Mangueira's new sticking

Fascinating Lions rehearsal last week - new inside scoop from Mangueira.

So, Mangueira, of course, is the grand behemoth of baterias, the oldest and most famous, and one that had an incessant series of drug deals, scandals and various unfortunate events last year. Musically, their bateria did not perform quite up to expectations last year. For one thing they had a couple horrible tempo fractures while turning the bateria around in the Sambodromo - lost points there. For another, a lot of the players aren't actually playing the same patterns and the sound and even the swing has become a little muddy.

Mangueira's influential fans were not pleased with Mangueira's performance last year, so after Carnaval, the president of the escola took over the bateria "temporarily" - took it over from the mestre! - and made all the section directors attend special training sessions. The news reports about this were all couched in a delicate, everything's-just-fine-here, we're-just-doing-a-tiny-bit-of-reorganizing tone that made me think something really dramatic must be going on. Whenever someone "temporarily" takes over from the bateria mestre, you know some serious scary politics are happening!

Later, rumors came out that the Mangueira bateria directors were really cracking down on the players. So now, the Lions have just heard from someone who has been in the Mangueira bateria in recent months. (this info via Brian) Apparently, after the crackdown, the Mangueira caixas were required to all start playing the old-style double-right pattern:
RRlR lRRl RRlR LZzL

... which is the one I've been trying to play, too, the "old school Mangueira" that Monobloco insists that all its players learn. But it is SO hard to play it fast! Mangueira used this pattern back in the day, when sambas were slower, when they cruised along at 135bpm or so. But these days it's more like 150 or 160. I work on that pattern a lot and I can chug pretty well at 135 on it, but ... well, for example, last week at the tail end of the crazy Obama celebration, we got into a Mangueira that was maybe 150 or so, honestly, it was ridiculous, and my forearms completely seized up. I felt sort of bad about it, like, gee, what kind of pathetic player am I if I can't play the basic Mangueira pattern at 150?

So in the next rehearsal Brian came cruising in with this report: Apparently even the actual Mangueira caixa players can't play that pattern really fast! He said they'd all dutifully switched to that old pattern, but it was just so brutal at 150 that even their best caixas were struggling. They could play it, sure, but it sounded tense and struggling, and it wasn't swinging.

SO, now the Mangueira directors have switched everybody to a new sticking. (Says Brian, from his Mangueira source.) As follows. The back half is the same as the old pattern. What they've done is make the front half gentler on the arms, by switching to overhand sticking and eliminating the double-rights - in other words, made it exactly like the Mocidade front half:

New Mangueira sticking, fall '08
RlrL rlRl RlRR LZzL

So we spent about half of the rehearsal practicing the new pattern. It INSTANTLY felt smooth and easy. It still sounded like Mangueira. But it was DREAMY smooth. Immediately the band was grooving better, locking better. Nice!

Everybody was having so much fun learning it that a bunch of non-caixa people got inspired and wanted to try it too, so I loaned away my caixa. Then... since I only had one other instrument with me, a spare tamborim I keep tucked in my caixa case, and since we were playing kind of slow while everybody else learned the new caixa pattern, I thought "gee, I wonder if I could hang with the tamborims at this speed" and joined the tamborim section. And -
REVELATION!
Tamborim is REALLY FUN!!!!!

Chris, our wonderful tamborim section leader, spotted that I was trying to follow along and started showing me a few of their desenhos. It was INCREDIBLY fun! And I could almost keep up! Only because it was super-slow, of course, but still, I started to have tamborim dreams. I decided I'll try to learn Mangueira style on tamborim too: single-strand baqueta. It just seemed like a Mangueira kind of week.