Cubango to the rescue

Brief report on the second Pink Martini recording session. Just to recap, Pink Martini's recording a Christmas album, and they want to add a samba bateria to one or two of their Christmas songs, so they've recruited various local Portland sambistas to put together a small bateria for a recording session. We'd had one recording session last week, but our little ad-hoc bateria had found it difficult to swing normally while playing to a click track [a metronome]. So we were back tonight for a second try. I'd been carefully drilling myself on caixa with a metronome all week, just in case we had to record with a click again; but it turns out Pink had decided that tonight we'd try playing live as a whole ensemble this time, just letting the tempo flow naturally, with no click.

The goal tonight was just to get a couple of decent takes of Joy To The World. With our little bateria fronted by cavaquinho player Claudio Sorriso (a brilliant player who used to play for Salgueiro and now lives in the US); Thomas Lauderdale (the King of Pink), on piano; and of course, Brian Davis and Derek Rieth, who are Pink Martini's percussionists in addition to being brilliant all-around sambistas. Truly world-class musicians, and such an honor to play with them.

Still though, there's that awful weird tension of recording. The Pink guys are old pros and are pretty much flawless in a recording setting, but most of the rest of us have not recorded a lot before. In that sort of situation, where you have a fair number of samba drummers with limited recording experience who all need to drum perfectly, a natural paranoia sort of creeps up on you (or least it creeps up on me): Please god, let me not be the one who messes up and ruins the whole take!

So there's a certain tension to the whole thing. You're standing there, all tense and nervous, in Pink Martini's vast, gorgeous recording studio, with three other caixa players all clustered tightly around some microphones, trying to get comfortable with some unfamiliar headphones on your head, tripping over your headphone cord, muttering to yourself "For god's sake, don't drop a stick". Surdos are behind you; a clump of tamborims (Derek directing) and the chocalho (Pauline) are off to your right, with Brian up in front leading the whole thing. You can just glimpse Thomas and Claudio nestled away in private little cavaquinho and piano rooms, and you can hear Thomas still calling out last-minute ideas for the song arrangement right up to the last split second before recording starts. ("What if we do a 8-measure intro instead of 16? Or what if we do sort of a bridge after the first verse and take little solos? Or how about if...")

Then the engineer calls "Silence on the set!" and there's a tight, still tension as everybody waits. Then a set of strange noises through the headphones as the tape starts rolling: a weird spacious background hiss, a mysterious outer-space series of clicks that sounded EXACTLY like the smoke monster from "Lost" (I kept expecting it to come leaping through the studio door) - and then the engineer says "Rolling", suddenly sounding so close that he seems to be standing right over your shoulder. The hiss and clicks vanish abruptly into a sudden dead, empty silence, as if you all have suddenly fallen into outer space.

There is an absolute and total lack of sound. You are holding your breath.

Then Brian counts in the cavaquinho and piano. Jeremy behind you comes in sweet and clean on surdo. (I personally would have keeled over dead from the pressure, had I been sole surdo for the whole intro, on each and every take, for a PINK MARTINI RECORDING like Jeremy was doing. But it was Jeremy, so, no problem.) The tambs start up - now you look up for Brian's silent cue - you feel the tamb phrase rounding out to its natural conclusion, knowing Brian's count will come, THERE IT IS, he's starting to count you in, GET READY, now don't panic and for god's sake DON'T SPEED UP, just do a clean pure start right into the Mocidade caixa pattern, DON'T PANIC - your eyes are glued to Brian - ok, NOW! - and off the caixas go on Mocidade. Feeling awwfulllyyyy exposed though because it's just caixas and surdos. Through one whole verse. Joy to the world.... finally, thank god, the tambs and Pauline enter, and as soon as Pauline enters you can relax. (A good chocalho always helps ground my caixa playing.) But don't relax too much; don't move relative to the microphone; stay frozen in place - stand unnaturally still, don't dance, don't bounce, don't step, just keep playing while you slowly getting stiff and cramped up - just keep on playing - keep it together - don't panic -

Through the second verse, the third, the fourth... Thomas throwing in random, brilliant chord changes (Claudio nimbly following these unplanned chord changes somehow. While constantly salting every measure with a few dozen cool little zinging cavaquinho riffs) - wait for the ending - watch Brian again - here it comes, okay NOW!

Hit the last beat - BE SILENT - don't say anything, don't crack a joke, don't make a comment, and for god's sake don't knock your stick on your rim accidentally! DON'T DROP YOUR STICKS. DON'T EVEN BREATHE. DON'T MOVE.

Okay, now it's over. Breathe. Shake out your stiff leg and cramped hands.

Get ready for the next take.

Then repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

At first I was pretty pleased with how it was going. I thought we were all playing quite well. But I was standing so stiffly, and feeling so paranoid about not dropping my sticks or banging them on the rim accidentally, that I was gripping them way too tightly and my hands started to get tired. I started having to shift my right hand from Standard Grip to Gorilla Grip halfway through the song. On the fifth take I started to play a cut in the wrong place, realized my mistake just barely in time and just barely managed to scramble back into the groove. No one seemed to notice but I felt rattled. In the next take I stalled totally and missed an entire measure. In the next take after that, I found I was having to concentrate EXTRA hard just to keep playing at all. Damn! I was starting to choke! From there it just got weirder and weirder. For a second I was sure that my left hand was attached upsidedown to my left arm. Then my right hand seemed to rotate around, and a moment later, both hands felt like they were as big as basketballs. Then my left leg started going to sleep. I managed to force myself to keep drumming, but now I sounded like a robot - no swing at all. OK, definitely losing it. Shit.

This was all happening because I was so tense. Gotta relax somehow, but how? I started scanning around mentally for images that would make me relax and help me feel the swing of the samba again. I tried listening to just the surdos; tried homing in mentally on John J beside me (who was drumming along as silky and swinging as a river, apparently without a care in the world); tried singing the song; but nothing helped.

"This isn't remotely like playing with Cubango," I thought, and an image flashed into my mind: drumming down the great avenue in Niteroi with Cubango, and Mestre Jonas coming bounding through the bateria. BOUNDING. With that great big crazy open-mouthed grin, with that joy of the samba. Daniel next to me drumming every break perfectly; Humberto on caixa next to him, shooting me that shy grin; both of them swinging like hell; and the wonderful funny guy who had done the Michael Jackson impression (damn, what was his name??); and the Germans; all those fantastic caixa players clustered tight around me. Little Hand on surdo behind me, thundering away. Nana up in the tamborim section. The chocalhos flashing in the distance. I saw it all, saw them all, all around me. Jonas leaping. The thundering samba. The porta-bandeira's flag whirling around, the rainha dancing like crazy in her sequinned minidress, her hips going a mile a minute. Over and over I saw them... Jonas leaping, Daniel and my other friends playing, the surdos thundering all around me, the rainha dancing.... Jonas leaping, the caixas playing, the surdos thundering, the rainha dancing....The Samba. The Swing.

I suddenly started to swing again - my hands loosened up and started feeling normal - my foot woke back up - I felt myself start to smile - and the song came alive. I kept those images in my mind, all those Cubango memories; repeating them over and over in my mind, that magnificent parade with Cubango..... swinging, swinging, swinging.

Next thing I knew the engineer was calling out "That's it! We're out of tape! My god, I can't believe we had enough tape for that last take, it was coming off the reel right when you finished!" After my Cubango breakthrough, we'd gotten two solid takes of Joy To The World, and it had been sounding so good that we'd blasted on and sailed through several wonderful takes of Auld Lang Syne, just for luck. It had all just flown by in a Cubango-soaked blur. We were done! We did it! We all piled outside, all went out for dinner together, laughing and chatting and joking; and I headed home, wistfully full of Cubango memories and wishing I could be back there right now. (Auld Lang Syne indeed - that whole song is about memories of old friends.)

***

PS also have to report our cut was as clean as a whistle this time. Maybe people sharpened up after last week's trauma of trying to play to the click track! And in the tempo department, Brian counted us in at 108 for every take tonight, and each and every time we would gradually ramp up to 110 by the end of the tune. Very consistently. Not too bad a shift, really, and it had a nice natural feel.

PPS An update in October 2010 - I just noticed that some cd tracks are available for preview on Amazon, and it looks like Pink decided to use the take of Auld Lang Syne! the take that we did right at the very end! It's the last track on the cd. The bit that you can preview on Amazon includes the very moment that we caixas enter. Which of course is the most important moment in the entire cd, right?

Small-group Gatas gets it done

Just a brief note on a Samba Gata gig last Thursday. One of those lunch-time open air gigs that attracts random passersby - this one on the Portland State University campus. This was a gig Pauline had almost cancelled multiple times because key players kept discovering they couldn't make the gig - Tanya, Stacey, Angela, a few others, all dropping out. But Tracy volunteered to try to play double surdo (two surdos at once, mounted on stands), which might sound easy but is actually not at all easy to do the first time you try it (especially when you're the only surdo player. The responsibility is like an elephant sitting on your back), and I volunteered to drive down from Seattle special for the gig (and another long drive down for the rehearsal the week before). It was still a bare-bones gig with more things going wrong at the last second - Pauline dragging herself to the gig sick, and our singer suddenly down with a sore throat. So would it fly? Can Samba Gata pull it off with just a few players and our leader sick?

It flew!! It went great!! It was even fun!! Tracy was fantastic, Ara was rocking on third surdo (even though her third kept bouncing backwards. I kept expecting her to disappear entirely off the back of the stage). Had great fun playing with Camille. We pulled it off with a small group, felt pretty solid, and hey, we even managed to fill an hour. Great reaction from the crowd, the PSU guy wants us back and a we got another gig inquiry too.

The only bad thing about this gig for me was just that it kept me in the city on one of our first truly beautiful spring days - and I haven't got that many days left in Portland, and I've been dying to go visit the coast. I didn't get home till 2pm, and the coast is a couple hours away. But suddenly I thought: Wait a sec, the sun is staying up past 8pm now! - so I hopped into the car, still in my Gatas hot-pink minidress and psychedelic pink-and-black print stockings, and charged out of the city and clear to Cape Lookout. Pulled up in front of the Cape Lookout trailhead and hopped out, pink minidress and all. Definitely got a couple funny looks from the surfers walking up from the beach. I hiked the whole trail clear to the point. Hot pink minidress and all. What a great day.

I'm glad I went out when I did, because 2 days later I was laid up in the most awful way with the same bug that had brought down Pauline. I can't figure out how it hopped from Pauline to me, because we didn't even share any drums or drumsticks. It must be transmitted by samba somehow.

Don't rush the cut baby, don't tip the cut over!

Now about that cut. We were all rushing the cut. I am pretty sure it wasn't me (especially because I took myself out of it a few times by not playing it at all, and it rushed even more.) But not completely positive, who knows. The reason I was particularly focused in on this was that I've just come back to Portland from three months of playing with Cubango in Rio, and Monobloco and Banga too, where I had had sort of a Rushing Retraining experience.

When I arrived in Rio in late December, in all 3 groups I had the strangest sensation everybody mysteriously slowed down suddenly whenever they played a cut. They slowed down during the cut, they slowed the space after the cut, and they slowed again in the measure of samba right afterwards.

Of course, they were not slowing down at all. It's just that they weren't accelerating like I was used to - they were actually just holding tempo. But my ears had become so accustomed to hearing a rushed cut that, in my personal perceptual world, a rushed cut sounded "normal", and a steady cut sounded like "slowing down".

I don't know if it is Portland or the West Coast or Americans in general or what, but man do we rush, and especially our breaks and our cuts. And unfortunately, once an entire band calibrates to that and gets used to it, they are truly not aware that they are doing it. They literally can't hear it any more.

After a few weeks playing with Cubango and the other groups, I managed to recalibrate and play a good cut that actually held tempo. By the time Carnaval rolled around it was solid. But boy, the whole recalibration process made me paranoid - what else might I be hearing wrong? During the big Carnaval parade with Cubango, in the Sambodromo, I was on high alert at every single cut, thinking, what if I regress suddenly to my bad American habits and I rush the cut? what if I flam, right under the judges' box??? What if the Cubango directors kill me???? I have never been so hyper-paranoid about not rushing!!! It was a bit stressful, and really kind of hilarious because the cut is perhaps the single easiest thing to play in all of samba. Anyway I returned to the US with a freshly recalibrated ear, and a rock solid cut, which I was perceiving now almost visually, with a lovely long stateliness to the "two and", and a wide open sunny field through the 3 and 4.

Then I returned to Portland, and, of course, the very first samba rehearsal here, I was waaaaay behind everybody else on the cut, further behind on the next down beat and
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
behind everybody else by the time we were a measure into the samba. Everyone was looking around to see who was dragging so bad. The thing is, in a band, if you're the odd one out you are wrong by definition, even if you're really right. Dang it! Just two rehearsals later I could feel my lovely Cubango-calibrated cut degrading. I felt miserable, and a little angry even; angry at bandmates who joke about how they don't practice with metronomes, who joke about how the metronome's always slowing down, who giggle about how they rush the tamborim triplets. Now LISTEN UP. And you KNOW WHO YOU ARE. You the one who doesn't practice with a metronome. 'Cause you're too busy or you're too lazy or you think you don't need it or you think you're hot stuff or who knows why. You DO SO need it. Maybe not on the groove, but try running through all your breaks; you'll find one where you suck. And every time you play it badly, you're digging it deeper into your own brain. And it's not just you that you are f**kin with. if you don't play well, you are constantly f**kin up your friends' hard-earned musical skills too. Honestly. Is that any kind of a thing to do to your FRIENDS? You are messing up the band and degrading the sound and un-training people's ears. It's like they say about horses: Every time you get on a horse, you are either training it or untraining it. Same with your bandmates. And yourself. Honestly now. Get a grip and get that frikking metronome out RIGHT NOW.

Unjoy to the world

YES okay I KNOW I am six months behind on this blog, plus 3 mos behind on riostories and nearly a year behind on biostories, which was left on some kind of cliffhanger with me either lost on a Wyoming mountain or in the middle of the Navy meeting, I forget which. The endless travel grind does make it hard to keep up sometimes, and there have been major changes - I left my teaching job, didn't get rehired despite my BRILLIANT! sea turtle talk, then landed an AWESOME dream job as a marine biologist in Boston, travelled all over NE Brazil, moved a few times, got kind of swept up in the oil spill, found out where the location of human consciousness is in the brain and learned how to cure Down syndrome and how to get a jugular blood sample voluntarily from a willing hyena (it's all about the chicken), etc. It's been busy. Anyway, the point is, I will move to Boston in January, where I will be thrillingly closer to both Europe and Brazil, but tragically far from Oregon; so I am trying to spend all the time I can with my Portland bands till then.

So yesterday I came zooming down from Seattle to go to a strange recording session with Pink Martini. If you don't know Pink Martini, they're a pretty famous band these days, doing amazing arrangements of beautiful old songs from around the world. They pretty much tour the world constantly. This causes various bands in Portland a bit of trauma because Pink's got a lock on several of the best drummers in town, including the leader of the Lions and the leader of our local maracatu group, so we have to stumble on without them while they're gone on tour. Anyway, apparently Starbucks has been bugging Pink Martini to record a Christmas cd - one of those cds that are always stacked there temptingly by the little boxes of mints and chocolates - and Pink kept turning them down, but then Starbucks said "We'll buy 98,000 cds" and Pink Martini said "Well, ok" and now they're in the middle of recording some funky, Latinized versions of Christmas carols. Like a 6/8 version of "We Three Kings of Orient Are" and, here I finally get to the point, a samba version of "Joy To The World."

So, a bunch of various local samba players had been called in to lay down a batucada track for "Joy to the world." None of us had any idea what it was all about or what the arrangement might be, and no, none of us had practiced or anything like that, why, would that have been a good idea? We all trickled over there at 8pm - except, I didn't trickle exactly, but rather tumbled in at the last second, exhausted and starving from a 4-hr road trip from Seattle. (I'd been up in Seattle desperately slaving away on the 3 sun bear hormone manuscripts that have to go out to Theriogenology, Journal of Mammalogy and Zoo Biology pretty much immediately, and also finishing a new draft of a huge new "Animal Hormones" chapter for a top-secret new edition of a top-secret new introductory biology textbook.) Anyway, I'd gotten up super early in Seattle on Monday and spent all day working in a panic, not even any time to eat, got my chapter in just under the wire at 4:30pm, hit the road to Portland, hit MAJOR traffic. At 7:59pm I pulled up at Pink Martini's recording studio, fresh off I-5, my car still packed full of all my stuff from Seattle, dead tired and a little loopy from having only eaten 3 cupcakes all day. But I'd gotten there.

Pink's studio is the hugest, most beautiful, most lovely recording studio I'd ever been in. Huuuuuge. Huuuuuge central studio and two beautiful little side rooms and a enooooormous engineer's room with a main board that seemed about twenty feet wide and was lined with gigantic sofas. I guess you need a lotta space if you're a big band with harps, pianos, a full wind section, and multiple percussionists.

And TAPE! OMG! PINK MARTINI RECORDS ON TAPE! When the engineer said "We're rolling" he meant it literally - actual tape was actually rolling. I was astonished. How retro. But, that's Pink Martini - classy, old-school, a little different.

Well, long story short, it was both very fun and very frustrating. Fun to be with that group of players, a bit honored to be one of the caixa picks (I was playing with John J, Randy, and roving-samba-bicyclist Esteban, which was quite a caixa lineup). And really fun to hear the arrangement come together. Fun to watch the tamborim desenho develop. Fun, and quite bizarre, to suddenly be pulled into a little impromptu chorus singing "Joy to the world! The lord is come! " with the great China Forbes herself. (It turns out, if you get us right next to each other in the same room, and we both sing the same song together, China turns out to have a way way way way way way better voice than I do. Who knew? It was almost like she was an international singing star or something.)

BUT. So, I've recording a few things with various samba groups and it has always started to devolve into a progressive panic about the fact that samba baterias are s**t at playing with a click track, and then it starts to devolve into trying to record little sections of the band separately, and then it starts to become obvious that when you put the little recorded sections together again, it sounds stiff and weird and awful, and then you reach that sad late hour of the night, that midnight moment, when everybod slowly realizes that the whole many-hour-long session has been a frakkin waste of time and you haven't got a single usable take. This recording session was par for the course. It might of course be that *I* am the common element in all these recording fiascos, but, seriously now, the thing is, samba baterias do not practice with click tracks and there is a natural ebb and flow to samba. Little surges that happen around breaks. And playing with a click track - a metronome that is piped into your earphones - you can't do those ebbs and flows. People can't unlearn all those ebb-and-flow habits in a single evening.

A little digression here into the difference between playing with a metronome and playing without one. Playing with a metronome requires OVERcorrections, and playing without one does not. For example. Say you speed up on one beat. If you're playing to a click, you can't just slow down back to the original tempo on the next beat. You'll still be ahead of the click. In order to get back with the click, you have to overcorrect and go TOO slow for a beat.

To put in terms of numbers: say you're chuggin along at 500 milliseconds per beat (=120 bpm) and you have a measure that's a hair fast, say, 490. If you're not playing to a click, you can just return to normal immediately:
500 500 500 490 500 500...
... life is good. And that is what most baterias learn to do when they need to fix a momentary tempo glitch.

With a click, though, you have to overcorrect to match up with the click again - by doing a super slow beat.
500 500 500 490 510 500...
See that 510 there? See that sequence of 490-510? Every slightly fast beat tends to be followed by an unnaturally slow one - or more likely, these will be entire measures that are too fast and then too slow. And the difference between the too-fast and the too-slow is painful, because they are right next to each other. Pretty soon your recording is peppered with strange swoopings and staggerings, lurching back and forth, with especially horrible, nausea-inducing moments when some people are readjusting to the click and are doing the slow 510, others have not yet noticed that they are way ahead of the click and are still going at the too-fast 490. It's particularly horrible for anybody who's trying to lay over an overdub track later.

Of course, the real solution is never to deviate from your original tempo in the first place. I suppose pro studio musicians reach that point. But samba baterias, look, we are going to have our little rushy moments, ok? Just accept it.

So anyway, we were just having TROUBLE with the CLICK. We kept paring the band down smaller and smaller, and finally started recording just one section at a time - just surdos, then adding just the caixas, then the tamborims. The caixas were about dying trying to get through a single damn cut without rushing; the tamborims had been sent clean out of the room for a while and were all dying of boredom in the engineer's room; the surdos had laid down a lovely track except that it was consistently behind the click the entire way through, and so of course the caixas were wobbling terribly between playing with the click and playing with the surdos.

Derek, meanwhile, was doing a brilliant job trying to gently-yet-forcefully coax everybody into the lay-back, let-it-breathe mindset required to try to slow down consistent rushing; Brian was somehow managing to remain awake and energetic enough to coach us through the entire arrangement over and over and over and over, singing that damn carol the whole time; China had long since left; and I was near passing out from exhaustion, dehydration and a severe lack of cupcakes. I started having trouble holding my sticks and had to revert from Proper Grip to Caveman Grip and my entire left leg had gone to sleep. It was only two weeks ago that I'd wrecked up my hip so badly that I couldn't stand upright, so standing and playing caixa for four hours was not really going that well.

Eventually Thomas (King of Pink) called it: entire multi-hour session a frakkin' waste of time and not a single usable take. Everybody go home. But, this being Portland, things were not bad for long; we hatched a plan to record it all in unison next week with NO CLICK! YAY! and Brian conducting it; we're all going to practice the arrangement all week; and Derek had brought beer for everybody to celebrate Jay's birthday, and then we all went over to another bar and Derek bought us all a round of trunks and even bought me a plate of shrimp linguini that I totally thought I was going to pay for. Whatta guy. And then I got to sit between Tim and Esteban and crack up laughing for another hour nonstop. I did not ever get any cupcakes but the evening definitely ended on a good note. Now I gotta go play with a metronome for a week, bye.