Playing solo trombone hospitals or nursing homes?

[bwanamfupi]

Massively sporadic trombonechat participant here. Before Covid I would regularly play hammered dulcimer as a volunteer musician for the music therapy program at the IU Cancer Center in Indianapolis. Opportunities are starting to present again at hospitals and nursing homes - primarily to support music programs my children are involved with (the Indy youth orchestra wanted kids at 2 pm on a school day in a couple weeks - nobody was available so they're letting me fill the space with dulcimer, even though the folks at the nursing home didn't know what a dulcimer is). I've been pondering if I could include trombone in the mix as and when opportunities arise again. The idea would be to fill 60 min with a combination of dulcimer and trombone instead of repeating repeating some of the dulcimer songs. I play trombone with a local community band, and with the TC Christmas ensembles, but haven't put much time yet into what this could look like, or if it's just a bad idea. I'm a competent hobbyist, not a professional, but I'm not going to cause an evacuation due to awful playing. I'm curious if anyone in this forum has done something similar. Do you play completely unaccompanied? How about from a Real Book with iRealPro backing chords, and if so what's a basic gear setup?

[BGuttman]

I am a nursing home resident who plays trombone. We have regular music on Fridays from 2 to 3 PM. They asked me to play one of these slots. Here is what I found:

1. I had put together about 18 tunes; a variety of some band pieces and mostly stuff from the Fake Books. It wasn't quite enough to fill the hour. Even playing each Fake Book tune twice.

2. I'm a lousy improviser so I couldn't pad the songs to make them longer, and I felt that just playing the same song the same way was too boring (maybe my audience was a lot less discriminating than I was).

3. A lot of the other acts filling these slots used a computer to provide some kind of backing track. I'm not that sophisticated so I didn't. I wish I had.

4. The audience is not terribly discriminating and almost anything you do will be appreciated. You could fill the whole time on hammer dulcimer; as long as there is some tunefulness to it. I suspect that if you just do a series of riffs for an hour they will get bored. I still think that the ideal program is Lawrence Welk. Also, most of them won't appreciate rock.

5. Add some narrative. Say something about the song you are about to play. Make the event more than just playing a pack of songs. It's especially important if you play trombone. You need the chop rest between numbers.

I felt I could have done a lot better. Feedback from the audience was very positive.

Note that I practice in our back yard (outside) and I try to do it the same time every day because I have some residents who expect it and appreciate it. I play an hour doing about 15 minutes of etudes and the rest playing Fake Book tunes.

[andym]

It was quite a while back but I played at our local nursing home with a clarinetist. We played some duets written by the conductor of our orchestra. Trying those was the reason we wanted to play together. But what the residents really liked was just us sight reading through jazz standards and broadway tunes. It’s the right age crowd for the Great American songbook.

I will say I felt sorry for my Dad when we was passing away and in dementia care. All the recorded music was Lawrence Welk and other mild stuff. Most of the other people there loved it but he was more of a bebop and atonal modern orchestral music devotee. So hey, walk in and play anything and you will probably please someone.

[hyperbolica]

My quartet sometimes plays nursing homes as shakedown or practice gigs. I've played solo sometimes as well. Generally, when I play solo, I get some sort of backing track from Band-in-a-box and a little amp and just jam. My favorite in that vein is real book tunes with acoustic guitar and brushes behind the trombone. Very chill. You could even record your dulcimer and play bone along with that. Or record multitrack music minus one quartets and play that. It takes various amounts of preparation, but over time you can accumulate a varied repertoire so no one style gets dull.

These crowds are obviously very forgiving, so experiments can't go too far off the rails.

[bwanamfupi]

Thanks for the suggestions. My experience at IU was that folks were pretty friendly. I appreciate the encouragement to assume they still will be. The comment about accompanying trombone with dulcimer reminded me of an early quarantine experiment I did putting flugabone and dulcimer together. It was fun, although holding the flugabone with just my right hand got pretty exhausting.

[Doug Elliott]

I would definitely be a fan of recording dulcimer and playing with it. Maybe even recording a melody on trombone and playing dulcimer with it... Or both to keep it really interesting.

You could see if any residents play anything and work in a duet.