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.