Back home with the pandeiro

I'm in a new band! (Because I'm not enough bands already!)

I've been trading emails recently with a fabulous mandolin player here in town about maybe getting together to play some choro. I have actually been more and more nervous about it, because he's really an extremely good mandolin player (the US, with its bluegrass tradition, has a terrifying number of terrifyingly good mandolin players). And I'm, well, you know, I've got a decent swing on pandeiro but I'm not fancy. And I haven't played pandeiro all year and my hands are shot.

But with the amazing new freedom this week of Not Having To Prep New Lectures For Next Week - well, I finally got it out of its case. I got 3 good practice sessions in last week:

The first felt stiff and clumsy. My poor hands wore out in about five minutes, and I couldn't seem to remember anything to practice or anything to work on.

The second session, I was able to keep going 20 minutes. I suddenly remembered some cool, helpful jingle and buzz exercises - just the basics - and spent a patient, but rewarding, time going through them. But the next day my hands were so exhausted that I had to stop playing surdo halfway through Lions rehearsal 'cause I couldn't grip the mallet anymore.

The third session, I played 30 min, the swing clicked back to life, so I thought I'd play along with my old Cartola cd; and that was really fun and suddenly I had to re-start a track and play it all over again, because I'd suddenly had a bunch of ideas about how to play for that particular tune. The music just bloomed into life. MELODY! And I started having such intense pleasure playing along with the old "Cartola" tunes that I couldn't wait to play with real live people again.

So I asked the mandolin guy, how about this week, and he said, sure! me & my guitarist practice every Wednesday! Come on over! So today was Wednesday, and I went on over. And there I was in the mandolin guy's living room, feeling not the LEAST bit nervous (which is very unlike me, to not feel nervous when I'm about to play pandeiro for a brilliant choro mandolinist) and just feeling very happy and very eager to play. They started playing and... I knew all the tunes. I don't know why I didn't expect to know the tunes - somehow I'd thought it would be some total other batch of choro tunes that I've never heard - but one after the other, classic after classic - Doce de Coco, Cochichando, Noites Cariocas - each time I'd think "oh, THIS one! I know this one!" and I'd be playing along and humming it in my head and I'd suddenly know "There's a break coming up" or "Big triplets coming up in 2 bars, I can feel them coming!" or whatever it was, and the guitar player and I would hit whatever-it-was at the same moment.

It was like coming home. I'd kind of forgotten all the years I've spent working on choro, all the choro classes and even choro camps. Pandeiro was my big thing, back then, you know? And I was never a pagode player - I was a choro player, right from the beginning. The original reason I went to Rio.

The pandeiro felt so natural in my hands again. Swinging away, light as a feather.

This time I went 60 minutes. Tomorrow... I want to play for hours.

$720 to Salvador

I gave my last final exam today. I am done teaching.
The sense of pressure lifting is so strong it feels physical. I feel like I'm floating.

And so, of course, to celebrate, I bought a ticket to Salvador today! There is 1 good side to Bloco X not happening - I'm heading to Brazil instead! To see my apartment in person at last. To sit on the beach, and see the music, and dance, and buy more shekeres and timbals, and to visit Chapada de Diamantina (forests and waterfalls) and/or Praia Forte (sea turtles) and/or Boipeba (idyllic peaceful island).

There is a dengue fever outbreak going on in Salvador right now. But, honestly, everywhere I go recently there is a dengue fever outbreak. Dengue or swine flu, it's always something. I'll just bring a gallon of bug dope, just as if I were working in Alaska.

AND... my ticket cost..... well, I have written a little commemorative poem about it:

Seven Hundred and Twenty Dollars
Total
Taxes and Fees Included
Round-trip
*from Portland Oregon*

There, did you like my poem? I like my poem. I like my poem A LOT. It's usually an extra $600 just to get from Portland to the East Coast - and then it can be $800 or more from the East Coast down to Brazil. $720 clear from Portland is unheard of. My frequent-flyer sambista friend Tanya says she's never seen prices this low since 9/11.

It'll be just two weeks. First half of June. But that's two weeks more than nothing! It was surprisingly hard to stuff a Brazil trip into my summer schedule around all the elephants, sea turtles, whales, Wyoming bird fieldwork, Brazil Camps, Lions gigs and whatnot.

Tough life.

I feel very lucky.

The Seventh Universal Human Emotion

I haven't had any time to write in ages, due to teaching some new college classes (or "new preps", which is college-teacher code for "never-ending high-stress hell of 100-hr workweeks"). Which means little time to practice either. But I gave my last lectures on Friday! The spring semester is OVER! Such an unreal feeling to give that Last Lecture and hand out the student evals and BE DONE.

(Well, not done actually, because I've still got all the grading and the exams to write and then the exams to grade... but never mind about that little detail)

It gave me a sense of dizzy-headed elation all afternoon. And just in time for Friday night's Axe Dide show! Despite the total lack of practice time, I've been trying to keep up with the Lions and Axe Dide as much as I can. I feel like I've been hitting new personal low points in both groups - I've been having to miss about every other rehearsal for each of them, and I hate not having any practice time, and I hate the sensation of hard-won skills leaking away. But on Friday with the Last Lecture done, I scooted home to review all the Axe Dide breaks, then raced to the mall to put together a new white-and-red stage outfit and then, off to the gig.

I'll skip the long description this time and just say, this show completely kicked ass. The band was hot, hot, hot, and the dancers were hot, hot, hot, and I was so glad I'd had that speck of time to review all the material - it all was finally locked into place in my head and it just flowed. The whole show just flowed. It all just worked. It was beautiful, it was exciting, it felt fun, it felt relaxed, it felt happy. I got to play pandeiro with Mehmet, and shekere with the amazing 3-part guiro shekere team (the formidable Chaz on lead, Doug on the middle, me on the high), I got to sing the amazing Osain songs with the scary-good Axe Dide singers.

But the moment that is really sticking in my memory - well, aside from the moment of curtain rising to reveal Doug the shekere player pelting the singers with gumballs from clear across the stage, and then saying to the audience "Anyone else want any Ecstasy?" - is when Zach - ok, now a word here about Zach, I'd last seen him dressed in a crazy outfit in a Halloween parade in New York City pounding an alfaia, and then all of a sudden he pops up 3000 miles away in Oregon, and about two seconds later is leading every group in town playing absolutely masterful repique and absolutely masterful everything else, and teaching samba/Indian fusion classes at the local university, and it turns out he's never even touched a repique before two seconds ago, and now, bing! turn out he's learned all the Axe Dide choreography, and is leading us through all the dance cues and doing it PERFECTLY. Jee-zuz. So anyway - where was I -

So the enduring moment of Axe Dide at the Someday Lounge is when Zach calls us in using THE FASTEST REPIQUE CALL IN THE UNIVERSE.

And boom, there we are playing THE FASTEST SAMBA IN THE UNIVERSE. Or at least in Portland. I clocked it later at about 160bpm. Now that is what I call escola tempo! I could almost smell the fried cheese and hear the Skol beer sellers in the distance.

What you have to do in that sort of situation is just JUMP on it, like jumping on a galloping horse as it goes by. You just have to not think about it, and just jump. So I jumped, and so did Angela and Stacy and Mehmet and everybody else.

After a ragged start we kind of got hold of it and, like the wind catching the sails, we just started flying. It was like trying to sprint up Everest - the first hundred yards was going okay, but how long was our oxygen going to hold out?

I glanced over at Stacey, who was playing 2 surdos side-by-side, her arms were moving so fast she looked like a hyperspeed Energizer bunny. She shot me an eloquent expression of grim concentration and slightly bared teeth, and I looked to my other side at Angela playing caixa, and Angela gave me an equally eloquent expression, which I can only describe as equal parts smile, snarl, and eye-roll.

I've been watching the show "Lie To Me" lately, that TV show about a behavioral scientist who can decode the minutiae of people's facial expressions and can tell what they're really thinking. I wish they could put those 2 expressions from Stacy and Angela on the show - because they are the expressions that mean "Holy shit I can't believe we are playing this fast, this is INSANE, we are gonna DIE, and after we die, I personally guarantee that ZACH IS GONNA DIE FOR REAL right after we get offstage" . I think it's one of the 7 universal human emotions. There's, let's see, Anger, Surprise, Fear, Disgust, Sorrow, Happiness, and then there's Holy-Shit-We're-Playing-Too-Fast. And they definitely each have a distinctive facial expression.

But we went ripping along and I started really getting into it. I got all excited about my rimshots and just started leaning into my caixa, and then I suddenly remembered those amazing German caixa guys at Bloco X, and the spirit of Bethan-the-Wildcat-Caixa entered into my hands, and after that I just played as hard as I could. I think I accidentally sped us up some more.

But then ... a burn started in my right shoulder, a burn that grew and grew and grew. That increasingly ferocious, unstoppable lactic-acid pain that means you have 10 seconds left before the muscle simply quits working. I'd fried out my right deltoid! And it was about to quit working entirely.

One corner of my mind became academically interested ("Now why should it be the deltoid? I would have predicted the deltoid wouldn't even be involved! I definitely need to get some samba players into the EMG lab to test this out"). While another corner of my brain was just going "please don't drop the stick, please don't drop the stick." As much as I was loving the tempo, soon I would literally have to stop playing.

I kept thinking, if I can just make it to Samba Show, if I can just make it to Samba Show.... (our next piece, which starts with a very slow samba). Please god let me just make it to Samba Show without dropping my stick!

I made it to Samba Show. *****slow***** samba at last! Whew!

And then - oh right, Samba Show then switches to a fast samba partway through, I forgot about that. Zach played THE FASTEST REPIQUE CALL IN THE UNIVERSE. Stacey and Angela both shot me an extremely eloquent look. And we were off.

No Bloco X... but New Hampshire or Salvador?

Finally got the word on Bloco X - there'll be no Bloco X rehearsal in Europe this spring! They had some kind of problem finding an available venue in France, then a "last minute scramble" in Germany but couldn't get a venue. Apparently it is not that easy finding a gorgeous venue for 120 extremely loud samba drummers for a four-day party, oops, I mean "rehearsal". They'll probably get together sometime later in the summer & they're already planning for next year, but nothing this spring.

So on the one hand, awwww, because I was really looking forward to seeing all my London friends and my Sambayabamba friends and my German friends and ... etc. But on the other hand - this opens up May and June for some other opportunities, particularly a quick trip to Salvador that I've been trying to squeeze in for about a year now. So I just checked plane fares: $695 from PORTLAND OREGON to SALVADOR BRAZIL, yes I said SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE DOLLARS!! (For various two-week chunks of May and June.) wow.

I was shocked to realize that if just pulled up stakes and moved to Salvador for a month, I'd actually save money - the plane ticket is cheaper than my monthly rent in Oregon. (and I can stay free in Salvador, 'cause I have an apartment there with my friend Lisette.)

I can't quite swing a whole month there because of this pesky job thing that I have here in Oregon (I seem to have accidentally landed 3 part-time jobs for the summer - on elephants, birds and sea turtles; 3 grants got funded! who would have thought!), but, oh boy, it's tempting. Maybe if I just go for two weeks...

The other extremely tempting opportunity is the new Brazil Camp East in Windsor New Hampshire, June 7-13, brand new this year, from the same folks who run the fantastic California camp:
http://www.calbrazilcamp.com/bce/

... not sure if I can really afford either of these, but it sure is fun to dream. Just in case... last Sunday I started a money-saving experiment (my research question being : can I get through a week without spending any money at all? Not even a penny? Not even on coffee?). And I started selling off some of my possessions - my saddle, my old buddies Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank, a lot of Brazilian cds & dvds that I don't use much. Lightening the load. Basically if I haven't used it, or read it, or looked at it, in 2 years, it's outta here. I'm so intensely looking forward to the freedom of summer. I can't wait to be free again.... Just 3 more weeks of classes and then I am free....