Source: Access Magazine, December 1996

THE TEA PARTY
THE TOWN PUMP, VANCOUVER, BC
I'm sure you have heard the saying 'You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink'. Well, after seeing The Tea Party try to play acoustically for the boneheads who filed into the Town Pump for the band's recent intimate set, I have a new one for you: 'You can feed a monkey a gallon of caviar, but he would still rather be eating the bugs out of his neighbour's hair'. Jeff Martin, Stuart Chatwood and Jeff Burrows are three extremely talented young men whose music is an incredible blend of modern western sounds and traditional eastern rhythms and melodies. The thrust of this intimate acoustic show was to give a select few fans the chance to see the band perform up close, while at the same time letting them in on the beauty of the eastern influences that inspire the group's writing. As an unbelievably rare added bonus, this lucky lot of a few hundred would also get a chance to see these very versatile musicians play over 25 strange and wonderful instruments from places as far away as Iran and India -- a beautiful concept with disastrous results. An exasperated Martin spent most of his time shushing the crowd like a frustrated substitute teacher, saying things like "The key to this song is to be really quiet" or "We need to quiet down for this one." At one point, he tried to tell the history of one of the stringed instruments he was about to play. After realizing that the crowd (who would have moshed at the symphony, I'm sure) just weren't going to get it, he made one final plea in a faint voice, desperately sinking to their mentality ["It's (the instrument) kind of shaped like a peanut on a stick"] to which the crowd cheered wildly. Someone screamed, "Play that fuckin' peanut!", and I groaned painfully. I felt for Martin, who wanted to share his knowledge of music and genius love for the instruments he brought on stage with those whom he believed would care the most -- his fans. They couldn't have cared less. I'm sure that the boys in The Tea Party realized afterwards that they had wasted barrels of their finest caviar on a roomful of chimps.
Mike James

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