo and how.” That was it. He would arrange “Friend Like Me” from Aladdin.
The performance was two-and-a-half minutes long, but that was enough. Like Mickey Mouse trailing after the sweet smell of a fresh-baked pie, Grinke knew the path he would follow. He would form a band devoted to Disney music.
He needed good musicians but he also needed players who could differentiate between a magic feather and an enchanted broom. And so, each prospective musician was asked to list their two favourite Disney songs.
“If people just picked generic Disney songs . . . I knew they weren’t true Disney fans,” Grinke says.
Songs like “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid or “Someday My Prince Will Come” from Snow White were indicators of insufficient appreciation, Grinke explains. On the other hand, the musician who chose “Streets of Gold” from Oliver & Company zoomed to the top of the list.
“I said, ‘Yes, absolutely!’” Grinke recalls.
Grinke has a deep affection for the deep cuts in Disney’s catalogue. “Run, Llama, Run” is from the chase scene in The Emperor’s New Groove, he informs me. “How could you not know that? It’s common knowledge,” he says, kidding on the square.
The show should be about 60 per cent obscure Disney songs and 40 per cent fan favourites including “Zero To Hero” from Hercules, a medley from The Incredibles, and Walt Disney’s personal favourite, “Feed The Birds.”
The shows are also set to feature some improvisations on audience requests as well as a few tunes done in smaller, more intimate arrangements.
The difficulty has been getting all 17 pieces of the 17-piece band into a room.
“We haven’t had a single rehearsal with the same band twice,” he admits. “That’s kind of the fear of the show.”
To ameliorate that fear, Grinke has been arranging and re-arranging out of his unofficial office at the Starbucks at Park and Tilford.
“They know me there now. I get nice cheap drinks.”
Asked if the arranging takes time away from composing, Grinke shakes his head.
“This is my composition writing. This has become my life and it’s all that I do,” he says, explaining his ultimate goal of bringing the band to a Disney cruise line or a theme park. “I’m very lucky that I live in a house where I don’t have to pay rent. . . . It’s basically like a permanent government grant.”
His mother calls him The Lone Arranger, he says, explaining that he sifts through movie scores over and over for what he calls “iconic sounds,” those moments that embed themselves in the consciousness of everyone who hears them. He keeps those, he says.
But while there’s a chord structure that doesn’t change, that same structure offers thousands of possibilities. To illuminate his point he plays three different D-minor chords. The choice is between what’s almost right and what’s right.
“You can’t really plan out an arrangement in great depth,” he says. “You just kind of have to start it and then let it form on its own.”
The lead-up to the show has required “endless problem solving,” Grinke says. But he enjoys puzzles and can solve a Rubik’s Cube in a minute, he adds.
He pauses and considers what he just said.
“Which is kind of what arranging is, I guess, it’s just a big puzzle of fitting notes together.”
