“It’s the biggest party we host all year,” said Carly Myers, chief marketing officer for Embassy Theatre. 

That party has Myers and staff once again bracing for the holiday onslaught of a sold-out crowd of 2,471 fans coming to hear the nine glee-full men who sing a cappella in the phenomenon known as Straight No Chaser on Wednesday, Dec. 20.

Straight No Chaser’s annual holiday tour across the U.S. began Oct. 20 and runs through New Year’s Eve: 45 concerts in 26 states over the course of 69 days. 

Has there ever been another group in the U.S. that can stretch out a holiday tour that long? 

“I can’t think of one,” said founding member Walter Chase. “Maybe Trans-Siberian Orchestra back in the day.”

Well, there you have it. Maybe a cappella choirs are bigger than progressive metal this holiday season.

“We definitely break the mold with our fans wanting to hear holiday music from the middle of October,” Chase said in a phone call from Cincinnati, where the group packed the house at the Taft Theatre on Dec. 1.

Hoosiers create something new

By now, the Fort Wayne audience knows the group’s remarkable story. 

Straight No Chaser formed in 1996 at Indiana University in Bloomington. They come from a longstanding tradition, the Ivy League-style college a cappella men’s group, but with their own twist.

They took their name from Straight, No Chaser, an instrumental jazz album by pianist Thelonious Monk in 1967. 

“We were all a part of the School of Music at Indiana, and we’re music geeks,” Chase said of coming up with the group’s name. “As well as trying to find something that was sort of a double entendre, something that was college fun.”

Actually, the group hasn’t done much jazz. Rather, they were “10 friends looking to make music that was more our style. We were all part of a larger show choir called the Singing Hoosiers, which is a mixed choir,” with women and men,” Chase said. “But I was into Boyz II Men and different smaller R&B groups. And then a cappella groups like Take 6 and Rockapella, and there was nothing like that at school. So we formed our own group.”

The men from 1996 graduated and went separate ways. Then, in 2006, a member posted a video of theirs from 1998 to this new thing called YouTube, which was just catching on. Straight No Chaser was one of the first acts to “go viral.” 

Atlantic Records called, reconvened the band, and signed them to a contract.

Since then, it’s been a full-time job for Chase, who sings tenor. The other members are tenor Jerome Collins and Michael Luginbill; baritones Seggie Isho, Jasper Smith and Steve Morgan; bass Randy Stine; and on tenor/vocal percussion, Tyler Trepp and Freedom Young.

Taking their cues

The group’s Sleighin’ It Tour comes on the heels of their latest holiday album, Stocking Stuffer, released Nov. 3. 

Their signature sound is created by arranging conventional songs into their style, replacing the instruments with human voices. 

“We have a vocal percussionist that’s incredible — to sound like a full drum set, and percussion,” Chase said. “We have a bass singer” who scats a busy, moving bass line. 

“That leaves six other guys to fill out the orchestra of all the different sounds: guitar, piano, strings, synths, whatever we need to cover.”

On the studio recordings, I can hear extra layers of voices, and maybe sequenced and sampled percussion sounds. But Chase assures me that when they perform on stage, it’s strictly nine men singing live.

“We don’t have any tracks playing in the house,” he insists. 

They do wear in-ear monitors to provide a click track to keep everything in time as they spread out across large stages. 

“The click track also allows us to have light cues,” Chase said. “We have a large screen behind us so we can sync to videos.”

In addition to his work with the group, Chase makes use of his music education degree. 

“I do a lot of arranging for cruise ships and theme parks,” he said. “I sometimes do one-off arrangements for other a cappella groups, other live performing acts.

“When we have students come in and we do masterclasses, it’s good to have some sort of pedagogy to be able to express what I’m looking for. I’m not in a school on a daily basis, but I definitely use my degree to communicate musically.”

Getting in on yacht rock revival

Speaking for the whole group, Chase said that when off the road: “I’m a full-time dad. It’s a fun balance of being a touring musician where you sing for thousands of people, and then you go home. My oldest is nine now. Some of the guys have kids who are even older; some guys have newborns. I think there’s 15 or 16 kids between the nine of us. 

“It’s a unique dynamic, and we’ve become successful at trying to balance that. I am grateful for the chance to do both.”

The group is performing more concerts per year than ever. They’ll always do Christmas, but they’ve found a way to perform outdoors in the summer.

 This year, they released Yacht on the Rocks, with their signature arrangements of ’70s favorites by bands from The Doobie Brothers to Earth, Wind and Fire. 

Nick Niespodziani of Yacht Rock Revue, a classmate of theirs at IU back in the ’90s, produced the record. 

I, for one, would sure like to see Straight No Chaser back here next summer.

As I was thanking him for the interview, Chase had one more thing to say: “Fort Wayne is one of those cities that is just, every time we go there, it is out of control. How passionate and how into it the crowd is! Ever since I can remember going there, we know that it’s going to be packed. There’s something about the view from the Embassy Theatre stage of the crowd and how high up it goes into the corners.

“It’s always a highlight for us,” he said. “I look forward to playing Fort Wayne every time we go there.”