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.