This wedding hit all the right notes for me as a bandleader. First of all, I had just been at a very fancy reception party at the Hotel Commonwealth a few weeks prior to accept Boston Magazine’s “Best Wedding band 2016” award for Flipside, so I felt quite positive about doing an event in their newly renovated ballroom. Secondly, being so close to the Island Creek restaurant I had some deigns on some Duxbury oysters before the wedding. There was a Red Sox game scheduled for the same night, so I was quite pleased that all my band members got there early enough to thwart the extra traffic, find parking, etc. The event staff at the venue bring a youthful and positive energy to the night, which is always welcome to a band trying to get in the right frame of mind to rock a party, of course.
For the first dance, Josh and Jackie chose “Coming Home” by Leon Bridges- an excellent Sam Cooke style tune that is just the perfect thing to show off the soul power of our lead vocalist, David Jiles Jr. Of course, the first dance is all about the bride and groom and that’s where the focus should always be, but it never hurts when it’s a song the band can really knock out of the park. It helps us make a strong first impression.
Photos by Dan Aguirre
Guests came for all over the world for this one, but a lot of the groom’s family were from London which thrilled my little Anglophile heart, of course. English wedding guests often means two things: great hats on the ladies and excellent toasts to follow. The father of the groom gave a sarcastic but affectionate welcome toast that had the entire crowd- including the band members- howling with laughter. It was also a Jewish wedding and we unleashed one of the most raucous horas we have ever been part of! To kick off the dancing, we played an uptempo medley of Hava Nagilla, Simon Tov, a bit of Dodoi Li and back to Hava Nagilla for the big finish. By the end of that, we had everybody on the dance floor and went right into a set of high energy Motown, 80s and 90s hits and a bit of Top 40 that kept people of all ages dancing for the rest of the night.
