One week to PSU

The PSU Carnaval show is this Saturday night and the heat is on! 3 long rehearsals today - it's all I did all day.

Axe Dide: After humiliating myself by arriving late for rehearsal (when I'd sworn I'd be on time... but then lost my car keys!!). Luckily it didn't matter since I'm not playing the first several pieces, and in fact nobody said a word about it, but still, I felt terrible. ANYway, this is the first time I've seen Axe Dide in full force with all their usual musicians - healed from their appendicitis, back in town from Mexico and Jamaica and wherever, everybody there, and My. God. Impressive as hell. 3 skilled atabaques, full rack of surdos, 2 or 3 extra people zipping around being brilliant on bell, chocalho, caixa, whatever is needed. Casually whipping through all the candomble stuff, Cuban stuff, and tossing in a red-hot Rio samba and earthy samba-reggae, funky hiphop orixa rap, some real capoeira even. I'm just the pokey little puppy trying to help out a bit on caixa and pandeiro, but they don't need me at all. They are SO blazing. And the DANCERS, my god, they are on fire. This group is hot.

Lions: Luckily I wasn't late to Lions, since they follow Axe Dide in the same space. Lions have got their game on too - lots of old hands have turned up again, two new good caixas have joined (real drummers, even! A kit drummer and a drumline snare guy). But oddly we're short on surdos again - our rock-solid segunda player, Melanie, has switched to dance. That leaves us short by one segunda, so I volunteered.
Segunda gets overlooked; people think it's dull. But segunda has to be solid. The difference between a band with a not-great segunda vs. a great segunda.... (what's funny is, people won't even realize why the band's changed. They'll all be saying "Wow, the band sounds so much tighter today! Everyone's playing so well and all the breaks are working! I wonder why?").
So, segunda ok, it's what the band needs. But then... in rehearsal today I spotted so many long-gone players who reappeared and played... third, or timbal, or tamborim, or whatever flashy fun improv thing they wanted. I found myself getting really steamed that I was having to play segunda when, HEY, I'm really a third-surdo player, *I'M* the third-surdo player, that's MY drum you're playing, that's MY third surdo!! I worked myself into a good snit over it before I remembered that I'd VOLUNTEERED for segunda. Oh, yeah.
And then it turned out to be kind of fun. It's a major brain flip to play the cut on segunda, for one thing.
Oddest moment of the rehearsal was when everyone got into a big kerfuffle about where the big BOOMS fit in the song "Vou Festejar", which we're working up for Saturday. I seemed to be the only one who knew FOR SURE how the clave fit into the song - this being one of my Top Five Sambas Every Gringo Sambista Should Know By Heart - so I waded in to say emphatically "No, this song does NOT flip clave. The "vo" is on the TWO. The "ce" is the THREE." No one was really convinced, so I sang it, from the beginning, to demonstrate, and I was right (I'm not always right, but I do know this particular song) and next thing I know they'd asked me to sing, the entire band listening to me sing Vou Festejar, solo, at the top of my lungs, over and over and over, BELTING it out, over and over, everybody counting on their fingers, so they could all count it out ten million times and figure out where the breaks fit in. Funny. I'm not a singer at all but... hey... that Brazilian spirit of "what the hell, who cares if you're a singer or not, just belt it out!" took over.

BAQUE LIVRE: The ad-hoc maracatu group rounded out the evening. Two hours solid of beautiful maracatu. Only a couple people in the group really know maracatu, but all the others are solid samba musicans (mostly Lions) and they're picking it up fast. Even that classic tricky call (the one that starts with the triplet-y caixa call) was coming into focus pretty quick today.
I was on middle alfaia today, me & Derek trading off the top virada part. It's been a long time since I really got to pound on an alfaia. Tremendous fun. When you get going on alfaia, the left arms starts to get into this whipping motion, and then your shoulder gets into it - you can sort of THROW your shoulder, THROW your entire ribcage almost, throw it down to the left side, and use the momentum to accelerate your whole left arm. It's so cool....
Derek had a beautiful set of variations worked out for us, which we set to 3 songs, and - oh man, I think it's going to be really cool on Saturday.

My notes for practice this week:
Axe Dide, Gaga - bell. Make more triplety, stay close to Jesse and try to match his swing
Also run ijesha bell while listening to vasi, see how they fit against each other
Axe Dide, Rio samba - Work on Viradouro caixa, polish it up a bit
Axe Dide, 6/8 - Work on quick caixa flammy thing
Axe Dide, capoeira - Make DAMN sure I don't enter on pandeiro crossed with the berimbau, yikes!
Axe Dide, reggae - Review breaks
Lions, 6/8 & reggae - Practice timbal, makes slaps killer bright
Practice entering 6/8 timbal w/metronome, NAIL the tempo (something has been going wrong here!)
Lions, segunda - Warn Randy Monday that I need to review any breaks we'll be doing, for segunda
Lions, Mangueira - Practice Mangueira caixa, cement the swing. (it flickers in and out)
And practice those triplets at the end. They always take me by surprise when I'm on caixa.
Lions, Vou Festejar - New goal: See if I can sing the entire song while playing caixa.
Maracatu - Mostly I just need to play a bunch of alfaia solos. And tape up my hand.

My schedule for the week:
Monday: Lions rehearsal
Tuesday: Maracatu dress rehearsal with dancers
Wednesday: Axe Dide song reherasal
Thursday: Play for maracatu dance class
Friday: Axe Dide full show, 10pm
Friday later: First-Friday Pagode, till wee hours
Saturday morning: Play for samba dance class
Saturday evening:
1. Maracatu
2. Axe Dide
3. Lions
4. Batuque (Jeff Busch's group)

ok, here we go....