Hey guy, who even are you?
I am Bryan and I do a show called Bryan vs. Music. It is your standard soundtrack set with a couple added gimmicks. I do it solo. The playlist is seven years old and I have painstakingly curated it myself. (Let’s ignore the fact that ‘Oh Girl’ by the Chi-Lites somehow snuck onto the playlist four separate times…) And unlike many other soundtrack sets, I try to have a narrative or thematic through-line in mine. The playlist is on Spotify and I will freely give it out to anyone who asks. Sometimes I will force it on people who don’t ask! Anyone can do my show, it is not especially precious to me.
Some of you may not know what the soundtrack is. Simply put, a soundtrack is a montage that is set to music. I’ve seen it referred to as “an Armando with songs instead of stories.” Often what will happen is the team will use an audience member’s phone or mp3 player, and plug it into a speaker or the venue’s PA. Less commonly, a group may try a narrative or structured format set to music. It is distinct from an improvised musical; the performers are not improvising songs, but letting prerecorded music play, and letting that music affect their scenes in some way.
There are multiple ways a performer can use a song for a suggestion: I myself am particularly influenced by the emotional resonance of the chord progression, or the lyrics. Sometimes we may be inspired to dance, and the movement of the song becomes our character. Sometimes the song puts us into a specific historical context, or drops us into a certain location. There are some people who pretend to be the band members recording the song at hand. These people are bad at doing the soundtrack.
How did I come to do a solo soundtrack, to my knowledge the only solo soundtrack currently running? It is equal parts happy and sad. A number of things all happened at once: I was tasked with curating a jam playlist for the soundtrack jam at Kickstand Comedy in Portland. I was one of I think two tech people for the first three years of Kickstand’s existence, and the jam playlist was my unique responsibility. So, when they stopped running the soundtrack jam, I was left with a 1500-song Spotify playlist of weird and wonderful stuff.
I really enjoyed this labor of love, the playlist curation and the joy of the performers and the inspired scenes. When the jam stopped, I was sure a large group of dedicated performers would want to see it continue. I put out feelers on Facebook. I canvassed my immediate friend group. No takers. And thus Bryan vs. Music was born.
I’d wanted to do solo improv since I’d first witnessed Jill Bernard from Minneapolis performing Drum Machine. I was also greatly inspired by listening to her admission that Drum Machine was the culmination of all of her improv aspirations in a single show: solo, musical, historical periods, audience interviews. She just went ahead and did the thing, and that’s a high I’ll be chasing until the day I win the lottery and open my own theater. I was nervous but the idea of doing solo improv did not scare me away.
I became the host of a Thursday night indie show at the Brody Theater, also in Portland. The show was first come, first serve, with minimal vetting. As long as you had taken some improv classes somewhere, and you could provide a cast list for your show, you could book a spot. As it turns out, this led to performers not taking the show too seriously, which led to performer absences. In the event of a performer absence, we would extend the jam at the end of the show. If no one was particularly interested in jamming, that’s when Bryan vs Music would step in.
There are two rules in play for the tech person at a Bryan vs Music show. You must play more than one song during my set, and you cannot deviate from the playlist. These rules are in place because techs before you thought the point of the show was to give me a challenge. [Once upon a time I had a tech play an unbroken 2-minute segment of a podcast, at full volume, complete with Squarespace ad.] Beyond that, every show is different, bound to the whims of the tech who I hope is helpful and wants me to have a good show.
I got very good in a short amount of time, so much so that Kelly Buttermore and Justin Peters chose to include me in their Countdown Improv Festival in Tampa, FL, a festival dedicated to solo-to-trio acts. In fact, they liked it so much, that this year I will be performing in my SIXTH Countdown Improv Festival. That first one really marked a turning point in my improv career, because it opened up new networking opportunities and also made me believe that maybe I was Good at the Thing. So far this year I am slated to attend twelve improv festivals.
Now I’m traveling a lot but I’m also trying to teach to offset the costs. I’ve been doing the soundtrack for a few years now, at times exclusively so, so I think I have a pretty good handle on it and I can communicate the concepts pretty well. If you want me to come to your theater and do a show and teach your students how to do the soundtrack, I’m open to it. But it’s so rare that I see another soundtrack show out in the wild, and I’d like to see more of them. If you do the soundtrack at your theater, or as an indie group, or especially if you’re another solo soundtrack person, I want to hear from you! Let us join forces for good or for evil!
Here’s the link to my Spotify playlist.