At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Louis–based jazz and bossa nova musician Janet Evra found herself doing something she hadn’t done in years: going weeks, then months, without performing live.
Evra, a native of Gloucester, England, who was a Kranzberg Artist in Residence, had a full East Coast tour booked when the pandemic canceled that tour and all live performances. She and her husband, fellow musician Will Buchanan, quickly found that playing music at home for each other lacked the same rush of a live performance and the feeling of community with the audience.
“We were just sitting on the couch, looking at each other and thinking to ourselves, We miss making music,” Evra says. “We were looking [online] to see what our fellow musicians were doing, and they were in limbo just like us.”
Evra and Buchanan’s idea to cure their music standstill began taking shape over the next couple of weeks, and Evra says the COVID-19 lockdown proved to be “the silver lining” to the project forming.
“We thought, ‘What if we made our own virtual collaboration, made some great arrangements, and invited musicians we’ve admired from afar and our local favorites to just play together in some form, even if we can’t get together in person,” Evra says. “It was the perfect time.”
The result is the St. Louis Music Box Series, a semi-monthly YouTube video of a song rehearsed, performed, and recorded in each individual’s home.
“Recording in your living room is definitely its own art form,” Evra says, laughing. “There’s nothing quite like being in the room together, but we’ve made it work and pulled a lot of magic together.”
The songs feature four to five collaborators each and are arranged by Buchanan, with one song, “Octopus’s Garden” by Ringo Starr, arranged by pianist Ryan Marquez. Grammy Award–winning saxophonist Eric Marienthal, Grammy Award–nominated jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti, New York–based saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, and St. Louis jazz singer Anita Jackson are just a few of the performers who’ve appeared in the series.
The first performance in the series, “Ladies Night” by George M. Brown and Kool & The Gang, débuted July 1, 2020, and has around 1,700 views on YouTube and more on Facebook. The series’ eighth performance will be released September 1.
Buchanan says he spends a few weeks arranging each piece, not counting time spent on usually two to three pieces they don’t end up selecting, before he and Evra record their parts. The next step is to have a drummer add their tracks, followed by a pianist and then any remaining musicians. This method, Buchanan says, makes it easy to collaborate at every level of the process.
“It’s always fun to get someone’s tracks back and say ‘Oh, we expected this’ or ‘We didn’t expect this.’ It’s a cool way to build [a song],” Buchanan says. “Everyone contributes their thing.”
Evra adds: “These songs are so great as they are, but they're so rich in terms of where they could be taken harmonically. So the arrangements are reinterpreted, which gives them a little bit of new life and new bold flavor, and it also gives our guests something to dig into. You can see them take the arrangement and really run with it.”
After all the individual components are in, Evra and Buchanan blend them together, and Eightfold Studios edits a split-screen video of the performance. The total production time takes about two months per song.
As several of the artists tiptoe back into live performances in recently reopened clubs and restaurants and rescheduled festivals, Evra says that everyone plans to continue performing in the Music Box.
“This is the type of project that you squeeze in and keep burning,” she says. “Some of these world-class people have indicated they’d like to come to St. Louis for a live performance once touring resumes, and we’ll be their band. ... We’ve discovered this passion and are playing with our favorite people.”
St. Louis Music Box performances can be streamed for free at YouTube.com, Facebook.com, or on Instagram @janetevra.
