Booking jazz bands for your wedding

Query: I want a low-cost jazz band for my wedding ceremony and breakfast; as always, and said many times above, the first step in getting a low-cost jazz band, or any kind of live music groups that matter, is to book well in advance of your wedding when there is the maximum choice to be had, enabling the lower cost bands to be chosen together with those that are local to you and can minimise their travel costs. There is great scope for cost control in a jazz band as it can be anything from a single musician with backing tracks through to the normal trio or quartet and onto the larger bands right up to a twenty piece jazz big band.

Many jazz bands, being sensitive to the cost implications for bride and groom, offer a range of band sizes, so that they can have the musical talent of the band at a cost that they can afford. So we will typically quote for example a trio and quartet of the same brand and you can choose whether you can afford and wish to pay the extra instrument and the extra tonality and wider range of repertoire that that affords, or prefer to save some money, keep your costs down and go for the trio.              

Query: find the barn dance band to play entrance music for my ceremony;   we've covered this before, the important thing being to make sure in your enquiry that we know this is the sort of thing you are looking for so that you can ensure that the band are happy to play session music, probably without amplification for convenience in the church.                     

 Request: find the best harpist to play at my wedding reception and wedding ceremony; the best harpist is the one that is best from your point of view, and this could encompass price (either high price or low price )                     

 Request: find a pianist for my civil ceremony;  we've covered this extensively already, but perhaps the most important thing is to be sure that the venue that your civil wedding ceremonies going to be in is suitable for setting up a piano and that there is time to set up an electric keyboard and take it down: this can be a problem at registry offices where one ceremony may follow the other with virtually no break.                Query: wedding ceremony exit songs;  the exit song needs to be very positive and uplifting. This is announcement that you are married. It also has to be something that you can walk to in a positive manner, it's no good having a next song where you have to run out to it, or one which is so vague and lofty that nobody knows if you're actually leaving. It also has to be music that is loud enough and clear enough to sound over the clapping and cheering people (unless you have extremely subdued wedding guests).

Request: wedding ceremony musicians; wedding ceremony musicians are any kind of musician who have the experience of playing at a wedding ceremony. This is quite specific experience, as the music has to be timed exactly right and coordinated with the registrar all the vicar. Musicians who are used to playing for film music also have the right sort of experience, as they will be recording to a click track and to conduct who is watching the film and fittingly music to the nearest second to what is happening on screen.              

 Requests: songs for a wedding ceremony;  popular wedding songs during ceremony;   recessional music for wedding ceremony;  these were of request that we get relating to the music, and as described above it is a matter of looking it lists of suggestions in books about weddings (they have to be careful with the book and look at its publication date, as fashions change year by year, and if the book is a few years old any suggestions may not be relevant, unless of course there classical pieces. But even tastes in classical and baroque music for the wedding ceremony has changed over the years.  ) A better place to look for what is in vogue, is in the Internet, but again check on when the page of the website was produced. Some pages are up-to-date, but many are years old, and it can be very difficult to establish the age of a webpage and the relevance of the music songs that are listed.      

Request: I want an all male harpist for my wedding ceremony and breakfast ;   this is a difficult one to fulfil. Traditionally, harpists are female. I don't know why, perhaps it's because the church through its history has commissioned artists who depict harpists as attractive female angels floating around in clouds, and perhaps this image has influenced the sex of harpists and indeed there looks. So, there are male harpists, but they are few and far between, often specialists in some way, perhaps specialising in South American music or tangos or being very high level and dedicated orchestral or classical solo harpists.

 Request: find the best pianist to play at my wedding reception and wedding ceremony;    as before, this is a matter very much of you all particular tastes, but can also relate to whether they have their own instruments or not and whether their instruments if they have one is suitable for the venue in situation you are expecting to play.

Query: find a jazz band for my wedding  ceremony;  if you want a lot of hard work, you can look up the jazz clubs and pubs that hold jazz sessions on some night of the week, go along to the club with a pub and try and find somebody who has the addresses and phone numbers of the band to play their. You can then phone the band and try and get hold of somebody, which can be difficult with a jazz band has they tend to be out playing with their phones off. When you get hold of them you can try and find out whether playing and whether there available on your date, though most the time they haven't got their diary with them. You can see want to hear their music, and they may promise to send you a CD or something, but most the time it doesn't arrive. Why? Is it because they're sloppy? No, not normally, jazz musicians tend to be very thoughtful and honest people. It's more likely that they just so busy playing jazz, which normally involves a lot of travel for them and late nights, they just failed to get round to it and it disappears into all the corners and halls of a jazz musician's life.

Alternatively, you can make life easy for yourself and look at the list if jazz bands and jazz trios on the Midsummer music agency website, where we have done all the hard work of getting recordings out of bands and displaying them and it easy to peruse format for you.           

 Request: I want an all female jazz band for my wedding ceremony and breakfast;     yes, we can do that for you, there are some all female jazz band, but that is not particularly common. There is a tradition for jazz instrumentalists to be male and vocalist to be female, although this is by no means strictly the case. There are swing bands that are all female, saxophone quartets that are all female, and solo pianists and solo saxophonist's who are only female (now think about that statement, is it obvious, was it not? An interesting one to mull over!).          

Request: I want an impressive string quartet to play at my wedding ceremony and your reception; any string quartet is impressive in that it is live music, which many people don't get to hear and see and experience. So if you want to impress your guests at the wedding ceremony and then later on at the drinks reception and wedding breakfast, a great way to do it is to book a live string quartet. It is also a much cheaper way to impress your guests than hiring some magnificent and prestigious wedding venue that will set you back many thousands of pounds. A string quartet just costs a few hundred pounds. Pretty good value I would say!

 Request: find the string quartet to play entrance music for my ceremony; we have a superb range of string quartets right across the country, all of whom are experienced at playing the processional or entrance music for the bride at wedding ceremony. But when you've got the string quartet the you want to get the best value out of, so you would normally expect them to play during the signing of the register and all the photographs that can go on for rather a long time at this point in the ceremony, especially if it is a civil ceremony and particularly if you have a photographer and videographer. Save got to give your guests something to occupy them while all this is going on, as it can get rather tedious for the guests. What better than to have a string quartet playing to, giving them a concert, a rare treat for most people. And then of course you got to make your grand exit and some stirring music from the string quartet is a great way to do it by.

 I want an all female string quartet for my wedding ceremony and breakfast;     we certainly have quite a number of all female string quartets. They will cost more than a string quartet that is not specified as being all female, as the all female string quartet has become something of a fashion accessory to weddings in recent years, and they can therefore command somewhat higher prices. But if you want something that looks beautiful as well as sounding beautiful, then this is perhaps for you to go.    

Request: I want a low-cost barn dance band for my wedding entertainment;   to be perfectly honest, just about any barn dance band is low-cost in comparison with the other things that people tend to spend their money on at a wedding. This is not true if you are having a low-cost wedding, perhaps hiring a village hall and catering for your wedding guests yourself, with friends and family to help. This is a very low-cost way of doing things and can result in some of the most delightful and memorable weddings. This isn't the way that most people do it. Most people spend quite a lot on the ceremony itself, particularly if it's a church ceremony, with flowers, choir, organist even before you get to the string quartet or soprano from outside the church organisation. Then wedding venues can cost you many thousands of pounds, the meal if it's a hotel wedding venue type meal and you have a lot of guests will also set you back a lot, then there's the hire of clothing thousands of pounds pounds on wedding dress. So the barn dance band is going to be low-cost compared with out, even if they are one of the most expensive bands on our website. But if you really are wanting or needing to have a low-cost band then, as always, hire the band well in advance of your wedding, get the booking sorted out now not as a last thing just before the wedding day. Also with barn dance bands there's a huge range of prices that are set by the band, in part because of their own ideas of what they should charge, but in part because there are a lot of small bands that obviously are lower in cost. To have all the choice you could imagine to find a low-cost barn dance band if you get on with organising it now.