Lake Norman Big Band to Record with BPT

The 20 member Lake Norman Big Band plans to record a demo CD early in 2013, as part of BPT's Community Recording Project.  The non-profit band, formed in 1998 of volunteer musicians practices weekly and gives regular performances throughout the area.  Their music includes classic songs from the 1930s and 1940s, when names like Benny Goodman, Fred Waring, Duke Ellington, and Tommy Dorsey dominated popular music.  They also do big band arrangements of popular modern songs and seasonal favorites.

In the days before amplifiers, these bands with their large brass sections that included trumpets, coronets, trombones, and woodwinds including clarinets and a variety of saxophones, made room-shaking sounds.  They featured tight, expert musicianship, complex musical arrangements, and a wide variety of instruments that also included percussion, guitars, piano, vocalists, and sometimes string sections.

Recording the Lake Norman Big Band will be an unusual challenge where much modern music consists of electronic instruments plugged directly into computers and synthesized sounds, built track by track.   Blending 20 live performers playing in a large enough space to accommodate the really big sound will take a special effort.  The best location for the recordings is being discussed.  It would be a tight fit in the new BPT recording studio, and recording sessions in a large venue, like the Myers Auditorium, where the public is invited is another possibility.

The band performs once a month at The Finish Line restaurant in Mooresville.

For more information visit their website,  http://www.thelakenormanbigband.org/