How can you be a rock band without instruments – and connect with people through song? Tune in to the next episode of Voices of Exchange and discover how one a capella group, The House Jacks, created a pitch perfect connection through song and how their music has struck a chord with audiences across the world, most recently in Latvia and Estonia.

With a special holiday treat at the end, this final episode of Season 3 is one you won’t want to miss. 

Catch Voices of Exchange on all major podcast platforms and at alumni.state.gov/voicesofexchange. Subscribe at bit.ly/SubscribenowVoE.

I could almost throw a rock to Russia from where I was standing. That's when it hit me at the body level. How close we were and what it might and or must be like for people who were living in Latvia and Estonia to be that close to Russia when Russia was doing what they were doing in Ukraine, knowing that those places have been formally occupied by Russia.

As the “first rock band without instruments,” The House Jacks aren’t like an a capella group you heard in college. The group leans into the texture of sounds made by the human voice, and has shared the stage with iconic artists like Ray Charles, LL Cool J, and James Brown.

But it was on their first cultural exchange when they found themselves a stone’s throw away from Russia that they had unexpected moments of pitch perfect connection and speaking to the heart through song.

From Britney Spears to Michael Jackson, Queen, and Prāta Vētra, this is even an episode you won’t forget. There’s even a “holiday treat” at the end, courtesy of The House Jacks to you…

Band intros

So my name is Austin Willacy. I am an Exchange Alumni, and in the band The House Jacks, which is an acapella band, I sing high tenor, and that's, that's most of what I do in the band on stage. And I will pass it to Colin.

Hello, I'm Colin Egan. I am [an] ExchangeAlumni, and I am also a member of The House Jacks. I mostly sing tenor in the group. I also arrange quite a bit and help facilitate some of the music for us. I would take my [turn] and pass it to Greg.

My name is Greg Fletcher or Gregory Fletcher, whichever you prefer. I too am an Exchange Alumni... I also sing in the group, The House Jacks, where I primarily sing low bass. I’ll pass it off to… Let's go with Tracy.

Hi. My name is Tracy. I am a member of The House Jacks, and also an Exchange Alumni. And in The House Jacks, I am primarily a vocal percussionist, making drum sounds on my face.

Yes, yes, passing it off to Grayson.

Um hi! My name is Grayson Vinueva. I am an Exchange Alumni, and I'm also with The House Jacks. I sing high tenor, um, and outside of that I also, um, record secret videos of the guys so we can post it on social media.

Yeah. And one thing I'd also like to just add to Greg's... Greg seems to be the person in the group who sings all of the leftover notes, so like when we're- when we all have the songs that we sing that have the melodies through this and that, and Greg is very creative and very musically adept, and so just finds all these beautiful notes and adds beauty to everything.

Inspiration behind the band’s creation

So what was your inspiration behind becoming the first rock band without instruments?

Um, started having groups that were offshoots of the Glee Club or the choirs at their respective schools, and would have Octet of up to like 16 to 20 people, and the repertoire of the group evolved such that they were doing more popular stuff or jazz stuff, um that would benefit from a smaller ensemble approach than trying to get 120 people the same ‘Toxic’ and have it sound like Britney Spears. And what happened with that is that the type of arranging that was done became not so choraly derived and became sort of textual, so that there was a focus on replicating more instrumental textures, and so based upon that I was like, “Well, wait if we can sort of do textures that aren't recognizably vocal and map in people's minds, like keyboard sounds or guitar sounds, or horn sounds. If we have somebody who is also doing drum sounds, beat boxing, then we could actually have a pretty lean lineup and have something that sounds more like a vocal band, um than a small, a cappella ensemble.”

And so that was where the vision came from. The group was founded by a guy named Deke Sharon, who was in The Beals Above at Tufts University, with three other founding members of the group, and the founding beat box was a guy named Andrew Chaikin, who was at Brown University in The Jabberwocks, a phenomenal vocal percussionist, and he was the one who really did the most beatboxing in this group at the founding and, and really sort of launched and helped to sort of gel that sound in that concept.

Yeah, I mean, I heavily associate a cappella with my time in college, and it feels very American to me, at least in that style, right not being the class tradition. So I was wondering how audiences overseas reacted on this tour to the music.

I'll take this one, too, and at least first, and then see if other guys have something to say. One thing that was really gratifying for me actually on this tour of, both in Latvia and Estonia, is that we were told, often very gravely, “You know. So, House Jacks, we just need to let you know that you're in Eastern Europe, and people here are very reserved. … We know that you have traveled to different parts of the world, and you've been to very wild places, like Germany. Um, and over here, you know, you really shouldn't expect the audiences to respond to you the way that they do to Germany, so they're probably not going to clap along. They're probably not going to sing along, but just know that even though they're not doing that, at the end of the show they will probably give you a very enthusiastic reception, and that way you will know that they really liked what you're doing.”

It's like, OK. So we were notified. And then, after the fourth song on our first show we got a standing ovation. The audience was singing along with us. They were clapping along with us. Some were dancing in their seats, some were dancing on their feet, and that proceeded to happen at every show in Latvia and every show in Estonia. So, ah! It felt great. Um, and what, what I remember hearing from the promote- the promoters or the people who are operating the- um, I'm sorry, directing the performing arts centers is, “We've never seen this before like this is or, this is a unique thing, like we didn't know that this could happen here.” So yeah, I don't know if there are other guys who want to add more of theirs, but that was far, in a way like a very strong impression for me.

I think one of the really special things about us traveling to Estonia and Latvia specifically, was the fact that both countries have such strong singing cultures. Um so Estonia, you know, has their song festival. Every I think it's like, ah, every two years, and then every like five years or something, they have a very large gathering of people in pretty much every town, and then a, a big song festival ground in Tallinn, where we stayed, and having this singing culture around us, I think, really struck a chord. You-- we were able to connect through our voices and through harmony, and that really aligned with the culture of those countries, which I thought was really special. Whenever we sang, we sang a song in Latvian and we sang a song in Estonian, and the response to that was immense. Like we, we got standing ovations in both countries, just singing in their language just something as simple as speaking in their mother tongue reached them in such a way that they felt so moved.

Um, one was Spogulīt, Spogulīt, which is from you know, a band called Prāta Vētra. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, and we adapted an arrangement from a local group, Cosmos, and it's a slow ballad, so like you wouldn't expect it to get a big raucous applause. But we got standing ovations at almost every show that we did, and then, whenever we sang Maripidu in Estonia, which is a traditional folk song, we just saw them swaying back and forth in the audience. It's a song about the sea. And seeing that joy was amazing. We, we had no idea that the response would be that strong, especially to the, to the songs in their native tongue.

Yeah, I think a big part of our show, too, is like audience participation, and also like the fact that we got to sing with a lot of different, like, local choirs as well was super impactful for us, and I'm sure for everyone watching. And yeah, we have- we don't have a show without audience participation. So even though we got the, the grave news of, like, people not being able to react to, to us in the way that maybe we are used to, like, we didn't find that to be the case at all. And I think one of the most impactful comments that we got at the end of the show was, I think, in the best way, they said, like, “Your sound is bigger than the spaces you perform in.” And I just thought that was so, like, beautiful, and we carried that through the rest of our shows.

I think there's one last thing that I want to add to what Colin shared, which was about the the reaction that we experienced from, and the reception to the audience by the audience when we were singing in Latvian and Estonian, and I think, in Trevor Noah's “Born a Crime” [book], he refers to, I think, a Nelson Mandela quote, which is something to the effect of: “If you speak to a man in a language he understands. You speak to his head. If you speak to him in his language, you speak to his heart.”

And I think that one of the things that's so beautiful about the the AMA program and getting to be a part of the Voices of Exchange program is having that be an explicit ask, right? And actually being an explicit part of preparing us, like we - Colin and I - were working on an arrangement of La Bamba. You know it was like, “How is it for you to do something in a different language?” And it's a different challenge. It's their different musical idioms. You know there are different ways for us to stretch in our craft and learning how to make our mouths make different shapes; and as a cappella singers, particularly contemporary a capella singers. That's a challenge that we embrace, um, and it really paid off because the connection that we built with the audiences was not a head connection. It wasn't like, “Oh, wow! That is technically difficult. We really appreciate that you were able to do that, and those arrangements are so so clever.” It was a heart connection.

They felt honored that we took the time to learn those songs in their languages, and even if our pronunciation wasn't great– Anyway, the point that I was trying to get at is that, um, by putting in that time, and really investing ourselves in that the audience deeply appreciated it in a way that was not just like technical applause. It was really like, Wow! And we got to, you know, to learn a bit about the history of the, the various occupations. And how, um, how important preserving language is um, both um, just for itself, and also as, as it interweaves with the cultures there. So yeah, that was really amazing.

A rock to Russia

I wanted to kind of follow up on that and touch on a story that I think you had shared previously about your time,... when it was during the morning you had taken a walk before performance, and you know, realized that just across the bridge was was Russia, and you know, kind of gave you this sense of the sort of geopolitical significance of, of your exchange. Can you kind of take us back to a moment - either this moment or another - when you had that sense?

One of the things that was really wonderful, um, ah, about Tiu is that she really made sure that we were learning about the places that we were going to, and she was providing a lot of context for us. Um, I learned that she - um, back in the day, she was a teacher. Um, and she did a really beautiful job for me of making sure that we got our needs met, and that we had enough time, and also that we were carving out time to see things that were significant, and learn about things that were culturally significant. And so, um, we did get a chance to go to a place that was right on the river bank.

Directly across the river from that is a bridge – I'm sorry, there's a bridge that spans the river rather and that's called The Friendship Bridge. Ironically, I think. And for me I live in, I live in the Bay area, so I'm like a good long way from Russia. Good, long way from Latvia and Estonia, and I've been watching some video clips of and following, like, news articles about what's going on in Ukraine or the war in Ukraine, and I mean, I guess, working with the sort of head versus heart, peace, or body, level like intellectually, and even like to a certain extent at the heart level. I understood how messed up it was, and how, how challenging it was, how confronting it was. I could almost throw a rock to Russia from where I was standing.

That's when it hit me at the body level how close we were and what it might and or must be like for people who were living in Latvia and Estonia to be that close to Russia when Russia was doing what they were doing in Ukraine, knowing that those places have been formally occupied by Russia. So that was kind of, that was kind of, what happened for me.

It was really important too, I guess, you take the understanding to a deeper level to let it seek, sink in viscerally.

And following up on that, yeah, so we performed at the Narva Fall Festival. So it's basically in Estonia. They have different cities as different capitals of the season. And so we performed at the, the kind of, start of autumn in Narva, which is the autumn capital. That is a border town. It is, I think, over 90 percent Russian speaking. And it was a lot of gravity just being that close to the border, and like literally looking across the river and see – seeing Russia, knowing, knowing what everything that that has been going on, you know, in recent history, but also the- knowing that Estonia only got its independence from the USSR in the late 80s, so they're still kind of patching some of those wounds in in many ways, you know. Families separated a lot of –you, you know we, we encountered this mesh of humanity in that part of the world. I think, one of the things that was a common thread, though, was everyone's kindness. They- It was really a beautifully kind culture, from... There was a lady in the theatre in Narva that insisted on ironing my show uniform - like, would not let me touch it. She was like, “This is my job. I'm the costume manager here,” like, kind of like forcible hospitality, to a Russian, an older Russian lady who must have been in her, like, 80s [and] has clearly seen it all.

We, we were gathering in the lobby after after the performance, and you know, just mingling, mingling with everyone and saying, “Hi,” taking pictures, and I kind of was surprised because she just like grabbed my hand without making eye contact first, and I just kind of looked over, and she just said, “Spasiba, Spasiba. Thank you.” Um, and just having that human connection when I wasn't really expecting it really kind of hit me hard, especially being where we were in navva kind of feeling that shadow looming a little bit, but knowing, you know, knowing that the these everyday people are just kind, and they just want to be kind to one another.

Speaking to the ability of music to warm a space, a specific kind of call out, memory, was from our performance in Vinci in Estonia. One of the hosts of the cultural center did a speech at the end of the performance. And, thanked us for being there and said something to the effect of, “Today you have shared your warmth, you have shared this American music, and we will carry that warmth with us through the long winter ahead.” And that really, really got me. It was uh, such a powerful reminder of the power of spreading joy. Just spreading musical joy and not knowing where that’ll lead but knowing that someone will hold onto that, and carry that into hardship is a really powerful thought.

Speaking of spreading musical joy, what’s your favorite part about acapella music?

Sure, um, the thing that's so fun about um, a capella music for me, and I think for us safe to say is that um, it's so relatable because everybody has a voice. And so, even if everyone you know isn't like, I can sing my beyonce because who can um, it's, ah, it's incredibly relatable. The mirror neurons in you see another person singing on stage, and the part of you that's like, “Ooh! I want to do that, and like I have a voice.” There's a part of me that can aspire to do that right. And so that degree of transparency and relatability really pulls people in, and what I experienced is discovering that there are actually a lot of - I don't know if this is the right term to use, but maybe - underground a capella fans who actually work for the American Music Abroad program, or at the embassies.

Um, because it turns out that we met one who sang in an a capella group in college and another person who dated someone in the a capella group and went to all their shows and all that. And so, um, apparently it was an extra treat, you know, for those folk to get to see us.

Having recognized that we kind of did grow out of that collegiate acapella tradition, and then sort of changed it right, updated it, and made our own thing of it. And so, getting a chance to connect after the performance, we were, you know, sharing like college acapella stories basically, like you know, touring this and pizza parties and all of that, which was really fun. And then also being told by both her and another representative from the Embassy in Tallin, saying: “You know you guys are actually amazing. You're doing incredible cultural diplomacy here, um, ah, at the musical level. And also the way that you are relating to the audience, and the way that you were speaking about what the experience means to you, is exactly what we're hoping will happen in terms of an exchange.” You know, we're, we're learning and growing by being there, and we're able to offer warmth. We're able to offer insight. We're able to offer, and encouragement and just laughter and joy by way of continuing to, to nurture ridges that have been built, and one hundred years ago I mean, we were celebrating one hundred years of friendship between Latvia and Estonia and the United States.

It's a huge deal, and we're really really honored to be there in that capacity, and that the cultural diplomacy element of it kind of slowly sunk in is like oh, workshop by workshop. When we're working with the students at the schools. It's like, oh, okay. Um, yeah. And so it kind of came to a beautiful conclusion. You know It'd be beautiful head at the at the end of the last night of the tour, which was our final show in Vimy and Estonia.

Filling in the song potholes

So, I'm just curious. Do you... How do you prepare for these shows? I mean, if they could just request anything. And, I mean, there's a pretty wide range of different songs that people can request...

Well, we don't promise that they're ever going to be good. We will do them, and we will make them entertaining. So you know, we start with who can… Who, who remembers the most words? The - we kind of like, look around, make eye contact, see? Like, okay, do you- do you have this? Okay? And then someone just steps up, takes a crack at it. We kind of fill in the holes, you know. Tracy, Tracy will often offer a rhythmic motif on the drums - some, some kind of groove pattern. Greg will hop in on the baseline, kind of provide the foundation. And then whoever is not singing lead just kind of hops around and tries to identify the elements of the song that they remember that are sticky. And then using music theory, we just kind of come together on cords that make sense, and sometimes they don't. And that's okay, too.

I think we got “Toxic” about three or four times, so some secret Britney Spears fans in Latvia and Estonia. Um, we got a- we got a, a “Frozen” request, so that was adorable. We made a little girl's day. It was so sweet. A lot of, a lot of Michael Jackson, a lot of Queen. Everyone wanted to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

And “Don't stop me now.” Um, but it was, it was fascinating. Just kind of here, you know, fielding requests and, and also realizing how much American music has permeated other cultures. That was really fascinating the, the breadth of knowledge of American music that they had.

One of the best things that happens, I think, is something that's whatever ends up. Being powerful for the audience to see is like Sometimes they will say the name of a song, and, and it's either a song that we don't know, or for whatever reason the file is just not, it's not coming up. We're not. We're not able to pull it up. And so we end up taking whatever the sounds are that came out of their mouth occurring for us as a word or something, and that ends up being a prompt for something to happen, and that ends up being, you know, I think, those moments that the moments of us, like quote unquote, failing like completely falling flat, um, are probably you can easily justify that they are the most important moments that happen in the entire set. They contextualize the whole rest of the set in a totally different way.

Yeah, um, and the the reality that, like, “Oh, those are five humans like me, and we're- but we're doing this thing together right now.” That's, that's different than than the experience that most of us are having when we're going to um, especially in musical performance, we're really expecting that to be polished in a certain way. So I'm really grateful that, that this group does that, and that we were able to share something like that. That's so like, that's just so grounded. It's so down in the roots of what it is to be human, and that we got a chance to do that. There, that's really I'm grateful for that.

End of your comfort zone

Yeah. I mean, that feels like a really important lesson to anyone who is is learning to be a musician or learning how to sing. And you mentioned that you were, you were seeing you were teaching kids, right, is part of the tour was that one of the things that you were importing on them? Or, were there other lessons that you were trying to give them while you were there? Aside from technical things about music…

I think one of the most fun things for, for me to do in an educational setting, and you know the whole. Everyone in the group has such a such a cool, rich- a history of educating it in our own ways. One of my favorite things is taking the technical stuff and breaking it down into small enough pieces that the way it's being taught actually just feels like we're playing, we're just. This is kind of a game, and, and for me being the book. For when I'm teaching people who haven't necessarily made drum sounds with their mouth before to teach that in such a way that it feels like there's, there's a conversation about it. Um! There is this - just this exploration of understanding my own capacity to create something, my own creative. Like there’s creative energy or something that comes out of me, too, like oh, interesting! And then there's this body, awareness, thing, and this awareness of, um, everything just everything that goes into like a, uh, in the moment, a very present interaction. And for me it's like the joy of that. So we come out of this. We come out of this thing. And now there's a room of 50 kids who know, really know and have experienced themselves making all the basic sounds, for example, that are necessary for me boxing, and the process that occurred by which that was achieved was this process that felt like a game, and that's, that's just super. That's just super fun for me. And uh, and I answer- lasting, it ends up having a lasting effect beyond them just now, knowing some technical thing.

Yeah, I think Sorry. Go ahead, Austin.

I was just gonna say that I feel like for anyone who's trying to learn anything, it doesn't matter if it's music or, like, how to make cookies or whatever. If I'm going to actually learn, I have to step into territory where I might fail. Um, that's, that's, you know. They say life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Right? And so I think about it like I have a comfort zone, a stretch zone in a panic. So, Panic zone, I'm too freaked out to pay attention and learn anything or retain it. Comfort zone, I'm not challenged, so I don't learn it and grow. And so that zone in between, that stretch zone - the edge of my comfort zone is where I can learn. And so one of the things that I think is powerful about the workshop that we got to do is, I think that just about all of them we did something where we did, uh, ah, involve the students in the school, and a little bit of percussion beatboxing right. We also did that in the audience– at, at our performances, and so, both with the students and the audiences we're inviting them to go on a journey, like, to stretch.

It's in a way learning how to beat boxes like learning a new language, making sounds in ways that my mouth or our mouths are not trained to do um, and discovering new new barriers or new challenges that I need to sort of break through or move around or over, and so I think that that was another aspect of both the workshops that we did with the students and the show. That was both a cultural exchange piece a piece of inviting people to go on a journey with us, and a journey within themselves to of exploration and and challenge, and then also something that made the pieces that were prepared like the pieces that weren't like the request that was like, and nobody really knew that one, you know. But it's under the umbrella of entertainment, and you can see for sure that everything here that we're doing on stage is happening for real for you right now, you know… Um, so I think that the thing that was highlighted again was that the the pieces that were prepared like there's a beautiful arrangement of a Billie Eilish song that Greg did that, that we were doing on this tour, and like there were some moments where, like I was almost overcome with emotion by how beautiful it was to be a part of making that, you know. And so, if I compare that to like one of the rockier requests, there is a huge gulf between the level of musical polish and cohesion and intention behind that, and so inviting them in, you know, to ah to basically like, “Hey, come on into the woodshed with us and see what happens.” And I really enjoyed getting to do that, and it felt great to be able to do that there and with these guys.

I think, too, with the workshops. It was an interesting challenge that we had kind of a mixed bag of skill level with some of the different workshops, some of the workshops We were talking to a lot of non-musicians, and then some of the workshops. We were literally in a music school, you know, talking to kids that were really serious about music as a skill, and maybe developing into a career. So we adjusted how we structured it a little bit based on those different audiences. You know, kind of giving an introduction to what it is. We do what it is. What is a cappella? How do we build that? And then kind of showing the structure of, of how we kind of build on an arrangement, how we build out a song, um, and then inviting them to kind of be a part of that play with, you know, Tracy did a wonderful job of curating this kind of playful space for both percussion and we often did a lot of, like, singing and harmony, because we knew that it was such a singing culture. We wanted to bring them into that, and really, like, tune into that.

And then for some of the you know, more musically-focused classes. Some of them were asking us about careers, right? Like we all do other jobs within music. We're all freelance professionals within the music world. So, being able to share some of that knowledge of, like, there are multiple paths here to become a musician. There are multiple paths to include music in your life every day, some of which you can make as a career, but also what are some of the ways that music is a part of your life, and in strengthening who you are. So I thought that some of those insights with, with some of those kids were really, really special.

Colin Egan 32: 30

There was one kind of kid in particular at one of the music schools that was really interested in music technology, and I'm a recording and audio engineer, and seeing his eyes light up when I talked about a DAW, right, a digital audio workstation. He had never heard of that software before. And then he comes up to me afterwards, and I write down like all right. So, Ableton is a great place to start. There's also Pro Tools, and like just being able to see the light in his eyes, just tick of like. I love to write music, but I don't know how to start. I don't know how to get these ideas out, and just giving that seed, and like, who knows? Maybe a famous DJ will be coming out of Estonia in a few years. But his - the, the light in his eyes, was just like incredible to see that connection being made in his brain. It's wild.

I think that's the through line with all of the workshops that we did, is that, like whether they were like a music school that was like, you know, maybe a little more on a career focused, and or whether it was just like an extracurricular activity. For some of these kids the through line is, there is joy in music, and that's where we can connect together. That's what sustains a long career, or even just a long hobby that, like the-- fulfills you in all those capacities.

Snaps to that.

Happy holidays from The House, Jacks

And a happy New Year.

34:09

“Last Christmas” sung by The House Jacks

Thank you to The Housejacks for sharing their exchange journey in Latvia and Estonia, and for a wonderful rendition of Wham!’s Last Christmas.

And thank you, dear listeners, for tuning in to Voices of Exchange this season and this year.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until we meet again…

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!