Tonal Chaos
Residence: San Francisco
Style: Nine-piece improvisational vocal ensemble (think Wayne Brady x 9 + talent – campy faux-humor)
Members: Amos Glick, Kirk Livingston, Julie Sparling, Gerri Lawlor, Joshua Raoul Brody, Barbara Scott, Robb Penn, David Norfleet, Christopher Gray
By Erik Fong

Behind the chaos
Leave it up to Tonal Chaos to take every genre known to man and link them together in a daisy chain of sonic madness. Chants lead to gibberish leads to melody leads to Broadway showtunes lead to gospel, and so on. Each link in itself makes perfect sense – but when combined and thrown into an improvisational arena where nine different people are thinking nine different things at any given moment, all bets are off.

“We direct ourselves,” reveals Tonal Chaos member Barbara Scott. “So maybe some groove is happening, and someone in the group might like what these two people are doing. So he’ll tell the others to shut up and just have those two sing theirs, and then we build something else on top of that. We’ve been working for a number of years on creating all different kinds of spontaneous music.”

Uhh… line?
Since all Tonal Chaos performances are improvised, you’ll never see the same show twice. The group thrives on the moment, taking suggestions from audience members and incorporating as many different styles of music as possible into its performances. There are no boundaries – sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there are words, sometimes not. You might see backing instruments, or not. “We basically come out on stage and maybe we’ll get a suggestion from the audience for a gibberish word, or four notes in succession, and we just start riffing on that,” explains Barbara. “It’s not like we get a suggestion, do a song, get a suggestion, do a song – music tends to morph into other kinds of music.”

Voices in your head
You may recognize a few of the Tonal Chaos members from their various other projects. Joshua and David are full-time musicians and composers, Julie is a teacher, Amos is part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Barbara is an actor and teaches improv at BATS. In addition, both Jerri and Barbara have done voiceover work for video games – Jerri is the female voice in The Sims and Barbara provided one of the voices in the short-lived but extremely underrated Electronic Arts online game Majestic.

Practice makes… something
“We don’t write anything down. Everything we do is improv. We don’t repeat anything. The evening is completely spontaneous.”

Since there’s no set form, what does the group practice during a typical rehearsal? Barbara elaborates: “Different ways of creating music together. Like in our last get-together, we explored unison, because there are nine of us and we all tend to get very excited. We all want to join in on everything. So we explored unison to create this real strong tonality before building anything on it.”

Tonal Chaos also uses its group practices to firm its grip on different music styles and create a more elaborate and diversified musical performance. Barbara continues: “At our rehearsal, we might bring in a CD of some world music, and we’ll just drop it in and listen to it for four seconds, get the essence of that and sing something of our own.”

Train wreck
Contrary to what the thought of a completely spontaneous performance might lead you to believe, sometimes things don’t always go as planned. But much like the children of the ‘80s, each seeming “accident” during a Tonal Chaos performance is special, unique and a gift from God almighty himself. In fact, for Tonal Chaos, there are no accidents – only new opportunities. Barbara shares one specific moment that inadvertently opened up a whole new world of possibilities: “There was kind of a lull in the evening, and a number of us grabbed our water bottles at the same time. Some started playing the bottles – making a “toot” noise) – and the others joined in. It started out kind of cheesy, but then we realized that we were miraculously in tune, and it turned into a very cool rhythmic, kind of African-sounding jam.”

Coming soon
The group is taking the summer off as various members pursue Europe, Vegas and art scholarships, but looks forward to playing anytime and anywhere in the fall.

Witness: Sunday, July 13 @ Edinburgh Castle (950 Geary @ Polk, San Francisco)
Sample: Long Demo
Website: www.tonalchaos.com