Octopus Ballet and East Coast Swing
New music with familiar faces!
We’ve often heard Leanne Trevalyan play alongside Billy Stoops. However, we’ve heard of Leanne’s own group, Octopus Ballet, and looked for an opportunity for some time to hear them together as they perform less often. When we learned they would be performing together this evening at Urban Elks, we had to be there!
Performances at the Urban Elks typically last from 4pm-7pm, and we try to get there early to get a good seat. Unfortunately, my (Denice) chicken pot pie took much longer to bake than expected and we didn’t get out of the house until about half an hour later than planned… Thankfully we were meeting our daughter there who arrived early and saved us seats. We got there just in time to hear them play my favorite song, “Church!”
The Elks is a unique venue compared to many places we go. A full golf course, barbershop, venue center, and restaurant and lounge, it has an eclectic country club feel to it. They changed up the band location which even gave us a little more dancing room!
Leanne Trevalyan, an award-winning blues musician, played acoustic guitar and her tambourine and sang for much of the evening. Sheryl Clark switched between her saxophone and bassoon throughout the evening, giving amazing solos to the delight of the crowd as you can hear in the audio clip below. And Peter Pendras played electric guitar, occasionally taking the lead on vocals during certain songs.
I (Zeek) once asked Leanne on another evening if she had vocal coaching at some point. Her sound is so refined I was certain there must be professional level training in her background. Much to my suprise, her answer was no. She simply has a raw talent that she has developed over years of playing, with such a breadth of ability that comes to play in many songs (one of the reasons “Church” is Denice’s favorites)!
Of course, we had to get in some dancing! It was great to see other couples and individuals alike get up and dance to the music.
As we got up to leave for the evening, we were stopped by another couple who had gotten up to swing dance, something we don’t see very often. They asked if we were the couple they had seen last time “tearing it up on the dance floor” as they described. We laughed, “probably.” As we chatted we learned they had been taking lessons from the same local instructor we had previously taken lessons from when we started wanting to learn how to dance. We loved hearing about their experience wanting to get out together as a couple after raising kids, and discovering the world of dance and local music.
It reminded us of why we even started writing this blog. It was intimidating when we first started dancing trying to figure out where to go for good music and space where it was okay to dance. We are so grateful for the places and people we have discovered along the way and want to share that with others and encourage them as they dive into this fun adventure!