What's Your Favorite Pastime?

What’s Your Favorite Pastime?

Have you ever gotten goosebumps listening to someone sing? That happened to me last night. My wife and I stopped by Skyline Studios (one of our charter advertisers) to work on a radio commercial and, for the first time, got to hear a true 5-part street-style a acapella doo-wop group sing. Pastime is Gordy Geesey, Jr., Donnie Schwanger, Ron Horner, Bill Healis, and Buddy Scharff (l-r). Pastime is a street-style doo-wop group that focuses on harmony and blend as their forte. Pastime is excellent.

Gloria and I listened briefly as the group wrapped up another song for their soon to be released CD, as yet untitled. Donnie, the group’s founder, told me that they have no original songs. Everything they do are covers from the early 50’s to the mid 60’s, and everything they do sounds terrific. It was immediately clear that making a CD was the right move for this group. The CD will have an anticipated 20 to 22 songs on it, and is slated for a September release. (Check with the MODE office for availablility.)

Three key factors influence why Pastime sounds so great: 1) the member’s dedication to the "street-style" doo-wop sound, 2) their ability to harmonize naturally, and 3) the almost perfect blend of their voices. Buddy Scharff, the group’s vocal coach, told me that there are essentially two types of doo-wop groups from the 50’s, the barbershop style and the street-style. Barbershop style groups are always made up of four members, each scoring and arranging their singing separately. Street-style groups usually have five members, never score or arrange anything and commonly change singing parts according to which member can "hit the note". (NOTE: three of the five members can’t read sheet music, yet still sing powerfully). So a street-style group learns a song by singing and resinging until it’s right.

Harmonizing doesn’t come naturally, and more considerably to an a capella group. Pastime’s ability to make the music flow is outstanding. Buddy Scharff explains: "In street-style harmonizing there are three parts, one high, one low, and one in the middle. What makes Pastime sound so great is that we have an additional high (the 1st Tenor) and an additional low (the Bass)." It took practicing 3-4 times a week, 4 hours a night non-stop to memorize the 40 songs Pastime sings.

Listening to Pastime can be a profound experience if you close your eyes. Their perfect blend of singing creates the sensation that there are many more vocalists than just the five guys. For Pastime, their blend, or their ability to adjust their volume, intensity, projection and to match every vowel exactly, is what makes them so unique. Listening with your eyes closed is a truly wonderful experience. (It gave me goosebumps). When the group was finished with their recording session, they gave my wife and me a brief performance. Pastime sang Have You Heard, originally by the Duprees, and Diamonds and Pearls, originally by the Paradons. It was fantastic and no words on this page can describe the experience. It sounded like a chorus of singers filling the room from end to end.

If you’ve never enjoyed hearing an a capella group sing, I strongly recommend that you stop up to Circle G on Route 322, Saturday, July 27th for one of Pastime’s few local performances. You can also catch Pastime in Philly on an almost regular basis.

Good luck to Pastime on their CD project, and thanks for recording MODE’s radio jingle, we love it!