When Dancers Attack

Episode 6 in the Amazing Year Off was a trip to Oakland, CA, to play with Jorge Alabe's group Samba Rio. While I was at Brazil Camp (Episode 4, remember), Eric & Derek (Oakland-Derek, not to be confused with Portland-Derek) had alerted me that there Samba Rio had a fun parade coming up in a couple weeks. I'd checked it out with Jorge and, to my delight, gotten the go-ahead to come play in the parade.

Fast forward two weeks. It's Friday, the day before my flight. I'd just pulled in from Burning Man the day before and was wheeling my playa-dust-encrusted bike into the bike shop for a desperately needed overhaul when I got a call from The Man himself, Jorge Alabe. He said: would I maybe be interested in playing a little gig with him at a bar on Saturday night? Just a half an hour, a really simple gig, a small bateria, some dancers, at a party? Wow! Play with Jorge at a small gig? Hell yeah! He didn't quite mention that the gig was a late-night gig "in the city" (= a long drive over the Bay Bridge from Oakland, into San Francisco itself), and that we all had to get up at 8am the next day for the parade, but, in for a penny, in for a pound, right?

Saturday afternoon I'd just barely finished the Burning Man unpack job - hosing the last playa dust out of my car and pulling the tent off the clothesline a scant hour in literally the last hour before I headed to the airport. A few hours later I was in Oakland, California, flopped out at Eric's place and waiting for Jorge's call. At about 9pm, Jorge showed up in a little car stuffed full of surdos, caixas, and a couple other great players: Deborah (driving) and Tokyo surdista Mai. One more caixa player would be joining us at the bar, and that would be it - just five of us! Small group indeed. No tamborim and no big surdo, in fact.

But it didn't matter how tiny the bateria is, because Jorge is a NCGW player: Nothing-Can-Go-Wrong. Let me explain a bit about what it's like to play with an NCGW musician. Nothing-Can-Go-Wrong is a sensation I first experienced when playing with Seattle drummer Jeff Busch, and for quite a while I called it "That Jeff Busch Feeling". I was pretty new at drumming then, and most gigs frankly scared the living daylights out of me. I was always petrified about playing something hideously wrong that could potentially crash the whole band. But what I immediately noticed about Jeff was that I never felt scared when playing with him. Instead I felt relaxed ... completely secure, completely confident that, well, nothing could go wrong. No matter what happened, Jeff would somehow sail through it. All the drum heads could break simultaneously; the entire rest of the band could panic and forget a key break and freeze entirely, with that glazed, deer-in-the-headlights look; the whole stage could suddenly collapse into a pile of splinters; and Jeff'd just smile and sail on, keeping an swingin' surdo groove going with his feet, whipping up an intricate bell solo with one hand, a shaker going in the other hand, maybe four or five other polyrhythms going with his other hands (I have deduced, from listening to his playing, that Jeff has a minimum of six hands), and all while carrying on a complex conversation with a buddy of his who he just spotted in the wings, and exchanging a series of intricate signals and choreography cues with a dance leader, and pantomiming to all the other drummers the parts that they were supposed to be doing. And the audience would just think "What a great show!" and wouldn't even notice that anything unusual had happened.

Anyway, so, Jorge Alabe is also that kind of NCGW player. The entire bateria could train-wreck and Jorge can just somehow hold it all together by himself. (Often by sailing into a repinique solo so beautiful that you'd just feel sorry that the bateria hadn't train-wrecked earlier.)

So we got to the gig, which turned out to be a huge party for the Brazilian immigrant community of San Francisco. The five of us drummers got in a little line - Mai on the left on second surdo, then me on caixa, Deborah playing third (doubling the first surdo part), Jorge on repinique of course, and finally Steve on caixa. We were playing in a tiny stage area that was only about four feet deep from front to back and maybe twelve feet wide. Sufficient room for our little bateria... but then three dancers came strutting out wearing giant feathered angel wings that stuck out horizontally three feet behind each dancer. So, do the math, FOUR-foot-deep stage, and dancers wearing THREE-foot-long horizontal wings; consider that each drummer needs about a foot just for their own body, and the drum itself takes up another foot, and, well, suddenly I had a huge mouthful of feathers and there was a giant angel wing sitting on my caixa. Who would have known an angel wing was so heavy? Or that it could weigh down a drumstick so much? My sticks wouldn't rebound at all - it was like trying to drum underwater. Then the dancers started dancing.... and I was buffeted by the wings, slapped left and right, feathers everywhere, feathers in my eyes, sticks knocked in all directions. Then my dancer went into a spin (nooooo!!!): FWAP FWAP , FWAP FWAP , FWAP FWAP (that's the sound of the two angel wings whipping me repeatedly in the face) and my poor caixa was nearly knocked off my strap. I risked a quick glance to the side and saw all the drummers huddled over their drums. We were all turned kind of sideways and crouching over our drums, as if playing in a terrific rainstorm while a tornado was whipping past. Bit by bit, we all independently discovered that if we turned around completely backwards (i.e. our backs to the audience) and wedged our drums under the bar, we could almost keep playing, and almost (but not quite) keep Jorge in view too. The whole thing was getting so ridiculously that we all started laughing, and laughing more, and laughing more.... Far over to the right I saw the dancer back up into Steve and actually pin him between two wings. As he disappeared into the feathers I saw him actually bite a wing in desperation, but he had no chance. And I never saw him again.... maybe he's still in the wing somewhere....

Dancers can attack in many ways - most often they attack during rehearsals, actually - but this is the first time that I'd experienced a physical dancer attack on stage. But we were drumming with a NCGW musician, remember? Every time anything faltered, Jorge just somehow kept that beautiful groove going; and whenever we needed a rest (or just took one, accidentally), he'd just sail into one of those beautiful, stunning solos; and whenever the show needed some extra zing, he'd lead us through the Salgueiro breaks from camp. Somehow managing not only to cue the break, but also pantomime the entire break for us beforehand with just his head and eyes, because both hands were fully occupied playing repinique. I never would have thought it was possible to convey every detail of an entire 12-measure break with just your eyes, while also playing a repique solo, but, you know, Jorge is an NCGW player.