A drmes from the past

A series of musical anomalies recently has me wonder if something is pulling me away from Brazil. I got back from my Carnaval trip in mid-April and immediately had no interest in playing samba. Just could not get inspired to practice, or to play. Rehearsals started to seem like drudgery, like an annoying duty, instead of something to look forward to. At the grand Folklife music festival in Seattle in May, I skipped out on the Brazilian parade that I'd been invited to play in with a very wimpy excuse of a slightly sore leg. I did go to the Brazilian show, but only just long enough to watch my old friends VamoLa opening the evening (they put on a fantastic show!). But then I skipped ALL the rest of the Brazilian bands to go to the Balkan dance party next door instead (where I danced all night in spite of the sore leg). I had ZERO interest in seeing any more Brazilian stuff that night and instead was DYING to go dance a racenica. Am I getting Brazil'd out?

A few odd musical coincidences started to happen. At a street festival with the Lions, a dj finishing up on our stage was playing a rowdy Balkan brass-band chochek, to which I unthinkingly started playing a Bulgarian tapan pattern on my caixa. Thirty seconds later the entire Lions were playing along - hey! The Lions are playing a chochek!

Then at Folklife I heard an old Croatian dance tune called Drmes Iz Zdencine, something I hadn't heard in years since my Balkan bands. It's an incredibly dorky tune, all squeaky-clean major-key plinkiness; nothing like the fire or the swing of samba. But the dance is such a wild funhouse ride that it made me feet start itching with half-remembered fragments of the dance: hop-step-step, hop-step-step, right? Then here you change direction... and here I'm positive that there's a STEP, STEP, STEP that crosses the musical phrase... damn, how did the rest go? I couldn't quite remember the whole dance. But a few weeks later, as I was pulling boxes out of storage from a friend's basement, I found a set of ... forgotten Croatian tamburica instruments! And my friend picked one up and of all the tunes he could have played, he played ... Drmes Iz Zdencine! Exactly one week later I was walking through the Oregon Country Fair when I spotted a pair of lovely topless female fiddle players. Naturally I stopped to watch, along with a lot of guys who had suddenly developed a keen interest in fiddle playing, and the topless girls were playing, oh my god, DRMES IZ ZDENCINE! I asked them about it and they said they'd never played it before - they couldn't pronounce the name, didn't know it had a dance, had picked it at random out of a book of fiddle tunes. Honestly, what are the odds?

Better still, by the third time I heard it, I'd successfully reconstructed the entire dance.

In June I actually went off to a country THAT IS NOT BRAZIL for nearly a whole month. Greece! During which I remembered that I adore Greek music and dance. Like, ADORE. Back home afterwards I could not stop listening to eerie clarinet solo of "Delvino", the swooping vocals of "Kondi Kondoula"; the demonic recording of a gypsy chochek featuring my long-ago dumbek teacher. I unearthed my old dumbek (well, five doumbeks actually... did I really buy five dumbeks?) and discovered I could play the fast rolls of Delvino much faster than I ever used to be able to, past dance tempo even. Hey - so - some of these samba hand skills transfer over to other drums!

There's down times and up times. You just go with the flow; do it if it's fun, do something else if you'd rather. There's no law saying you have to do 100% Brazilian all the time. So I went with the flow and listened to Greek stuff for a few months, and grand beautiful blues tunes and a beautiful Turkish 10/8 that I have never quite gotten over, and my favorite Hungarian dance cycles. Didn't listen to a single note of Brazilian music for maybe three months.

And then, two weeks ago, out of nowhere, suddenly I developed an inexplicable craving to practice frigideira, tamborim and repinique all day long. Like some migratory bird when migration season rolls around - suddenly it's samba season again! Next thing I know I'm shopping for my next ticket to Rio.

But it's good to poke my head out of the samba sea for a moment, to be reminded that there are other musical worlds out there, other things as deep and wild. (Not everything traces to the African diaspora.) I keep wondering now what it would feel like to be back in the odd-meter world again, the world of the ever-changing movable "1", after all this time in the even-meter clave world.