At first, no one paid much attention to the group of five when they erupted into song in the middle of Clyde's restaurant in Georgetown.
Conversations continued, and servers kept taking orders. But as the melody grew, diners began lifting their heads from their plates, poking one another and pointing - most with the same quizzical looks on their faces.
"We're not used to getting music in here," said Cherie Calvert of Kensington, "just martinis."
The colorful members of High Five, the night's impromptu entertainers, aren't used to being together without performing, either, regardless of where they are - they claim it's nearly impossible to refrain.
"You know that Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham?" asked Susan Dargusch, the group's second soprano. "Well, that's us: We'll sing in a box; we'll sing with a fox. We'll sing in a bar; we'll sing in a car."
And they don't wait for an invitation, singing whenever the mood strikes. But tonight, the a cappella jazz quintet has a planned (but unpaid) gig. The group is singing at the Howard County Central Library as part of its new monthly music program, Third Thursdays in the Cafe, and their aim is to wow with nothing but their voices.
"You can equate us with stuff like the Manhattan Transfer without a backup band," said bass Mike Kelly, whose North Laurel house is the quintet's home base. "We're not a band; we're a group. We don't use instruments."
What they do use are their vocal cords and considerable musical training, which spans barbershop quartet to classical, to produce notes that often resemble instrument sounds.
"If you close your eyes, there are so many sounds it sounds like instruments," said Dargusch, 37. "That's the fun thing for us: to try and become trombones or clarinets."
A cappella is defined as unaccompanied singing. Their voices are the instruments, and their range is surprising. When High Five really got going in Clyde's, they drew a fair-sized audience of admirers, including Calvert, who fell under the group's odd public relations spell and ended up buying their newly released first compact disc, Moondance. High Five always carries a cache of them just in case.
"We're bigger as a group than we are as individuals," said High Five's founder, tenor Joe Mannherz, who has sung with the Baltimore Symphony for the past quarter-century. "Together, we're bigger than the sun."
A cappella may be bigger, too.
