Welcome to Amado Music

Upcoming Gigs

Dogtown Roadhouse, Friday February 17th, 8pm – 10pm: Trading Eights will perform with Amado on vocals, Justin Craig on electric Jazz guitar, Patrick Turner on bass, and Billy Ludtke on drums and percussion. The venue is located at 302 South Locust Street in Floyd, Virginia; here’s a map. A high-energy Jazz set list is prepared for you; come along and get happy.

Latest News

Amado says: “In the late summer of 2011 I attended a week-long workshop that has turned out to be the best event of my life so far. Nope, I’m not exaggerating. It was called Circlesongs, and it was a workshop (and a way to make choral music) developed by Bobby McFerrin and taught on this occasion by Bobby and five of his closest singer-friends.

“Of course, at this event I was given techniques that I can use to improve my vocal performance. But more importantly, my passion to make the best music I can was re-ignited and turbo-charged by Bobby, the faculty and staff of the Circlesongs workshop, and my 181 fellow attendees. I can't wait to, through singing, let you in on that joy, as best I am able.“

Trading Eights

The phrases “trading eights,” “trading fours,” and “trading twos” refer to when jazz or blues soloists take turns improvising, each playing for eight, four, or two measures (or “bars”) at a time. For the musicians, it’s a fun chance to have a kind of musical conversation, listening to what other soloists have to “say” and reacting to it in the moment. Listeners, too, enjoy this kind of musical interplay.

The Trading Eights jazz ensemble in Southwest Virginia consists of Amado Ohland on vocals accompanied by one to four instrumentalists. The most common configuration is: drums, acoustic bass, and either jazz guitar or acoustic/electric piano. For more information, contact Info@AmadoMusic.com.

“We play jazz material that lends itself to a high-energy, upbeat performance with certain bluesy and/or funky qualities. Will we trade eights, or fours, or twos? Most likely we will, because it’s fun for both us and the audience; we’ll do a lot other fun stuff too.”

Video From Around the Web

The tracks selected for the audio playlist you may be hearing now were selected as examples of Amado’s Jazz singing. For a small sample of Amado performing with an electric Blues/Jazz/Rock band from a few years ago, check out these videos posted on Google Video:

For examples of Amado’s original music, well, stay tuned. We’re still growing.

Biography

Amado’s 20-year music career is characterized by a gradual shift from writing and recording music influenced by progressive rock to live performance in a funky style of jazz and blues.

Born and raised in central New York State, he was introduced to music through grade-school trombone lessons. As a teenager he was inspired by progressive rock and its efforts to make music that might be taken more seriously as an art form. He taught himself how to play piano, absorbed the sounds of Queen, Rush, Styx, Asia, Yes, Howard Jones, and (slightly later) Prince, and started writing songs. His first rock performance experience was as a vocalist in a “rock ensemble” group sponsored by his high school, which performed a variety of the light pop-rock tunes of the time.

Upon graduating high school and going to college, he continued writing music and spent some time singing in pick-up rock bands and in of one of the school’s extra-curricular a capella groups as a founding member. Here he was first introduced to a MIDI studio, and used it to make some of his first self-produced recordings. Following graduation he moved to Baltimore, MD, set up his own home MIDI studio, and continued to write.

Two years later Amado returned to college to earn a music degree. While there he received four years of classical vocal instruction, composition workshops of a decidedly avante-garde bent, and traditional music theory. It was here that his writing started to turn from progressive rock’s more traditional, quasi-symphonic bravado towards art rock’s more experimental sounds. During this same time period, he received three years of jazz theory and keyboard instruction and two years of jazz vocal workshop instruction, and was introduced to the music of the Swing era. By graduation he had learned a whole catalog of jazz songs and gained some performance experience in the Washington, D.C. area as a jazz vocalist.

In terms of recorded output, the years immediately following graduation were Amado’s most productive. His debut disc Wanderlust was completed in 1998, and featured a selection of his progressive- and art-rock influenced songs written between 1987 and 1996. Later that year an EP of instrumental material called Forget the Words appeared, with songs culled from Amado’s collection of master tapes from the same period. The following year saw the completion of Jazz, an album that marks the beginning of his explorations of different traditional jazz styles. These works were later “released” on the fledgeling website mp3.com in its first incarnation as a haven for independent artists.

Meanwhile he gained more experience and explored different jazz styles by singing as a guest vocalist with a wide variety of jazz groups in Baltimore, and subsequently Philadelphia, PA. In 1999 he settled in central Florida, where he became a founding member of the funky blues band the Syndicators. The group had some regional success, and in 2003 was hand-picked by the Bose corporation to be one of only 24 bands nationwide to help them introduce their new live amplification system. When the group split in 2005, Amado founded a funky jazz and blues band called Upbeat, which appeared at venues throughout the greater Orlando area, including the Hard Rock Live. He also sat on the Board of Directors of the blues society in central Florida, the Orange Blossom Blues Society.

In 2010, Amado relocated to south-western Virginia. He is currently writing new material inspired by his recent live experience in funky jazz and blues, and performing jazz with his new group, Trading Eights.

Amado