Bloco X at the 2010 Frankfurt Marathon

I just got an email from Bloco X, inviting me to their annual samba bash at the 2010 Frankfurt Marathon on October 31.

They will have a "rehearsal" on October 30th.

And you know what that means! The phrase "Bloco X rehearsal" is, as far as I can tell, code for "massive samba party".

I can't go this year... but next year... you know, living on the East Coast is definitely going to have some perks. Europe will be so much closer. Still not cheap, exactly, but being 5 hours and a few hundred bucks closer is definitely going to help.

Batucaxé calls down the storm gods

I have to write a little bit about Batucaxe before too much more time slips by. So, what happened was, I flew to Tucson last week on my magic JetBlue ticket to visit a dear dear dear dear dear friend from my college days. One of those life-long friends who is at the very core of your heart. Her name's Susan.

When we were college roommates, neither of us knew the first thing about Brazil - or at least I didn't - my conception of Brazil was about as accurate as shown in this map (this is the famous "map of Europe as seen by Americans"):



(Later Susan & I went to Europe together - my first trip to Europe - that was when I discovered that there some little countries in between France and Germany, which right there makes me vastly more knowledgeable than 99% of Americans. Anyway.) So, the point is, neither Susan nor I had been the least bit into Brazil when we'd known each other in the long-ago past. Fast-forward to 2010 - guess what, Susan now turns out to have joined a Brazilian drum-and-dance group! Obviously there's some kind of parallel evolution going on here. Anyway, so last week when we saw each other for the first time in something like 8 years, in between all the laughing and hugs and rounds of brownie-baking, she says, hey, you want to come see a couple of rehearsals of this amazing Brazilian dance group that I've joined? Of course I said HELL YEAH. But I had no idea what kind of group it might be. When people invite you to see their local group, you never quite know if it's going to turn out to be a fluff group or a heavy-duty group, you know? Nothing against the fluff groups, they're lots of fun too; they've all got their place in the cosmos. But you just never know what kind of thing it's going to be. Will it be a fluff group, or a heavy-duty group?

So anyway, the group she'd joined turned out to be Batucaxé.

I have to back up here and set the stage. So, the last couple years that I've been going to Brazil Camp, I'm always totally exhausted by the time the samba-reggae class rolls around. It's always the last class of the day, and I typically am tired and overwhelmed, and brain is overflowing, and tamborim patterns are leaking out of my ears, and simply cannot take in any new drum patterns at that point in the day. But the last couple years, there have been these two amazing guys in the timbal class. Really awesome players who always remembered all the breaks, always playing about ten times stronger than anybody else, and, best of all, super friendly and helpful. I quickly discovered that the best place to stand, if you're in the timbal section at camp, is right next to these two guys, or better still right between them, because they're the kind of super-friendly guys who will try to play extra-clearly next to you if they notice that you've haven't quite got the pattern yet. Kind of coaxing you along with big friendly looks and then giving you a great big encouraging smile when you do finally get it. I remember last year feeling especially grateful to the two of them. I was sort of vaguely thinking that one was named Cliff Something and the other fellow was named, in my mind anyway, Guy-With-The-Cool-Hat.

You can guess what's coming - I'm lying around at the Batucaxe rehearsal when who should walk in? Cliff Something (Berrien) and Guy with the Cool Hat! (who turns out to have another name entirely - Kenya Masala.) I jumped up in total shock - oh my god! It's Cliff and Guy with the Cool Hat! The two timbal gods from camp! I couldn't get over it. And it turns out Cliff is the overall director of Batucaxe, and Kenya is one of the sub-directors. I'm sure they must have told me at some point at camp that they were from Tucson, but I'd just never put it all together and realized that THAT'S the group that Susan was dancing with.

Next a really cool surdo guy who I remember from camp, Alfie, also turns up, and a several other familiar CBC faces (one of whom says when she sees me "Oh my god! It's the Dudu Chick!" - guess I've acquired my own weird CBC moniker) Such a pleasure, and such a surprise, to find so many familiar friendly faces.

So. Batucaxé. First off. These cats are ORGANIZED. Awesome rehearsal hall with good dance floor and mirrors. (In an industrial area so they can often go outside and do sectionals, outside in the street, without having to worry about noise-ordinance issues.) Roomy side closets for drum storage, packed completely full of some insane number of surdos (looked like at least 10?), plus caixas, plus repiques. The drums all match. Stands for the caixas. Huge plastic crates neatly labeled "STRAPS, STICKS, MALLETS " "BELLS" "CHOCALHOS" and chock full of exactly what their labels said (wow.... what a concept... the labels were correct). Big bin of earplugs free for the taking. Four full racks of... steel pans! - and just for one song, Aquarela do Brasil. (I don't mean four steel pans; I mean four RACKS of steel pans) Twelve samba dancers! Insanely cool choreography! Twenty-five drummers! A full line of timbals! Four dun-dun dancers, with their own drums! A full set of actual alfaias! A podium for the director to stand up on so everybody could see him! Assistant directors! Smooth hand-over of control! Efficient use of rehearsal time! Drummers paying attention! (wow... how do they do that?) A surdo director (this was Alfie) who was cuing the newer surdo players through everything (thus sparing the overall director from having to spend all his time doing surdo-cuing). A full sound system - big blue-light Mackies and microphones and all. Singers who could actually sing! Songs. MELODY. People leaping! Dancing! Shouting! Singing!

Batucaxé started playing, and a huge roll of thunder burst through the sky. The drums came pounding in on an awesome West African rhythm, and a low throaty growl started to rumble through the entire building - was it an echo from the drums? No, it wasn't just the drums. Something else was going on. The growl got louder and louder and louder, becoming a roar, a throaty, rumbling, huge-voiced roar. Were there lions outside, or a herd of elephants maybe? Perhaps a herd of dinosaurs was attacking the building? Lights started flickering on and off. Batucaxé kept on playing. I ran outside and found that the building was being pummeled by a thick, heavy barrage of pea-sized hailstones (this in Tucson, Arizona, where temps had been running 100F.) I ran back inside, excitedly showing a handful of icy hailstones to the surdo players; and Batucaxé kept on playing, with the massive growls of thunder and the drumming roar of the hail, and the flickering lights, and the cracks and flashes of lightning from outside. I thought, this probably happens every time Batucaxé plays; because they were playing with enough wild energy, and groove, and drive, and heart, and swing, to call down the honest-to-goodness storm gods.

So here's the deal on Batucaxé: They are not a fluff group. They are a Heavy-Duty Group.

****
Now the geeky drum notes. A couple of things that really caught my eye. Well, the organization, definitely - especially, the place to store the surdos and the presence of a good sound system really got me thinking. (Lions have been kind of hampered by the lack of storage space and the fact that we shift between two different rehearsal places - our Sunday place and our Monday place - so we're always hauling surdos all over Portland, so, nobody ever wants to drag a sound system too.)

Second. Huge diversity in repertoire. West African, a 6/8 thingy, Timbalada pieces, samba-reggae, afrosamba, a genuine maracatu (with alfaias), Rio-style samba, and a bunch of other stuff too. Samba was only a small part of their repertoire; most of the rep was a huge variety of other kinds of rhythms. It gave their repertoire a lot of texture and different flavors.

Third. Songs! Melody! Batucaxé has singers. Now the cool thing is, it was just a singer - a good singer- and the drums. No cavaquinho (though apparently they do often have one, just not at this particular rehearsal, but Cliff confirmed that they will often do tunes with just singer + drums.) The point is, a cavaquinho is great if you have one, but you shouldn't let lack of a cavaquinho prevent you from ever doing any songs. If you have a really good singer, then singer + drums is very, very, very effective at holding audience interest, much more than just drums alone. Even if it's just one Olodum song, or one Timbalada song (Toque de Timbaleiro is a perfect example of this kind of thing, and in fact Batucaxé sings that). Or, say, one piece that you start with a bitty little singy intro - like, for example, Cliff singing a cool little chant, and the whole bateria singing it back, then a massive and eardrum-destroying BOOM, and the bateria enters. Creative stuff like that, putting in a bit o' singing here & there, is so effective at texturing your sound and holding audience interest.

Fourth. I just really dug that they do Aquarela do Brasil on steel pans. So pretty! Then the bateria comes in; very cool. I've always had a soft spot for that song. I know it's an oldie but boy is it a goodie. Samba de exaltação. That one really made me dance.

The Germans are already here

Just spent a whole day today actually writing my sea turtle grant, which is already looking pretty spiff. Recall that this turtle grant (massively complicated to write, requiring physical proximity to a university library, and due Nov 11) is the reason I am in the US right now instead of in Brazil.

Coincidentally I just got a bunch of Facebook messages from four different Rio friends who don't even really know each other - they all just happened to write to me on the same day. Christiana, Andrezza, Dudu (the wonderful Banga musician who taught at camp), and Daniel (the great caixa player from Cubango who so kindly took me under his wing, when I first showed up there as a lone stray gringa last year). I haven't heard from most of these folks in months, and suddenly all these messages coincidentally pile in one after another on the very same day! And they said:

Andrezza:
"where are you??"

Chris:
"where are you????"

Dudu:
"where are you? Sergio just got here and Dennis is coming next week. You're the only one missing!"

Daniel:
"Where are you? All the Germans are here already!" [at Cubango rehearsal]

To which I can only reply:

ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGRRRRRGGGRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHGRRRRRGHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
lucky Sergio!
lucky Dennis!
lucky lucky lucky lucky Germans
ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGRRRRRGGGRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHGRRRRRGHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

aiii.... I just have to keep thinking of the little turtles....turtles, turtles, turtles, cute little turtles, turtles in trouble, turtles that need help, turtles! Stop thinking about Rio. Think about TURTLES.

Here's a little guy who was saved by our program:


Here's a nice story about our turtle program.

one more photo to convince myself some things might be more important than going to Rio. This poor little guy had the bad luck to be caught in the BP oil spill, and no, he's not breathing any more.


We're not working directly on the BP-oiled turtles (who turn out to be caught in a lot of complicated legal paperwork anyway, poor things). But a lot of the Kemp's were in that area, during the spill, so it's expected the species took a blow this year, which makes it just that much more important to try to save each of the little guys that washes up in Cape Cod. OK, back to the turtle grant-writing. Cubango will still be there next year, right? Right? Right?

Auld Lang Syne ROCKS!

jeez, I am running so ridiculously far behind again. I still haven't written about the Moyseis gig, the Lions restructuring, my visit to awesome Batucaxe in Tucson, then the INCREDIBLY FUN samba class I got to teach yesterday, the Z'Bumba gig last night and the terrifically useful Lions swing rehearsal today; and, worse still, I've never even written all the updates about CBC; in fact, fer chrissake, never finished my report of the 2010 Carnaval. I believe I left my story of Carnaval suspended dramatically at the moment when I'd just finished parading with Imperio Serrano and was dashing out the door to Cubango, and there it ended. (I did post the results later, but never had time to write the story of any of the parades that I played in -Cubango, Monobloco and Banga.)

But first this update! Just to say, Pink Martini's Christmas cd, called "Joy To The World", is almost out, and I just noticed that on Amazon.com you can preview a short snippet of all the tracks on the cd.

Including (*ahem*) the song "Auld Lang Syne", the last and therefore most important track on the cd. And the snippet of Auld Lang Syne that they have chosen to feature for preview, on amazon.com, is the very moment when (*AHEM*), THE CAIXAS ENTER, which of course is the single most important moment in the entire cd.

This caixa moment features, of course, ME! ta-daa!!!!!!

(and, oh, yeah, perhaps there were some other caixa players there too... perhaps they were a wee bit closer to the microphone than I was... and ... well, yeah, probably playing better too.... ok ok ok, it was Randy, John and Esteban. And ME!!!! way in the background, but I'm there!)

Doesn't it sound purty? Doesn't it sound cool? I recommend you listen to the caixa entry about ten times in a row on Amazon and then pre-order a few dozen of the cds, so that you can play the caixa entry moment over and over again in different parts of your house, on infinite loop on multiple cd players scattered throughout your house. Perhaps, eventually, you might wish to hear the rest of the cd as well, but really, "Auld Lang Syne" is what it's all about.

***
One last note. I spent much of Saturday night (post-samba class, pre-Z'bumba) reading my past blog entries and was startled at the AMAZING! FREQUENCY! of CAPITALIZED LETTERS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!! Because in my normal, non-samba life, I am actually really a lot more laid-back than that. My emails these days are models of calm, crisp professional efficiency. ("Yes, can write sea turtle grant - K" "No, could not find the bird. BTW grizzly on trail" - K") But apparently when I am writing about samba, I JUST HAVE TO USE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! And everything has to be IN CAPITAL LETTERS!!!! BECAUSE I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!! ALL THE TIME!!!!!!!! Someday I'll go back and edit all that stuff down to some semblence of rationality... but perhaps it's more accurate the way it is? Samba just kind of does that to you. You think you're a normal person and then you go and join a samba bateria, and the next thing you know, exclamation points are pouring out of your ears.

Why your group needs a Big Parade

It's mid-September. Back in Portland, Oregon, fresh off my thrilling parade weekend with Jorge Alabe's Samba Rio.

That parade was so much fun!

VamoLa's parades in Seattle always used to be a blast, too. Solstice, Gay Pride, and then Halloween. Okay, sometimes it was rather traumatic (I broke my nose while prepping for my first VamoLa parade... long story short, I whacked myself in the face, as hard as I could, with a 2x4, and then I bled all over the freshly painted parade float. This is how I introduced myself to all my brand-new drummer friends. It seemed like a good idea at the time) Okay, so there were ups and downs, but parades have definitely been among my most vivid life experiences.

After that cheery story, you may be wondering why on earth my Portland groups don't usually do any parades. Well, actually, one of my groups is now gearing up for a rare parade (yay!), but even that group hardly ever parades, and my other groups never do parades at all. In one case parades have been outright vetoed by the surdo players, which, honestly, sorta pisses me off. (more on that below.) There just seems to be this grumpy attitude in Portland about the whole concept of parades. Not just from leaders - from everybody! Portland's usually such a cool, rockin' place, too. What gives??

I do understand the challenges involved in putting a parade together. The logistics for organizing a parade are hideous, and definitely are emotionally scarring if any one person tries to do it all alone. If the work is delegated among many people, it all becomes even more hideous and even more emotionally scarring. The costume discussions alone usually require a couple of United Nations mediators. But in my opinion, every Brazilian samba/samba-reggae/maracatu group NEEDS a big annual parade. With a costume! Otherwise.... without a Big Parade, the group isn't really Brazilian, isn't really doing samba (or samba-reggae, or maracatu), doesn't really have the ineffable feel of it all. Because samba (or samba-reggae, or maracatu) is much more than a music; it's a culture, and a huge part of samba culture is that it is parade music. In Brazil, every samba bloco and samba escola's activities, all year long, are all aimed at the Big Parade. All their classes and recruitment are oriented toward the Big Parade. Even their stage gigs are perceived by the group, and advertised to the public, as "rehearsals" for the upcoming Big Parade. A Big Parade also provides an excellent entry point for new people, and an excellent focus for an annual recruiting cycle. It's a great recruiting tool - "If you work really hard, and master this small, manageable set of material, you can do the Big Parade with us!" Plus, the shared adversity and trauma of a parade really bonds a group together, you know?

What's more, samba itself evolved as a parade music. The bateria is arranged the way it is for parades; the straps are slung they way they are, the caixa is held where it is, for parades. The rhythm itself has evolved for parades. After participating in five Rio Carnavals, I'm convinced that the very reason that Brazilian samba has such as solid ONE, TWO, ONE, TWO (rather than, for example, the much more highly syncopated bass lines found in most Cuban music) is because the surdos must provide a very clear beat for a long string of paraders, who are all trying to sing along with the band, and many of whom are pretty far away. The second & first surdos can never deviate from their ONE, TWO, ONE, TWO for more than a couple measures, and then only in a few short breaks that only occur rarely; if they got any more syncopated than that, the far ends of the parade would fall apart. (I've seen it happen, when escolas experimented with a syncopated break that was too long - the entire parade falters, people who are far away get completely off the beat, and the whole parade can fragment beyond repair.)

This music evolved for parading. So I feel you will never really "get" the spirit of samba unless you do an annual Big Parade.

Most disturbing to me is that many of my fellow Portland musicians actually don't like parading. I really don't get this. Especially, dancers and surdo players don't like parades. Perhaps they've been scarred by the painfuly too-fast walking pace of many American parades, as I mentioned in a previous post. But there's an easy fix to that; just walk slow, and then pretend you can't hear the parade organizers who try to harass you to speed up. You can just say to them: "WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? GREAT PARADE, ISN'T IT? WOO-HOOOO!" (More seriously, do some clear negotiations with parade organizers early on - explain the issue well in advance, preferably months in advance, and warn them that your group CANNOT, physically CANNOT, walk faster than, say, 2 mph or whatever it is. Explain it in terms of how much more fun it is for the audience if they get to really enjoy each group's performance, rather than just blinking in the dust as the groups sprint past at top speed. And then put your top permissable mph in your contract.)

Perhaps some dancers don't know they can scale back their dancing; do less of the fast samba step, have some simple, ground-covering moves that are easy and pretty and let them catch their breath. Honestly, they could just strut around and show off their costumes and not dance at all; that's what Rio passistas do for maybe 90% of their parading time. They only really samba on every other chorus.

I admit that I'm a lot more patient with dancers who don't want to parade than with surdo players who don't want to parade. I admit, in fact, that I get rather annoyed by surdo players who don't want to parade. (I get especially annoyed by the following: "I'm a surdo player and I won't parade. No, I don't know how to play any other instrument, and I don't want to play any other instrument, so even if you're willing to parade on surdo in my place, you can't! You have to stay on caixa! Cause I can't play caixa! And I don't want to learn!" arrrrgh) Okay. Here is the deal. YOU ARE NOT A REAL SURDO PLAYER UNLESS YOU PARADE. Hate to be harsh but that's really what I believe. I walk the walk on this - I've done many two- and three-mile parades myself, uphill, playing a 24" first surdo, so there! I'm not saying it was easy. I had to train for a month beforehand, lifting weights, doing situps, falling off horses and breaking my cell phone (long story), and walking a mile around in Seattle's Woodland Park with my surdo twice a week with my friend Yonca, banging our drums. Yeah, we got quite a lot of strange looks. But (a) I lost a lot of weight! hey! (b) it was fun, (c) it helps you develop the confidence and ballsiness and the borderline-insanity that makes you psychologically able to drum and leap around in public like an insane person, despite many peculiar looks from passersby, so this sort of parade training is all part of developing your understanding of the Spirit of Samba and improving your stage presence. I also now know, in retrospect, that we maybe should have cleared this plan in advance with the elephant keepers at the Woodland Park Zoo, because the elephants turn out to be very, very, highly, interested in nearby low deep rumbling sounds. But, the point is, we trained for it, and we DID it. We rocked those parades, Yonca and me! Honestly, only then did I become a real surdo player.

There is nothing like a parade on surdo; you are king of the universe. In Rio it is an incredible honor to be allowed to play surdo in a parade. If someone in Rio asked you to do the Big Parade on surdo in their group, my god, you would fall all over yourself saying yes, and you would train like hell for it, and play your little heart out, and even if you dropped dead on the parade route from cardiac arrest and dehydration and hand blisters and elbow tendonitis and shin bruises and slipped disks and second-degree sunburns, you'd die happy. If you're a real surdo player you just gotta have that gonads-to-the-wall, do-or-die, HELL YEAH attitude.

So you can imagine my delight when the Lions started tentatively floating the possibility of doing the Rose Parade in Portland next spring. OH PLEASE. I'd fly back from Boston just to do it with them! On a 26" surdo if they want! Uphill both ways!

Post-parade party

We wrapped up the parade at about noon, and then a chattering horde of Samba Rio dancers and drummers all headed back to Eric's place for an afternoon barbecue. We ate, we drank, we played pagode, we danced, we ate more, we played more, we sang, we gossiped, we chatted... three, four, five, six hours! - past sunset. The parade itself had been about two hours total, and as is proper, the post-parade party looked to go at least six times longer than the actual parade.

As the sky was darkening, the backyard fell into shadow and it started to get a bit chilly. Time for the party to end? NO! Time to move up onto the deck in the last rays of the sun with a diehard core of partiers and get into a full-on analysis of every tiny Brazil Camp's daily schedule of classes, and how we wish THIS class didn't conflict with THAT class, and how we really need TWO advanced bateria classes because one is just not enough, and two weeks of maracatu and two weeks of samba-reggae too. So we spent maybe an hour drawing up a new schedule that would be IDEAL, IDEAL I tell you, for drummers (because, really, who cares about dancers and guitarists and those other strange people who do not drum?).

Brazil Camp schedule conquered, we assessed the much-rumored possibility of a move to the Mendocino camp site. The Bay Area people are worried about this because it increases their driving time to camp. The wimps. I tell you. WIMPS. Here the Portland and Seattle drummers are doing two-day, and sometimes three-day, odysseys of thirteen and sixteen-plus hours, the Vancouver BC folks even further, while the Bay Area drummers are scared that their bitty little, blink-and-you'll-miss-it, two-hour drive might become a two-and-a-half-hour drive. My goodness! They might have to stop once for a snack! Oh, the poor things, I've got a tear in my eye just thinking about it.

Anyway, the mention of Mendocino awoke a thundering herd of vivid Mendocino music camp memories for both me and Derek. Derek's been there for Lark-In-The-Morning; and I've been there for Baratsag Hungarian camp, the Balkan Camp, and also Middle Eastern Camp. A sudden memory shot into my head of learning tapan at Balkan camp, and dumbek at Middle Eastern; my first ever exposure to percussion! - immediately chased by a stunningly vivid memory of the Hungarian boot dancers showing up a night early at the last Balkan party and launching into a legenyes in the middle of the Bulgarian pravo, and then another memory of Joe Graziosi pushing an entire line of maybe thirty zonaradikos dancers across the floor, backwards, all by himself, at a dead run.... oh yeah baby....

[OK, I am typing this in a coffeehouse in Portland and exactly when I wrote that sentence about memories from Balkan camp, suddenly a fiddle outside starts playing a Bulgarian dance tune, a racenica. There is a girl out there with a fiddle playing a racenica. What the hell are the chances??]

Anyway, while I was lost in this flood of memories, Derek was describing the entire layout of Mendocino in minute detail to everybody else, with impressive accuracy, practically drawing us a scale-model blueprint of every building. We mapped out where every class could go, and settled on a spot for Bola's drum shop, because of course, it just won't work unless there is a good spot for Bola's drum shop.

There! All camp problems solved! Then another hour or so for the requisite discussion of All The Things That Are Wrong With My Group (And With Every Other Group In The World), and Why Can't We Recruit More New People, and How Can We Start Beginners, and Should We Have A Smaller, Super-Cool Group Within The Main Group, and Things I Don't Like About My Group's Last Parade Costume, and I Also Don't Like Our T-Shirt, and a nice selection of Worst Gig Ever stories, and etc. and etc. ... ... by this time the sun had really finished the setting and it was dark. So was it time for the party to end?

Of course not! It was time to go inside and pull out the congas and play candomble songs!

An hour later our candomble singer finally had to leave. It was 8pm; we'd been playing music pretty much nonstop for twelve hours. Was the party over yet?

OF COURSE NOT! We still had drums here, for crissake! It was time for the diehards-of-the-diehards - the die-hardests - to play samba-de-roda! For another hour!

(This included a rapid and utterly fruitless attempt to quickly teach me, in about 1 minute, about four different and rather complicated conga patterns for samba-de-roda. "Um, actually, so, the truth is, I don't play conga, like, AT ALL, and I don't even have the slightest first clue about samba-de-roda anyway" I explained, which elicited the interesting comment, "Oh, I just assumed because you were a third-surdo player that you'd know samba-de-roda on conga." I was quickly shifted to bell - which, actually, kept me plenty busy and entertained. It was quite the zen trance experience to keep playing that bell cleanly through all the fascinating conga things that were going on.)

Finally the last samba-de-roda players had left, the evening was over... oh, what a fantastic day, and what a fantastic bunch of people. This is how life should BE. This is what it's All About.

Hit the sack, then up early the next morning to grab the BART to the Oakland airport, and hop on the JetBlue plane. Wishing I didn't have to leave - but Portland is great too, and had a busy music week coming up with a mysterious and long-rumored Lions group meeting. But whatever goes on in Portland, I've got an invite to come back to San Francisco for the famous Mission District Day of the Dead parade with Derek's maracatu group. OH YEAH.

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.

Home is where you find it

After the Dancer Attack Gig, I got back to Eric's house in Oakland at one in the morning, where there was sort of a little sleep-over happening because of the morning parade the next day (since Eric's house would be the early-morning staging area for the parade). Eric was in his bedroom, I was on a sofa-bed in a guest room, there was somebody sacked out in the living room that I was pretty sure was Derek, there were drums and parade outfits all over the house, there was a carload of drummers pulling away going who knows where, and possibly there were several extra drummers stuffed into the closets. As I tiptoed past the probable-Derek, and past a table full of pandeiros and bells, and past a row of congas, and a stack of caixas, and snuck to my sofa-bed, it suddenly struck me that I felt so completely comfortable and at home.. in this house that I'd never even been to before. I'd first met these Oakland drummers in a pousada in Olinda, Brazil - I'll never forget walking into that pousada and hearing a chant of "deh, deh eh deh, deh eh deh" going on in a corner (the telltale sound of maracatu addicts rehearsing alfaia patterns) and knowing immediately that I'd found kindred spirits. We'd all bonded instantly, and had so many late-night adventures there together - chasing after Estrela Brilhante in their dark, wild, charging parade through the favelas of Recife, running around together on the Night of the Silent Drums (probably the most inaccurately named festival ever, just btw), studying alfaia in the burning afternoons under the Olinda gazebo, taking the bus back and forth to Recifie to play with Jorge Martins' group. Since then, we'd been crossing paths every August at California Brazil Camp: two weeks of living cheek-by-jowl, alternately exhausted and exhilarated in that Brazil Camp way. Puzzling through breaks together, surviving the wild Advanced Bateria classes, meeting up for impromptu parties at each other's cabins, staying up all night together, then exchanging bleary early-morning coffee hellos the next day and starting it all all over again.

There's something about going through that sort of repeated exhaustion and confusion and exhilaration together that really bonds you. I don't know why it touched me so much to be tiptoeing through this dark house full of my sleeping drummer friends, but it did. It felt like, these are my people. This is my family. This is my home.

***

Just a postscript... This was almost the first night in two months that I'd slept in a room that had walls. I woke up several times in the night with a vague puzzlement about my surroundings - where was I? was I by the Grosventre river in Grand Teton National Park? Was I rolled in a blanket under a lodgepole pine on Signal Mountain, napping while a radiotagged crossbill slept in its roost above me? or maybe I had fallen asleep on the glowing mushroom car at Burning Man, or perhaps I was on the cot outside my cabin at California Brazil Camp, or sleeping under a tarp in Modoc National Forest, or in the tepee at Mount Shasta? I looked up automatically for the Summer Triangle or the North Star or Jupiter; couldn't find any of them. I gradually realized I was surrounded by large, high walls, and reached the fuzzy conclusion that I must be in some kind of very, very large tent. Before I realized that I was in the kind of very large tent that is called a "house", I fell asleep again. Wherever I was, I knew I was comfortable and warm and I knew I had friends close by.

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.

Forced, FORCED, I tell you

Got an urgent email from the New England Aquarium a couple weeks ago - one of my vet colleagues had noticed that the Morris Animal Foundation has a call out for wildlife health research grants, deadline November 11, and she had realized that our uber-awesome Kemp's ridley sea turtle project might be a perfect match. The only catch: She's got no time to write the grant herself (because she is pursuing our other uber-awesome grant idea... to study whales in the Bahamas. yeah baby.). So she asked: would I be willing to clear my entire October to spend four weeks working full-time writing an enormously complicated grant for the Morris Animal Foundation?

The catch: That's just when I was supposed to be going to Rio, and I'd already booked my ticket. I can't write the grant from Rio; there's no internet where I was planning to stay, and plus I'll need hands-on access to the English-language marine biology journals (I don't have online access right now and have to go to actual physical libraries, like I used to in the Stone Age).

Dang. Got to move the ticket.

After a full hour on the phone with two rather traumatized American Airlines agents, I established the following:
- I can't move my ticket to later in November because the US flights are all booked up because of Thanksgiving.
- I can't move it to December, January or February... because those are "high season" for American Airlines, because Carnaval almost always falls in February. My ticket's a low-season ticket.
- Also can't rebook for June... apparently that's also high season... who knew. That rules out the June music festival that I've been wanting to see.
- Apparently I'd booked the ticket in July. Dang. That means I have to rebook before July 2012.

So I had to rebook the ticket for March, April or May... when all the blocos and escolas will be on hiatus. Double dang.

I was getting kind of depressed. It was already enough of a bummer that I might have to miss the awesome November trip I'd had planned, and miss hanging out in Rio with my Lions buddies Tanya and Chris...and now I was also going to miss the entire Carnaval season too, and miss all the escolas and blocos. DAMMIT. Stupid grant.

But I knew the sea turtle grant was a really great idea, plus, of course, there were the turtles themselves to think of. The Kemp's are the most endangered of the sea turtles, and they are in such trouble now - and after the Gulf oil spill especially. There's only a few thousand Kemp's in the whole world and almost all of them had been in the Gulf during the oil spill. Due to a trick of geography and currents, a few hundred of the juveniles usually get a bit lost in the fall and end up washing up on Cape Cod, stunned by the cold water, and end up at the New England Aquarium, and though the vet staff is incredible we do lose a few dozen of them, if If we could save even just a couple more of our cold-stunned Kemp's... it would be worth it, truth be told. So in the Bigger-Picture Department, just maybe I could give up a Carnaval season to help save a species?

I was a hair away from booking a rather depressing May trip when I suddenly thought: Carnaval is "almost always" in February. But almost always isn't always, right? As the American agent was about five seconds away from her final click to book my May trip, I pulled up a new web page, googled "Carnaval dates 2011 Rio de Janeiro" and instantly got a series of hits that all said: Carnaval in 2011 falls in March 4-8. In American Airlines' low season!!! The first time in a decade that it's been that late!

I yelled, "STOP EVERYTHING! WE'RE REBOOKING EVERYTHING FOR MARCH!" I was so excited I dropped the phone, lost the call and had to call back and re-explain it all to a second agent who had no idea what I was talking about about this Rio Carnaval thing, but obediently started booking me a flight. She was puzzled to find that almost all flights to Rio were mysteriously booked up on March 1, 2, 3 and 4. "Hm, that's odd for low season, isn't it?" she said, while I was still yelling "CARNAVAL IS IN MARCH THIS YEAR! CARNAVAL IS IN MARCH!" Miraculously, she found me just about the last free seat down (on March 1), and a seat back on March 18, and I grabbed it. YEAH!!!

I wrote to the Aquarium to try to explain that I had been forced, forced I tell you, to book a three-week vacation to Rio for Carnaval, just when I was supposed to be working full-time for them and was supposed to be setting up our new half-million-dollar lab. But hey. They'd asked me to clear time for the sea turtle grant, right?

So while still being a bit bummed about not being there with Tanya and Chris - oh yeah, CARNAVAL! I'll get to see one more Carnaval! I am so thrilled. I immediately wrote to one of my British friends, who'll be there the same time, and he said a bunch of the Bloco X Germans were coming too. Wrote to Dudu Fuentes, too, and he said he & Olivia would be awaiting me "with kisses" for Carnaval! I'll get to see Banga's 2011 Carnaval parade! Whee!!! I think this is going to be my fifth Rio Carnaval in a row, or is it the 6th? Oh yes, I am a lucky lucky girl.