Featuring numbers with titles like “A light dry table wine”, “Gooseflesh”, “Bed and Desk”, and together with the overall title of the collection, you would be right in assuming that the pieces are lighthearterd duets, possibly inspired by student days together.

Twelve Silly Songs For Twelve Silly Strings is a collection of up-tempo, light-hearted jazz/swing tunes written by Randall Avers and Rami Vamos.

“lively, infectious… a good-time vibe”
FANFARE: Robert Schulslaper

“fun, clever and novel pieces–we love to play them!”
Laura Oltmann & Michael Newman

“irresistible and delightful duets”
Stephen Aron, Oberlin Conservatory and Akron University

“laugh-out-loud funny…. This collection is a treasure”
Matthew Hinsley, President of Austin Classical Guitar Society

 

“Silly Songs is guitar music which has the rare quality of sounding wonderfully familiar,whimsical and totally unique simultaneously”
Ben Verdery, Yale School of Music

Here is Bed and Desk
and Cricket from the collection, which shows the essentially off beat humour and lightly worn musicality inherent in these pieces.

Rami and Randy are both firmly established artists in their own right – Rami Vamos is a  guitarist and composer of, amongst other things, fourteen children’s musicals and Randy Avers is a virtuoso solo player as well as being a member of Les Freres Meduses.

I heard Benoit Albert and Randy play “A light dry table wine” in the shed and it brought the house down (luckily the roof isn’t all that high)
Here they are, playing the same number in Agen

Get 12 SILLY SONGS FOR 12 SILLY STRINGS here

—-Notes on the pieces by Rami Vamos

“Twelve Silly Songs For Twelve Silly Strings” was mostly written over the course of a single school year at Oberlin. Randy and I were roommates- both working towards a degree in Classical Guitar Performance. We had an open-double, which meant little to no privacy. Only one of us could practice at a time. As most young guitarists can probably relate with- it can be very difficult to listen to someone else practice without wanting to pick up the guitar yourself……

The songs were premiered at Fairchild Chapel in the spring before Randy’s graduation. We wore white tuxedos with electric blue cumber bunds. The pants were too short and we chose not to wear socks for some reason- which meant that a relatively large amount of leg hair was showing between our white patent leather shoes and the cuffs of our pants. It wouldn’t have been so noticeable if it weren’t for the fact that we both used foot-stools elevating the legs. Randy’s mom came with guitar shaped cookies for the reception. We both gave up hours final exam study, to pose for our friend Ellen Butters 98’, who made caricatures of us for the programs. It was the ultimate in procrastination. Our teacher, Steve, came in special to hear the concert- which makes us think that we may have been forgiven for using some of our practice time to put this set together. To this day I have never made it through all 120 right hand studies, but I can’t blame that on Randy as we haven’t been roommates for 17 years.