How it began

At last, AT LAST, I've unpacked my last box!! I've never had such a frantically hard-working welcome back to the US. I've been back exactly 1 month and had not yet finished unpacking. But today, I did it, I did it, I opened the last box, and there were my repique rods and caixa rods (whew! so that's where they were!). I assembled the repique; I roped together one of the alfaias last night and will do the other tomorrow; I put the timbal together.

And tonight I actually sat down and went through all my random boxes of papers and mail from the last 3 years. I literally haven't caught up with my mail for three years! I'd just been paying the most urgent bills, throwing everything else in boxes, everything lost and scrambled. I had pretty much abandoned my life. Just threw it all in boxes and ran away.

It was very odd to go through that much stuff from so far back. I found an entire nest of peculiar little scraps of paper with ornately detailed little scribbles of L's and H's and X's and dashes. One crumpled piece of paper was a huge chart of four columns of meticulous, tiny, four-digit numbers. What I'd found was my notes from my first attempts to understand Brazilian percussion. It was my first transcriptions, from back in the dark ages when I thought the 2 was the 1, and didn't know what the words "samba" or "swing" or "funk" or "groove" meant. Or "clave" or "buzz" or "flam" or "rimshot" or "roll"... uh, is that like when you roll the drum along the ground?? When I first joined the Seattle group, VamoLa, I was so mystified, and so shy; I didn't understand about 90% about what anybody was saying. Break? Groove? Turnaround? Whenever our leader Tom told me something, I used to just nod brightly and say "Uh huh"; but I never had any clue what the hell he was talking about. ("Start with that marcacao pick-up going into the second groove, y'know, the regular funk, right before the break, ok, Kathleen?" 'Uh huh." - shit, what the hell did he just say??? was that English??? ). It was all excellent training, I now realize, for getting through Banga and Monobloco rehearsals without knowing any Portuguese.

Somehow I thought they would kick me out of the group if they realized I didn't know anything.

The chart of numbers was an analysis I'd done of the exact number of milliseconds between 16th notes of a stretch of samba. Nerdy analytical Kathleen starting to get a glimmer that something was Not Square in that strange music from Brazil. Like a 17th-century exploring hacking my way into the Amazon, with just pen and paper and a digital sound-analysis program, I'd discovered the swing! I still had not heard the word "swing", at least not with any knowledge that it meant something specific.

I had the Mocidade caixa pattern written down three different ways with question marks all around it - I had no idea where the cycle began and had tried 3 different possible downbeats. I had three different mis-writes of the simplest possible bell pattern. I'd written partido alto as a 7/16 followed by a 9/16. I had a painfully detailed transcription of a cutter solo that I remember took me an entire night to write out. I look at it now and it's just the simplest, easiest, stupidest, third surdo variations! Just a simple 30 seconds' playing, all standard stuff.

I found the schedule of the folk festival where I first heard samba. I was walking to a Balkan band at a distant stage, and walked past VamoLa, the local Brazilian group,playing on a lawn nearby. I veered over to watch them; I never got to the Balkan band. I came back the next day to see them again. I joined the next Tuesday. Apparently I stuck the schedule on my desk when I got back, and never looked at my desk again, & a year and a half later shoved all the clutter on the desk into a box as I took off to Brazil; and there it was today, two years after that, sitting crumpled in the bottom of the box.

And then I found a complete pack of flyers for an entire year's performances by a local band, Quasi Nada. It was almost painful to look at. They were Seattle's wonderful Brazilian-funk samba-soul band, now defunct. It was an assemblage of my favorite local musicians: Chris Stromquist (also the drummer of Kultur Shock); Justin Cayou; Tom Armstrong (the director of VamoLa, who switched me onto first surdo the first time he heard me play. He became my first and most influential drum teacher). And wonderful singer Njoli Brown - oh, he had the most majestic velvety voice! (And he always completely ignored me every time he met me! Even though we'd even performed together a couple times, he never could remember my name.) Quasi Nada also had a full horn section! and a really great keyboardist. Oh, it was such a great band - mixed samba, funk, hip-hop, maracatu, edgy and rough, smooth and soulful, always grooving; treading that delicate line of the old and the new, the Brazilian and the American.

Quasi Nada was a turning point for me. I'd never heard anything like that. I never missed a show. It also marked the first time I'd ever heard pandeiro (played by Tom, of course). I fell head over heels for the band, for the music, for Vamola, for pandeiro, for samba, for Brazil; and, inevitably, for Tom, the person who was introducing me to it all. He was the first pro percussionist I'd ever met, and he had a dark-eyed coolness that fascinated a pretty large fraction of VamoLa, and he was one of the finest music teachers I've ever known. So once he switched me to first surdo, and then started showing me pandeiro (!), I was beyond help! (To his obvious dismay!)

I still miss Quasi Nada, and even Tom to some extent - though he's receded now into the "long-ago-former-teacher" past. I haven't spoken to him for years. He moved away, and our friendship (such as it was) ended, unfortunately on a rough enough note that I never even play his music any more. Quasi Nada died. And VamoLa gradually went downhill without him. I put my time in leading, with VamoLa; put in my time with the VamoLa surdos too, and tried hard to find other people in Seattle to play with. But it was all fizzling out. I felt like a bird who'd been blown briefly up above the clouds and then blown back down again; and I couldn't fly well enough to get back up there on my own.

Eventually I decided, hell with this, I'm going to Rio so I can continue on pandeiro. I'd caught a glimpse of what was possible, with music; I wasn't about to let it get away.

But even now I still miss that Quasi Nada music! And now I know why: it's the same approach as Monobloco & Bangalafumenga. What I love is NOT playing pagode the way it's always been played, or playing samba the way it's always been played. What I really love is taking those grand old rhythms and applying them into something new; taking modern songs and putting an ancient beat under them, powered by a wall of percussion. Take a funk or hip-hop or reggae tune and put a Brazilian beat under it. That Brazilian approach to percussion has a sonic richness, and a sheer power, that propels any song beyond belief, beyond anything that a single drumset player can accomplish on his own. Blend the old and the new. Take it forward.

All I've done in the last three years has been to try to develop my own skills so I could do that myself.

Oh, I was SO clueless! It was funny and sad, tonight, to look through those old notes and see how captivated and how lost I was, simultaneously, by that glittering new world that I was catching a glimpse of; that unexpected door sliding open.

Oh yeah... so THAT'S how it all began.

So I was sitting there laughing at my sheets of puzzled transcriptions, then realized I was late - late for playing! I stuffed all the little notes into a big ol' file ("Learning Samba"), unpacked my last box, found the missing repique rods, threw my repique together, and went and played with my friend Ben. It started as a sort of a lesson but then we just got to jamming, and jamming, we had two repiques and a shekere and a surdo & a couple of pandeiros... and he had the Tom Ze pagode opera, and great old weird LPs from all kinds of eras and we ended up playing along to old Ile Aiye and David Byrne and old funk stuff. We ended up both rocking out on pandeiro to an old funk LP he'd found somewhere, just grooving.... we had so much fun! ah, damn, it was cool! I came home on such a high.

Later I realized, oh! I've found my own Quasi Nada! I can build it on my own now. OK, so many there's not quite enough people yet (but we have a 3rd guy in mind) and definitely I need to work on everything more. But soon.