Q&A with Five Star Quartet

CH: Tell me about yourselves!

JC: I've been barbershopping about 35 years. I started directing in the old Cadillac chapter back in the early 80s. And didn't know anything about barbershop. But I was a choral director, and a music major. So I guess that qualified me. And most of the guys sitting in the room were teaching me how to do it, you know. Had a chance to direct at Swan Valley to help them out to help their chorus out for a while, and then went from there to Lansing and from Lansing to Grand Rapids. And that's basically what I've done directing-wise. Won a few district championships, one with Full Court Press in ‘93, Firepower in ‘95, and then, again, with Dexter's Alibi in Southwest District in 2011, Majestyx in 2012, Upper Deck in 2017. Two of those being with James Masalskis, who is one of my favorite guys. We've been singing together for almost 10 years.

CC: I've been [in barbershop] since I was seven. I joined the society when I was seven. I sang in the Plano Men of Note chorus for a while. And then I started filling in with dad around 2016 in some of his quartets, and started to get better. I started my own youth chorus here about a year ago, and Cadillac Cadillac-area youth chorus, and then I sang with Solid Gold at International, at midwinter in 2020. Got fifth place there and then came back and started what kind of revamped and started Shoreline here with my sister. And then we just competed with Shoreline at the last contest. And now I'm Singing in Five Star too. And that's pretty much all there is to me.

CH: How did this all come together?

JC: Well, Five Star goes back a little longer than the commercial. The Grand Rapids chorus wanted to do a Disney show. And Cole really wanted to do “Go the Distance,” which I think is a Vocal Spectrum chart. And I said, you're insane. I can't sing that. And he goes, that's cool. Jeff can do it. And he said, you'll get to sing baritone for the first time like you've always wanted to. So it was great, because we had Cole sing the opening feature. It was really special because that was the one of the first times we sang together other than little fill in things. Cole sang tenor and I sang baritone and Jeff sang lead and James sang bass. And we had a great time doing that, and actually talked about doing a few more songs, but [Jeff] was really wrapped up with Bluetonium at the time. And obviously we were really involved with Upper Deck.

Basically, after the pandemic rolled around, I talked to Mark Wilson and, and William Stutts Jr. and said, you know, my son was now in high school, and I really wanted to have an opportunity to get a chance to sing with him in whatever format that would be. And [Cole] was probably going to sing tenor or baritone. We wanted to keep James. So I talked to him, I said, probably the fairest if we just had them both step out, and we would find somebody else to kind of start over and with Mark and the time was just swamped with the store. William was coming up from Detroit, which was always tough. And he was working with some new quartets, and it just was a good time to make the change. And I was excited to have the chance to sing with Cole. That's the sole reason for doing that.

A few years later, I got a call from an agent from Five Star Real Estate, who said they wanted to do a barbershop jingle because they won some award. I figured I could get four guys together to get through a barbershop song, right? So then the guy calls me back and I said, “you know, I haven't gotten the music yet.” And he said, “Well, I hadn't told you. We don't have the music yet. But we have some words.” And I said, “Okay, wait a minute, you have no music. It's just words. Okay, send them to me.” He sends it to me. It's like a paragraph of streaming thoughts.

So I said, Okay, wait a minute. I'm going to bullet point all the highlights that you're trying to say about your company. And then I said, “Can you send it to the owner and ask the owner, if that's what he's trying to convey?” And I said, you know, now I have to write the song from scratch, including the words in the lyrics. I said to Cole, “okay, I wrote some words, see if you can come up with a tune.” So he started working on and came up with a tune, and between the two of us, we wrote a jingle.

And, you know, we wanted James to sing with us. And I said, well, let's get Jeff--Jeff learns fast. He can sing lead, and I'll sing baritone. So we did it. Well, we had such a great time doing that. And you know, we kept saying, you know, the lock is pretty good. There's some really nice natural matching happening. And I said, What do you think about trying to put it together? So we talked about it and sang together once or twice. And then Cole came to me and said, you and James have been doing this for 10 years on lead and bass and he said, You've kind of got that mastered. And he said, I think we should try Jeff as a baritone instead. And I said, “Are you kidding me? The guy's been a lead his whole career.” And he said, well remember Jeff Marx, who was a lead for 20 years and came to Firepower and you switched into baritone and became an amazing baritone.

I have been floored at Jeff's what he was able to do in literally two or three months. Learning baritone, he had never done it before. And he's such a talented musician and a nice guy. And, you know, he makes me sound like a million bucks, which is great. I just get to keep coasting in the middle. But that's kind of how it came up.

CH: What was it like to win the district contest?

CC: We were not expecting it. We’d only had five rehearsals and Jeff had never sang baritone before. We just we wanted to do it for fun to get a score so that I could sing with dad, that was the goal. I didn't care because I was competing with Shoreline and I'd prepared a lot harder with Shoreline. And Shoreline was gonna go to International at the time. So we weren't expecting to have Five Star do anything. Jeff had a vacation scheduled during the week of international already, which is why he’s not going because we just really did not expect to do as well as we did, I guess at all.

CH: What is it like to get to compete with each other on the International stage?

JC: I get an opportunity to sing with my son on the International stage. And there's a lot of brothers that have been on the International stage, but not too many father son combinations. And I was really, you know, we were a little torn because our vacation was also about the same times as Jeff's, and we made some alterations, so we could make International work. And, you know, I told my wife, I said, I can't see us turning it down, because no one else can go because of that rule. I really feel every district needs to be represented. I think that's important. And so that falls on us. And now it falls on William coming in as a sub, which is kind of like putting on an old shoe. It's nice, it's comfortable. And you know, there's a really nice magic happening, again, with Cole on tenor, and I'll get to sing with my son.

CH: Do you have any hopes for International?

CC: We don’t want to get last.

JC: That's, that's our personal goal. Don't be last.

CH: Is there a future for Five Star?

CC: I'm gonna keep coming to Grand Rapids. I didn’t schedule classes on Monday nights or at night so I can rehearse. Shoreline’s doing the same thing. Maddie is going to be a GVSU, so Shoreline is going to be able to meet in Grand Rapids and so is Five Star.

JC: I'm turning over the reins of song selection to Cole and Jeff. I said, My son knows what I can sing and what I can't sing. And, and he says, “Yeah, you can do this one, this one will, this one will be good.” And so I'm gonna let him kind of pick out the things that we're looking for. So we're really looking to shake things up considerably.

I mean, I still think probably this fall just because the lack of time will still keep “As long as I'm Singing,” “Evermore” and “Cheer Up Charlie, but we've got some ideas. Got some new ideas for some up-tempo stuff for that one, and a lot of show songs that he and Jeff really want to do. And, you know, it's just, I told him, find the ones that you and James and Jeff can be featured on, and I can sing ooh around b-flat.