Press

7 Questions with the USAF Falconaires’ Tour Manager, Marcel Marchetti TSgt USAF

1. How much time do you spend practicing together? Practicing together depends on the job coming up and how it works into our busy schedule. Using the Vail Jazz Festival as an example, I see a total of 8 about hours to learn and work up for about 1.5 hours of music performed. That’s if we get all the time allotted in between other performances such as cadet parades at the USAF Academy, plus the admin time to preparing for tour. We don’t have a separate admin staff, so each person in the band is assigned an additional duty and some folks have multiple duties to prepare everything. Let’s not forget last minute performances can come up like a military funeral. That’s something you never can plan ahead, they just come up.

2. How is the program chosen for each show? The program is chosen by what type of audience we THINK will be at the venue. The Vail performance is part of the Vail Jazz Festival, so we will have a strong emphasis on big band jazz versus a performance for USAF recruiting at a high school, for example.

3. Which song seems to connect the most with all audiences? There is no certain song, but instead it’s how we program a performance that ends with patriotic music! This lets people leave feeling proud of our country and helps unit communities.

4. How much luggage does your group pack on tour? There’s a difference between luggage and musical equipment. Luggage is driven by how many days on the road we will travel, if there is a hotel with laundry facilities and whether the climate is hot or cold that we’re visiting. As to equipment, depends on the venues where we’re performing – what they have provided already and what we need to bring. It can be as little as half a 24ft truck or as much as a fullyloaded semi.

5. How are overseas audiences similar or different to American audiences? Overseas audiences are more appreciative to Americans performing jazz, because the origin of jazz American.

6. How long does it take to learn a new song? With the Falconaires having such top musicians, we can pretty much read a tune for the first time, talk over what we need to do, run it once again and then it’s about ready to be performed. This does depend on the difficulty of the tune, but for standard music that’s published, we can get it ready pretty fast.

7. What can we expect to see at the Vail performance? An exciting band that will leave you saying, “WOW!! I had no idea those guys were so good.”