Friday, August 29, 2008

Smoldering fire receives puff of air

I finally moved into my new place (Tamara's awesome little house in North Portland). My VERY OWN place for TEN MONTHS.

I've been feeling detached musically for a while this summer... since I returned from Europe. My biology teaching job has been sucking up my whole life recently. I'm happy to let it have, say, 80% of my life, but it's been 100%. Yet the biology has been sucking me in with a passion - there's a fire there too, with new projects starting up on elephants, sea turtles, California condors, all very cool and very important - but I have had an unearthly feeling sometimes of feeling Brazil sliding away. The horrifically high airfares to Salvador and Rio have also been very depressing. It's three times more expensive to get there; and three times more expensive to live there, too. When will I ever be able to get back there again?

I feel sometimes like: I'm not really a drummer... it's sliding away... my big experiment is ending.

Last week though I finally got caught up on my work.I wandered home thinking "Wow, what should I do tonight? I don't have to work!" It took me a while to realize "I could play..." Just play. Not lead a rehearsal, not teach beginners, not race to a show, not have to show people stuff.

Just play music by myself just for fun.

There was suddenly an extraordinary sensation of something opening, like a flower blooming, or like a fire almost smothered that suddenly has received a puff of air, and flares to life again.

I haven't been able to "just play" in ... how long? I can't remember the last time I had time to practice ANYTHING. Months and months. Now I might have the time; and now, finally, I have the space - my new house. My rent has more than doubled but I am making the investment so I could have practice space at last. (well, and kitty space too.)

I want one more year of being able to practice hard, every day, a couple hours. I want to dive back into it and grab hold again. I'm not done yet.

Tonight I invited a bunch of friends to come jam at the Last Thursday street fair on Alberta Street. After a brief confusion with one of my groups about the concept of a street jam (I thought they were telling me I couldn't go jam with my friends! Which would have been insta-rebellion for me! I was working myself into a puffed-up maverick rebel mode over it, I'll jam with whoever I want to jam with, etc. But it turned out to be just a mixup) - Anyway, I went ahead and invited some folks, and a little bunch of Gatas and Lions showed up.

And we played completely random stuff, laughing and messing up, sounding like shit, even losing the 1, getting crossed sometimes, missing calls and cues, ... and other times coming together. Ben doing his usual flashes of random inspiration and doing repique calls on the timbal, guiding us through random shit - hey! suddenly we're doing an enredo and Ben's singing all the words! Have no idea what it is! Wonder where the breaks go! Ben & I suddenly getting an identical brainwave to revive the old VamoLa "Em cima" break (fun to watch the Gatas and Lions folks gradually clue in to how that one worked, with Ben & me giving gigantic STOP PLAYING STOP STOP STOP signals to various players at random times and GO GO GO signals to other player and everyone fumbling it hilariously. But by about the 5th time through we had it together!). Mehmet suddenly remembering the Rhythm of the Saints intro and off we went on that, me yelling in his ear "HOW DOES IT GO AGAIN? I JUST FORGOT WHAT YOU JUST HUMMED TO ME" and him yelling back "IT'LL COME TO YOU" and he was right, it did.

Ben being completely brilliant on timbal, Pat getting the whole crowd dancing, Mehmet ripping into the samba-reggae repinique runs like I have never heard. Fucking around and messing up. Little crowds gathered, little crowds became big crowds, and by the end we had a huge mob. Samba dancers had popped up from the crowd out of the blue, and at the end half the crowd was throwing themselves into the samba-reggae dance moves. The cops finally had to come shut us down.

"Look," said Mehmet as we were packing up, "Somebody gave me this flyer for this gig and asked us to come play. Should we just go and pretend we're an actual group?"

Yup. Now that's the way it should be.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

cuica chaos!

Jay had the absolutely brilliant idea of getting Pauline, me, him, and Tobey all together for a cuica lesson with Blake today, along with a potluck dinner that was so much fun we are going to have to do it every month.

Blake's a killer cuica player and one of the only Americans I know who's really specialized in it. He's a fascinating guy - grew up in Tanzania or somewhere (sorry, I forget exactly) and taught himself to play cuica as a teenager. He's played for years and years, and done more than anyone I know to track down the hotshot Rio cuica players and study with them. He's done the journeys out to the distant favelas and studied with the masters. Multiple times. He had some beautiful rides from some of those guys.

Blake reports that there's always a shortage of good cuica players in Rio. He's had very good look getting invited to play with escolas - even showing up just a week before and getting to parade. He says, They always need good cuicas.

He was absolutely full of crucial tips on everything from how to hold it, whether to sand down your stick, whether to cut off the string, what oil to oil your stick with, the ever crucial what kind of fabric to use, etc. One of his major tips, though, was simply that there's never just one way to do it. Cuicas turn out to be incredibly temperamental - the stick, and the friction of the ribbon, adds a whole nother element. In fact, as we got into it, In fact, as Blake pointed out, there are lots of brilliant percussionists who play every single instrument EXCEPT cuica. "Because it's not a percussion instrument!" we all realized simultaneously. It's a melody instrument.

In fact, it feels very similar to a bowed string instrument. The act of pulling the fabric back and forth on the stick, and searching for just the right amount of zing, tone and grunt in the instrument's response, is physically almost identical to pulling a rosined bow back and forth on a classical bass. (well, a Hungarian bass, anyway.) The left hand action (pressing on the cuica head) even feels similar, because it's like pressing on a certain spot on the fingerboard on a bass.

Some of Blake's comments:
"It is ALWAYS okay, for ANY reason, at ANY time, to just stop playing if you need to adjust your cuica. Cuicas are very finicky. Look at any lineup of 20 cuica players in Rio, and at any given time, at least 2 of them are not playing and are just fucking around with their cuica. Sometimes you're right in the middle of a solo and your stick snaps, and that's that."

"Then sometimes your cuica is just on fire and, that night, you're the guy with the MAGIC CUICA!"

"If your stick snaps in the Sambodromo, you just keep faking it like it's still there - especially if you're under the judge's booth. I'd estimate, by the end of the parade, about half the cuicas are faking it."

"No, I can't help you with Cuica Face. You have to learn that on your own."

off to practice...