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.