A caixa report from Germany

Had a free day today and spent about 6 hours working on caixa. A couple hours of drills in my tiny bathroom, and then worked through the ENTIRE Lions repertoire... I've gotten so pissed at myself again recently for always having to rely on John, Sue and Pauline to get me through the breaks. "Viradouro now, Kathleen!" "It's PRESS bossa, Kathleen!" "That call always goes into Mocidade, Kathleen!" duhhh. I'm constantly spacing pieces of the repertoire. heard 3 of them are away this weekend at Xuxa's wedding and I realized, ulp, I better finally get my act together for tomorrow's rehearsal. If I can't go to Xuxa's wedding, :( :( :( at least maybe I can improve my samba playing. :)

So time for a little caixa geekage:

One of my little secret addictions recently has been the completely pointless word-finding game Scramble, on Facebook. And sometimes when I'm whiling away my life on Scramble at 3am, one of the European sambistas - who are well into their afternoon coffee break at work at that time - will start up a live chat. A couple days ago, Maluco da Caixa suddeny popped up in a little chat window - one of great German caixa players I met in Bloco X.

He'd sent me a note a couple weeks ago asking what I knew about Imperio Serrano's caixa style (my answer: not much) because Atila, the mestre of Imperio Serrano, was coming for a workshop.

(pause to go green with envy yet again over how many mestres they get over there...!! I mean, IMPERIO SERRANO, good god, and they get Jonas from Mocidade a couple time a year, and Esteves of Estacio, and piles of Mangueira directors, and all of Monobloco, and ... sniff... )

Anyway, Imperio Serrano is very dear to my heart - it's the only escola I've paraded with, and it's got such a great underdog vibe of being the poor, honest, hard-working, no-drug-money escola, AND, on top of all that, it regularly wins Best Bateria. A lot of escolas like to say they always get perfect scores of 10 during Carnaval, but usually they really get, oh, one ten and three 9.9's. But Imperio Serrano really DOES always get scores of 10, from every single judge, year after year. Virtually no other bateria can match their record.

They're best known for their quad-bells, but I personally am spellbound by their third surdos.

Aw, I would have given my eyeteeth to go to a Mestre Atila workshop.

So anyway the report from Maluco da Caixa was:

The first thing he said:
"Forget what you saw in Odilon's book". (ha ha!)

The second thing he said:
"so it turns out Atila is not a caixa player."

On further questioning it turns out that what Atila really loves is... take a wild guess.... quad bell and third surdo! But of course. No wonder the bateria especially shines at those.

But it sounds like Atila can indeed play caixa, even if maybe it's not his most-beloved instrument. At least, he can play it well enough to demonstrate subtle differences in feel between the identical patterns of Imperio and Mangueira.

What's that, you say? The identical patterns of Imperio and MANGUEIRA? Isn't Mangueira supposed to be unique? I dunno... the more escolas I see, the more it seems like there's a continuum from the Viradouro/Salgueiro family through to the Mangueira/Ilha/Imperio family. Only Mocidade really stands out as unique.

For Mangueira the consensus seems to be
X..X ..X. X..X .Zz. "simple" mangueira
XX.X .XX. XX.X .Zz. "harder" mangueira with double rights.
XX.X X.X. XX.X .Zz. alternate double-right version reported by Maluco da Caixa
X.XX .XX. X.XX .Zz. Ilha. (via Fred of Monobloco - I never got to see Ilha myself.) Fred said: Same kind of idea as Mangueira, but the FEEL is different - lighter, ringier, closer to the rim.

so here is Imperio Serrano (via Atila, via Maluco da Caixa)
X..X ..X. X..X .Zz. Imperio

... Identical to Mangueira. Apparently Atila said that yes, Imperio and Mangueira have the same caixa pattern, but ( you know what's coming) the FEEL is different. Atila then played the pattern two ways, Imperio-style and Mangueira-style, to demonstrate the difference, and... some people could hear it immediately, some never could. Hmmmm.

All the little comments he was dropping about all the workshops they get made me just want to up and move to Europe! (Especially now that the dollar is doing better!) So from there we got into a long discussion about, just exactly how difficult is it to learn German, anyway? :)

And then I went into my tiny bathroom and worked on swinging RrlR till my hands fell off. :)

*********
A P.S. on the Mangueira patterns, since people always wonder about this. Jorge Alabe once told me the double-right was the "original" Mangueira pattern, back when they played slower. Fred Castilho of Monobloco said the same - and Fred demanded we learn the double-right pattern since we played at a slower, historical-type tempo of 135. VamoLa used to always play this version too, with the double rights. I'm told the Lions historically have bounced back & forth between both the patterns, trying to figure out which is "right", but then realized they're both right. I remember a Lions rehearsal where we were listening over and over to field recordings of Mangueira, and it became clear that keeping a STRONG swing going through the whole thing is what's critical, not whether or not you're doing the double rights. Americans (including me) generally have trouble swinging through double-rights. Got to keep the swing going.

One of my strongest memories from playing with Monobloco was the couple of nights that a swarm of Mangueira caixa players joined us and (amazingly) ended up in a little circle right around me. (just because I was lucky enough to be the caixa standing nearest the repique player, and they all wanted to be next to the repique player). They were swinging it like hell, swinging HARD, almost lurching it, especially the RrlR at the front.

Then when I finally got my one and only chance to sit in the middle of the Mangueira bateria itself, I saw at least 4 different patterns going on, including both the above, and also including plain chatter.

Finally, Brian (of the Lions) says he's heard Mangueira has switched all caixa players back to the double-right pattern as of this year - i.e. after their huge bateria-director battle after Carnaval 2008 when the president temporarily (?) took over control of the bateria from the mestre.

whew, enough caixa, I'm going to bed.