One week to Bloco X

ONE WEEK TO BLOCO X! I can't really believe it. It seems so hypothetical, still.

A little explanation for my European readers: For most Americans, Europe is so remote and unreal that it seems like a myth. Most Americans can't travel much - we're geographically isolated over here, we only get a measly TWO WEEKS VACATION! criminy! (and we have to spend that visiting our families, since most of us live at least a thousand miles away from our families). And we just can't afford it, with plane fares these days. And we're terrified by foreign languages, since most of us get crappy instruction in school, and if we know anything it's Spanish, which is of limited use in Europe. So Europe's an exotically strange place that springs to life only two or three times in one's life, on the fleetingly rare visits overseas. Visits that you save up for for years!! Knowing you might only ever be able to go once in your life. A twelve-hour plane trip; a thousand-dollar (or more) plane ticket; all your vacation time saved up for a year or more; the other side of the planet.

To be able to say "I've been to Paris," or "I've been to Rome," really means something to most Americans. I have plenty of friends who've never been able to travel outside of the United States even once. And plenty of others who've been exactly once, twenty years ago when they were in college, and they cherish that one memory. "Once, I got to go to London..."

(No wonder we end up behaving like such illiterate country hicks when we finally get there! We're very inexperienced.)

For us here on the West Coast - we're three thousand miles further away than even the East Coast! Europe seems (and is) even more remote, like a very far away planet, a fairy story told to you long ago; unreal. Real is California sea lions & chinook salmon swimming up the Columbia River. Real is the hometown killer whales of Seattle, wild blackberries coming into bloom everywhere, peregrine falcons zooming overhead from their nests on the Portland bridges. Funky Portland girls in their tight wool miniskirts over long wool pants, tossing their blonde dreadlocks over their shoulders as they bike with their latest load of art supplies through the drizzle back to their organic-vegetable-gardened, backyard-chicken, plus-maybe-one-little-backyard-goat, cute chilly unheated low-carbon-footprint Portland houses. Real is spring-skiing the extinct volcano of Mt. Hood (or is it extinct, really?). Hearing the news reports that the gray wolves of Yellowstone have walked all the way to Oregon. Well, like I said, Europe seems unreal.

But it's REAL, my ticket says NEXT TUESDAY, I'm wrapping up my teaching at the University of Portland with shocking suddenness, moving out of my house already. Tuesday! I'll be gone for a month. I'm torn about leaving - part of me really wants to stay and see a Portland spring, and see the Gatas through their very first ever gig! and work on repinique with the Lions, take candomble lessons with Jesse, practice caixa and pandeiro every day. Instead I'm flitting off again. So distracted by my packing-up frenzy that I actually forgot about Gatas rehearsal (I can't believe I did that... it really shows how much I've mentally disengaged from Portland already).

Today three different friends offered me free housing in Istanbul, London AND France. ISTANBUL! I swore to myself years ago that I would return someday; now I will return in the company of a dearly beloved Turkish-fluent friend who I met playing samba. How lucky am I?? Bloco X, Istanbul, maybe Prague, from there to London, and maybe I'll fit in that France trip too.... Lucky lucky lucky.... I have to go pack now.

Caixa flowing to the sea

Lions rehearsal today... Sunday rehearsal on a freakishly cold mid-April day. It's been snowing and hailing, very bizarre this late in the spring. But I hopped on my bike anyway (don't have money to fill the gas tank and the car was near empty!), rigged a way to strap my caixa to my backpack and off to rehearsal I went. I couldn't figure out a way to also strap on the timbal... W

We've recovered from the blitz of the PSU Carnaval, and now, mid-April, back to normal. Full contingent at rehearsal and we're starting to focus on the summer parade season, which is shaping up to be tremendous. Brian's doing his usual canny and brilliant job landing us some killer gigs, including a brand-new Brazil day extravaganza on August 5th, at which, to judge from Brian's description of the line-up, I'll be playing in every single band all day.

The last month I've been mostly on primeira and segunda, filling some surdo holes the Lions have had for some recent shows. And I'd been drilling the hell out of timbal (Pat and I are determined to prove to Brian that a girl timbal section CAN SO kick ass, can SO, can SO! ). But today, a pause on all that, because I want to get back to... CAIXA.

My endless battle with caixa is like the tide flowing in and out of the Bay of Fundy. Sometimes it goes so well and sometimes I feel like such an idiot. But today is a full moon, and the massive Bay of Fundy tide came flowing in.

On caixa I've been really trying, this last month, to lock in the swing and to iron out a glitch I discovered last year in Rio. Here's the problem. Lions play this Viradouro pattern as their basic:
RllX RlXl RlXl RllX (rimshots are X's)

So, the problem is, THAT'S NOT WHAT I HEAR IN RIO. What I hear in most street blocos, and in Sao Clemente, and Portela, and, uh, VIRADOURO in fact, and also when Jorge Alabe plays, is:
RllX RlXl Rlrl RllX

Spot the difference! One rimshot that I need to change to an unaccented hit. ONE TINY LITTLE CHANGE. But I just can't do that change! It turns out I can swing this:
RlrL
And I can swing this:
RllX

But it turns out I completely suck at swinging this:
Rlrl
Which is the 3rd quarter note of that Rio-style pattern.

I also turn out to suck at swinging this:
RlXl
Which is the 2nd quarter note.

So making this apparently tiny little change, removing one rimshot from Viradouro, has been completely kicking my ass.

What it's really done is exposed a deep hole in my playing: I can't keep the swing going consistently through all possible caixa stickings. I only swing on certain patterns that I've carefully learned to swing:
Viradouro-with-the-extra-rimshot (but not without),
Mangueira-with-the-double-rights (but not with single rights),
Mocidade-with-the-drum-slanted (but not if it's level),
Chatter-if-it's-loud (but not soft).

It turns out I have all these black holes. Ask me to change anything, push me out of my zone of habit, and, no swing. I'm like a horse that can only canter on one lead and never on the other, only can trot clockwise and never counterclockwise. That's what horsemen would call a lack of suppleness. I'm lacking suppleness on caixa.

So I've been drilling every caixa motif I can think off, trying to get these all to swing, doing endless loops like:
RllX llRl
and
RllR RlXl
and
Rlrl RllX
and
XlRX lRXl
and.... you get the idea. Hours in slow motion.

Then I tried to put together the Viradouro pattern as it should be, without that extra rimshot. Man, that sucker is slippery. That damn rimshot keeps jumping back in there. I'm just so used to putting it in. And then the most infuriating thing started happening - after all those drills of strange combinations, my hands started getting COMPLETELY confused about what pattern they were supposed to be doing. They'd jump from Viradouro to Mocidade, from Viradouro to Mangueira, from Viradouro to timbal, and more and more often, Viradouro to complete random meltdown - all kinds of glitchy freakouts. I had to slow down to probably 20bpm, I'm not joking, GLACIALLY SLOW, to get the pattern right.

Then I gradually sped it up again. It would go okay for while, but took intense concentration. And if my concentration slipped for the tiniest split second, POW, off my hands would fly on some totally random sticking. The most I could go was maybe 90bpm. I could not, could not, could not play the new pattern at high tempo. Forget whether it was swinging or not. I just couldn't even PLAY it.

I've been working this now for a couple months.

About two weeks ago something new happened. I was plowing through my drills, and as usual my hands got into glitchy randomness at high tempo. But this time, EVEN WHEN I MESSED UP, IT STILL KEPT SWINGING.

I knew I was onto something. Because it meant I'd got to the point where any possible combination of rights and lefts still had the swing in it, and it meant I'd learned to chain them all together in all possible combinations.

So today.... for the first time...
The full Viradouro pattern leapt into my drum.
It is like a spirit has possessed your hands, when this sort of thing happens.
I was actually playing the pattern that I was intending to play! The one I heard in Rio!
And it was SWINGING all the way through, every quarter note.
That sticky rimshot had just vanished. In its place, a flowing, swinging Rlrl, smooth as silk, soft as velvet, flowing right out of the RlXl before, flowing right into the RllX after. Measure after measure after measure. A seamless river flowing to the sea.

Near the end of rehearsal, Randy asked the whole band to quiet down; then asked specific sections to play as loud as possible while the rest of the band stayed quiet. When the caixas' turn came, I seemed to be the only one who had picked up on what Randy was trying to do. Which meant I was the ONLY caixa who played loud. In the past this would have been scary. But it was not scary, it was fun. HERE I AM! said my drum. HERE I AM! HERE'S MY SAMBA!

It sounded alright! It sounded almost like a real caixa player was playing.

Bring a cookie

Minor gripe time. I've been teaching samba again the last couple weeks, for a couple different groups. One group I've been teaching for free... 'cause they're a new group, just starting out, and I want to invest in getting it going. But it turns out to have involved quite a lot of teaching time and basic drum skills. The other was supposed to be a paid beginners' class for another group, yesterday, but two of the 6 people just walked away without paying. It is, indeed, sliding scale, but it's a little weird for them to slide it all the way to zero without at least saying something to me, or offering to trade me something, I dunno, a chicken or a cookie or some labor time or something. Anything.

I'm not even that expert, and usually I DO teach people for free. But it's one thing when I'VE chosen to do it for free. It's not cool for the students to make that decision for me. It's also a bit not-cool when you'd only been planning to lead and you end up doing some heavy-duty teaching... and when people start expecting you to do that, for free, time after time.

It's a big intense output of effort to teach; staying ON and FOCUSED; and hours of prep time before (the way I do it, anyway. Though, I notice, when groups don't pay me I tend to stop prepping for them...). I really enjoy it, but it often leaves me dead tired at the end of a session. And it's time that I'm not putting toward biology writing (which pays me between $50 and $100 an hour) - and I DESPERATELY need income right now. I am flat, flat broke, counting every penny. The four students who paid yesterday are paying my food bill for the first half of the week. The two students who didn't pay mean I'll be eating rice and beans for the second half.

But mostly it's the disrespect that it implies... the feeling of being taken for granted. The sensation of pouring out everything I've got for two hours, everything I've learned. I'm a good teacher, especially for beginners. Teaching is, in fact, my profession (I'm a biology teacher, and I'm very good at it). When I teach samba, I'm sharing everything I've got from four years' struggle and five trips to Brazil, thousands of dollars of private lessons, $30,000 of life savings sunk into this adventure, leaving me flat broke and struggling.

And at the end of 2 hours, people just walk away. Hey folks, if you can't afford the $12, at least bring me a cookie.

Saturday: The PSU Carnaval

This was the big Brazilian bash of the year for Portland, Oregon - the annual Portland State University Carnaval party. (yeah, I know, Carnaval was practically two months ago...) It was a frantic night for me, back-to-back in three bands at once: Baque Livre (maracatu), Axe Dide (mostly orixa), and of course the Lions (mostly samba).

I was still pretty stressed about trying to learn all the Axe Dide songs, not nearly enough time learning Axe Dide's breaks, not nearly enough time on pandeiro for the Axe Dide capoeira (which SHOULD be easy for me but IS NOT), trying to keep the new maracatu arrangement in my head, not enough practice time on alfaia, practicing my butt off for timbal for the Lions, and also switching to second surdo last week for the Lions. (Second surdo's easy in theory, but it's always a bit of a brain flip to jump to it suddenly after a long time on third or first surdo.) Lots of new stuff, not enough practice, and tons of stress.

For some mysterious reason I also got caught in the middle of a tiny territory battle over who got to play my second surdo when I switched to timbal partway through the Lions show. Two surdo wanna-bes tussling over it, asking me for my surdo in the wings right before the show, and none of the leaders making a decision. (I thought it would have been self-evident that only the new surdo player who'd actually been to the last 2 rehearsals should play surdo in the show. But apparently it wasn't self-evident)

But once the show got going... it went SO well. The maracatu was great; Elise sang perfectly (and wow, was she brave to be able to start a cappella like that at the beginning) and it all clicked and hung together beautifully. Axe Dide was absolutely on fire. I survived my pandeiro thing, not with the crispness I would have liked, but I got through it. I remembered the songs - even was the only singer to remember the response song for the last three orixa songs (which had been added at absolutely the last second in the wings, the lead singer whispering the response to us backstage).

Lions were hilarious fun. Aside from the near meltdown when the caixas unexpectedly took off in a samba-reggae entry. Total tempo fracture, half the caixas at 100bpm where our guitarist was, the other half mysteriously shooting off at 110bpm - chaos for about three measures. Well, it was all back on track in just a couple measures, thank god, but that was an interesting couple of measures. The thing I can't understand is: what guitarist were the 110bpm caixas listening to?

The highlights of the Lions show for me were, first, getting to play in the tremendously kickass lineup of timbals - all sorts of awesome ringers had joined in on timbal, and I've been working so hard on it recently. And, second, playing second surdo against Jeremy's godlike first surdo. Bim, bom, bim, bom, steady as the hammer of heaven. It's been a while since I had that solid a partner on surdo. I indulged myself in a moment of pride about me & Jeremy (and the experienced surdos on the other side too) all of us capable of all SORTS of other instruments but FAITHFULLY serving the band where we were needed most, TROOPERS that we were, goddam SAINT BERNARDS carrying our solid beats through the SNOWSTORMS of confusion, holding down the CORE so the rest of the band could indulge themselves in their frippery little tamborim whatevers. Yeah, your flippy little drumlets and your li'l third solos are cute and all, but who's the core? FIRST AND SECOND SURDOS! THAT'S WHO! Get down on your knees and THANK the LORD for the FIRST and SECOND SURDOS of the GODS!

Where was I? Well, turns out, second surdo is all right! I was having a good time! Plus I finally had stopped feeling upside-down on the callout - which means second surdo has gotten comfy again. (I haven't played second since... um.... almost five years ago.) All right, enough surdo bragging. Basically the entire band played fantastically. Jorge did an incredible repinique solo. We got to play "Vou Festejar" with the brilliant Alex of Bat Makumba - Lions hardly ever do songs but they really made an effort for this show, and it all worked. Still a fair bit of tempo rushing, but it worked in the end.

My last little kicky moment was being the 1 person (as far as I could hear) who figured out Jorge Alabe's fuzziest hand-wave sign. Jorge Alabe had come up from SF just for the show. I was so happy to see him again; it seems like I run into him in the oddest places now, in Seattle, in Portland, in the California woods, in the middle of a Portela rehearsal in Rio, on a bus at the Praca Maua. And now, whenever I spot him unexpectedly, it's bear hug time! Anyway, he led us through a bunch of stuff that half the band had never seen before, and it was fun to realize that I know his cues now, and that I know the vocabulary of Rio signs well enough that even when he throws something unexpected at us, I know what he means.

Then one more call, one more samba, one more dance.... danced like crazy later to Jeff Busch & Batuque... got to see Aileen & Lisette again. Such a fine evening. I haven't had this much intense musical fun since Rio. I went drifting home on such a high... the whole week was so intense and so deeply nourishing for me. BACK IN IT. Back in music.

Friday: Axe Dide & March Fourth

And Portland's great Brazilian music weekend arrives! Today there was actually a samba-de-roda class that I had to miss due to some absolutely frantic last-minute prep for Axe Dide. Now I realize how ridiculous it was to try to learn 15 songs on Wednesday for a show on Friday. Plus I still haven't practiced nearly as much stuff as I wanted to!!

I did get some time in on pandeiro - only 2 short sessions though - 'cause I'll be playing pandeiro (alone) for Axe Dide's capoeira piece, which I fairly terrified about (the capoeira pattern, simple as it is, is alien to my choro-playing hands.) I spent hours today picking through my rehearsal recordings trying to remember this or that new song, break or pattern. I hate feeling this unprepared.

But I showed up for the gig and there suddenly were three or four other fantastic drummers sitting in who I'd never even met before, all of them wicked fine drummers. Extra bell and caixa players all over the place. Whew! Extra singers too and yay, I wasn't the only one who still needed to look at the words!

Well, in the end, bits of the show were a bit ragged- strange transitions, a couple blown breaks - but none of it was my fault (where) and they're all such pros it made no difference. They wowed the crowd entirely and I had such confidence in the people around me that I got into what I call my "Jeff Busch state", when I'm CERTAIN that everything is going to go well, NO fear, and it really starts to be FUN. (I call it the "Jeff Busch state" because playing with the great Seattle drummer Jeff Busch was my first experience in being able to completely relax when playing. That's because Jeff can rescue absolutely anything, all by himself, even if the rest of the band completely falls to pieces, so I know that nothing can go wrong when I'm playing with him. Plus, well, he always just looks so happy.)

When you're relaxed - when you're not thinking about what might go wrong, but instead you're enjoying every moment - you start to play out more. You start to develop your own voice. It's the difference between just rigidly tapping out a part you've been told to play, and happily singing it out because you think it's beautiful and you want everybody to hear it.

So, Axe Dide started to be one long Jeff Busch state.

And the dancers? I didn't mention?
Best dance show in the world, maybe? Am I overstating? I guess I haven't seen all the dance acts in the entire world, so I can't say that for certain. But Axe Dide is truly phenomenal. Donna's a very strong director, and she pushes for, and gets, very high commitment and very high performance level from her dancers. And her choreography is brilliant - she has a way of shaping a choreography so that a high # of dancers on stage looks balanced and creative, instead of just looking like a strangely large mob of dancers (as I've seen in some other groups I could name!). She'll do very dramatic changes between sets of dancers, like, 2/3 of the dancers suddenly crouch to the floor very still, while the other 1/3 continues dancing; subsets of dancers come whirling to life now and then, or are suddenly whizzing across the back from one wing to another, very dynamic and it gives everybody the spotlight. And the QUALITY of the dance, my god, such beautiful fluidity and torso control, and "live arms all the way to the fingertips" as Donna would put it. No dead arms! (another gripe I have with a lot of American samba dancers.)

Axe Dide's really a professional dance company - not just a bunch of random dancers accompanying a drum band.

Afterwards: March Fourth, Portland's punk marching band. March Fourth was started as sort of Lions spinoff a few years ago, by a former Lion of enormous musical skill and leadership talent, and so it has a high amount of Axe Dide / Lions crossover, I spotted some of the Axe Dide singers in there too. March Fourth has a fanatical following in Portland right now. I'm constantly running into people who pretty much start drooling and going into fits if I mention March Fourth. Their hula hoop dancer girl was at a hot tub place near where I live a few weeks ago, and people were treating her like a rock star. I can understand it to some degree - I first spotted March Fourth three years ago and immediately thought "Whenenver I burn out on samba, I'm joining that band". And I'm not the only one to have had that thought, 'cause March Fourth's "stolen" several fine Lions players.

Watching them tonight, I realized what they're doing that's so successful: Reviving vaudeville. It's basically a huge brass-and-drums band that plays silly songs, in goofy outfits, while people do stunts and skits in front - hula hoop routines, knife juggling, stilt walking, comedy routines. Cool routines, actually, and sexy and fun. But basically it's vaudeville! It's a great idea. They've found an incredible niche. They PUT ON A SHOW.

I LOVED them, I had a GREAT time, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the show, and I stayed much longer than I'd planned; and yet I was sort of relieved to discover that I didn't feel a strong need to join them. Turns out... I kept wishing they would play a samba! I guess I am pretty far yet from being burned out on samba.

So Axe Dide and Lions are still the bands for me.

Thursday in Portland: Maracatu

Nonstop. Something every night this week. Thursday night was the maracatu class. Raced downtown just in time, found a parking spot, lugged my alfaia in....

This was kind of a weird evening for me because I usually play the high alfaia, but we were short on marcacao so I played marcacao. (Marcacao alfaia just keeps chugging on the basic pattern - male in this case - while the other alfaias do variations). But actually it was really fun. Sink-into-the-groove time.

Something is not quite comfortable for me with alfaia this week. It feels like my left arm movement sometimes is stiff, and sometimes clicks into being very comfortable. Maybe I just need to get used to it again - I know I'm automatically positioning it way too much like a surdo, too low and too centered. I need to get the alfaia higher and way over on my left side, the way I used to play it. Back in the day when I used to play it a lot.

We never got to practice any of our material for Saturday, though. Dang. I'm still a bit worried about whether things will jell. We really need one more rehearsal... or two....

Wednesday in Portland

Tonight - Axe Dide song rehearsal. I'd had the hideous and humiliating ill luck and poor judgment to have arrived late at Axe Dide rehearsal last Sunday (I lost my car keys and spent about 20 minutes tearing the house apart looking for them). I was so mortified about this that it took about 3 days afterwards before I stopped cringing about it. One consequence was that I missed the part where the band was arranging the candomble pieces, so, I won't be playing on those pieces. But instead - Donna brightly suggested "Why don't you join the singers?" so off I went to song rehearsal.

Hey. It was a WHOLE NEW BUNCH OF PEOPLE. A whole different crowd I'd never run into before. The thing about Axe Dide is - well, there's several things about Axe Dide, all of them very cool, but one of the quite cool things is that they have an AMAZING bunch of a cappella singers. It makes the music really take fire - the drums blasting away and then a solo singer starts belting out some amazing weird candomble chant thing, and five or six other people start chanting little replies in five-part harmony.

I could not believe how fun these folks were. They could not stop horsing around for even two seconds, all following random and completely irreverent chain-of-consciousness musical ideas. We'd be in the middle of a perfectly serious religious song, quite serious actually, and accidentally we'd hit a chord that happened to remind somebody of something, and three seconds later the whole group would be mutating what had been a serious religious song into a hip-hop and beatbox routine, or four-part barbershop crooning, or leaping to their feet to do a striptease imitation or maybe a little vaudeville softshoe, or bursting into "Gothic Doo-wop" ("It is time for the SACRIFICE! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!), or a squeaky Alvin & the Chipmunks falsetto, a soulful sexy James Brown imitation ("HEY BABY, THERE AIN'T NOTHIN' WRONG... IF YOU WANNA DO THE BUTT.. ALL.. NIGHT.. LONG!") There were balloons bouncing around and small children and cats. The ideas and the jokes were flying so fast & furious I remember thinking "This must be what it is like to live in a family of otters."

Me, I was just trying to learn the songs.

But the most phenomenal thing was ... they could SING. Man, these people could sing. Beautiful pitch, beautiful tone and great harmonic ideas. And, GUYS! Guy singers! Singer guys! Who could really sing! I can't think what Donna was thinking sending me to this group - but as it happens, I did used to do a lot of a cappella singing and it was so fun to try it again. I'm no lead singer but I love holding harmony.

At the end of the evening I thought: Maybe there's a reason I couldn't find my car keys that Sunday... the universe was trying to make me late to Axe Dide rehearsal so that i would end up at this song rehearsal.

Tuesday in Portland

Maracatu rehearsal tonight - our first rehearsal with the dancers. A subset of Lions and ex-Lions usually assembles this little maracatu group once a year for the PSU Carnaval - and periodically there are murmurings of keeping it going. I'd love to because damn, maracatu is fun! It has an unusual feature of having the melody and the elaborate variations done by the BASS DRUMS, of all things, not by a higher pitched instruments. The alfaias. It gives it a tremendous earthy power. Plus it's got cool songs...

We ran into a snag, though - our singer has pulled out at the very last minute. A fine local singer from Hood River, Elise, agreed to step in at the last second, but we literally had never rehearsed together and at this rehearsal we just could not get ourselves synchronized. To complicate matters the band was marching around in circles and we'd somehow neglected to practice walking before, and both the alfaia players and caixas were having issues ("Do I step every beat or step every other? Or not walk in time at all?") and Elise was clear on the other side of the gigantic room, far enough away that sound delay was happening too, so, things were a bit ragged.

I suddenly had the brilliant and rather obvious idea that the band should start ON STAGE, NOT marching. While the DANCERS marched in, we'd already be on stage playing. Pitched this idea to Derek and he darted over to Beto with the idea, and it's a go. I think that'll help a lot.