Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Solano Stroll

The next morning a crowd of other drummers showed up at Eric's place and we all head off to the Solano Stroll. "It's the perfect parade," Eric & Derek had both told me, with a drummers' perspective toward what makes a perfect parade: "Only one mile long and all downhill!"

We got to the staging area and dolled up in our spiffy outfits (Deborah had arranged for an extra for me). They were great parade costumes: White drawstring pants, a colorful big tunic and cute matching little hats. Which added up to: colorful, festive, attractive, comfortable, looked good on anybody, simple in construction, sturdy and could be re-used, not a bunch of bizarre accessories that could be lost or broken, and easy to trade among different-size people. Ideal.

God, there is just something about a parade. It is just so much more fun than other gigs. The shared excitement of prepping for it, getting the costumes on, assembling at the staging area... running around in your silly outfit looking for a coffee shop, helping the dancers adjust their costumes, everybody taking photos, drummers losing earplugs and sticks, or discovering they've left their only strap back in their car two miles away... three or four last-minute crises.... watching all the other groups assembling too, the marching bands, the high school groups, the hopelessly adorable little kids' groups, the belly dancers.... Then seeing the shock and awe on the faces of the onlookers when your dancers show up in their dance bikinis (the American male onlookers visibly thinking "omg that's an actual BUTT! And an actual SIDE OF A BREAST! Am I allowed to stare? I am? OMG OMG OMG")

A few last drummers and dancers dashing up late and out of breath with some complicated story about parking or car shuttles.... the sudden confusion when it groups are inexplicably shuffled into a different order, and we all turn out to be in slightly the wrong place. Then suddenly we're in the line-up and suddenly it's starting.

Jorge called in the caixas, then the thirds. All around us people start smiling and tapping their feet.

THEN he called in the first and seconds and the whole rest of the bateria, and for a quarter mile away heads jerk around and the dancers start dancing and jaws drop. YOW. It sounded so good.

That's also the moment when the poor groups who are in front of you and behind you realize what they are going to have to put up with. (Hopefully it is not a tiny Native American group with one frame drum and a couple of flutes... why, oh why, do parade organizers always think it's a brilliant idea to put the local Indian tribe next to the samba bateria?) In this case, the group in front of us was a large dance squad of a few dozen young teenage girls with pompoms, who took all of two seconds to realize that they could synchronize their entire dance routine to our samba rhythm.

Then the moment the parade starts moving and you swing onto the parade rout! And the sky opens up overhead, and the whole crowd is stretching out in front of you for a mile. I don't care how big the parade is, whether it's the Rio Sambodromo or a tiny suburban strawberry festival, I get chills every damn time, that moment when we make the big turn onto the parade route.

I was inordinately pleased to see that Jorge shares my blithe disregard for American parade tempo. The thing is: surdo players can only walk just so fast. (I'm convinced that one of the quickest ways to make your drummers, and dancers, hate parading is to make them walk too fast. You can scar them for life this way and spark a full on No-More-Parades rebellion.) Brazilian parades move pretty slowly - even in the Sambodromo they go slower than American parades, and out on the Rio streets the blocos move at a snail's pace. (Some, in fact, never get around to moving at all, like annual Carnaval parade of the Rio bloco "Concentra Mas Nao Sai", or, "It Gather But It Doesn't Go") American parades, instead, are kind of car-oriented and tend to move at a car-cruising-in-first-gear speed that is just a hair too fast for surdo players and samba dancers.

So whenever I've led parade I steadfastly stick to a normal Rio parade speed, and a huge gap has opened up between me and the group in front. The parade organizers typically buzz up a few times, all fluttery and upset and having conniptions about the gap, but my drummers and the crowd are always having a fine ol' time, and the dancers have enough breath to zoom around and play with the crowd, and so it's VERY FUN and VERY ENTERTAINING for the crowd and everybody's having a BLAST, and the groups in back of me are usually thrilled too. So I always ignore the parade organizers, and this might be why I never get invited back, eh?

Anyway I was thrilled to see Jorge calmly lead us out at the exact same parade tempo I use! The proper, gentle, 2mph Surdo Saunter. So of course a huge gap opened up between us and the groups further ahead, practically a quarter-mile gap at one point, and we didn't care in the least, and the crowd loved it because they had more time to see our amazing dancers. Ha! We put on a GREAT show, too. My god, we had some killer dancers. Most seemed to be Brazilians who must have been Rio or Sao Paulo passistas in their former lives - they just had that unbelievable fire. (and eliciting quite of a lot of that "I'm allowed to stare? OMG OMG OMG" vibe from the crowd)

I got to say, Sambo Rio was LOCKED and GROOVING. It wasn't a very big bateria, maybe about 20 or 25 players, but we had an awesome groove. The kitchen (caixas and surdos) was cooking!- as they say. It was such a pleasure playing caixa with the excellent thirds and caixas who were layered all around me.

One mile long and all downhill. The perfect parade.

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