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...