looping with other musicians

["steve.sandberg" <steve.sandberg@earthlink.net>]

I've been dealing with the issue of the "church lady" aspect of looping in
solo performances recently --
went through a period of complete improvisational looping concerts, with
lots of morphing of loops and varying of loops on the edp --
then the pendulum swung the other way and i did a recent concert of almost
all songs and compositions, using rhythmic loops to create a percussive bed
for the song --
i thought the song aspect would make the music more accessible to others --
much to my surprise, many of my listeners (who had been to several other
concerts of mine and had followed the process) REALLY missed the free
looping stuff -- and these are not people who are into free or avant garde
music at all.
They felt that the whole concert was on a kind of restricted emotional 
level
from beginning to end and missed the spontaneity and thus wider emotional
range of the free looping --
so future concerts will be more of a mix --
plus i'm discovering that it's often better, if i'm going to sing a song, 
to
just sing it without a rhythmic loop - the loop, even with cool vocal
percussion, seems to put a straight jacket on things and rather than adding
to the emotional presence seems to subtract from it.