Some updates

Oops, I totally forgot I left my blog on such a dismal sad note. Leaving Portland, right. Well, it's three months on now and I've gotten so much cheerier, and with so much stuff going on, that I just forgot to update the blog! So here's some updates:

- MAJOR changes going on back in Portland. Maybe I left at the right time! The Lions have been scaled back and don't rehease weekly any more; they still exist, and drum and dance classes are still running, but the drumming side of it is only being called together now and then, for focused rehearsals for certain big gigs. So of course all the Lions players (plus ex-Lions and other assorted drummers) are missing the weekly rehearsals, so they are putting together a new group, and that means going through all the inevitable turmoil - meetings, committees, surveys, endless rounds of emails and soul-searching and arguing and apologizing, and more meetings and surveys and emails, and STILL MORE SURVEYS, AND ENDLESS EMAILS ABOUT THE SURVEYS, jesus effin c, and YET MORE EMAILS, and discussions about names and rehearsal space and goals and whatnot. All of this is normal, of course, and it's all part of the process. I'm simultaneously glad I'm gone, and wishing I could be there to contribute to what comes next. Anyway, the new group (still unnamed I think) seems to be coming together ... at least, the endless flow of emails has stopped, which probabaly means things are settling down to some kind of normal weekly flow. Certainly there's a tremendous amount of samba skill in Portland, and a couple of excellent leader types, and the new group's got the potential to be great.

Still miss the Lions though. My time as a Lion was really the defining element of the last five years of my life. (I was just recently going through my housing history of the last five years, and discovered I started playing with the Lions way back in 2006. Hey! I've been a Lion for five years, who knew!)

- And then I managed to get to Rio for three weeks for Carnaval. (See the riostories blog.) This was a tiny trip for me; I buzzed in only two days before Carnaval started, so was not able to play with escolas. But that wasn't my goal this time. I really just wanted to play with Banga, see the parades, and most of all see all my friends! Anyway, Rio was fantastic as always, with the real highpoint being playing with Bangalafumenga in both their Carnaval parade and their last big Lapa show of the ressaca-do-Carnaval (the "hangover-of-Carnaval", the weekend after Ash Wednesday). I was on repique again this year, actually remembered pretty much all of the repique patterns, knew many more of the songs and felt MUCH more confident and relaxed. I could see Pedro, the repique leader, gearing up several times to remind me of pattern changes in certain songs, then looking very relieved when it turned out I already knew them. He actually blew me kisses a couple times when I nailed some of the trickier transitions. The Lapa show was particularly awesome... god, we played the roof off that building, and the crowd was just euphoric. (And just fyi, the new Magalenha arrangement kicks ass.)

Also managed to snatch some time with my Cubango crowd - Daniel, Dora, Mestre Jonas, Humberto and some of my other buds - out in Niteroi at a crazy little bloco. Daniel drove me all the way out there, and then Humberto took the trouble to escort me clear back across the bridge all the way to the Sambodromo later that night, bless the both of them. Saw Monobloco and Rio Maracatu too, and went to just about all the escola parades of Grupo de Acesso and Grupo Especial, made some great new friends, went about 100 hours with about 6 hrs sleep, then got sick, then went and lay on the beach for a week, all the usual.

- Just fyi, Dudu Fuentes is returning to California Brazil Camp for WEEK 2 ONLY. I think (but am not sure) that he'll be doing a full class of his own to teach Banga repertoire (i.e. not samba). So sign up now and get your tickets! Me, I'm desperately hoping that my August whale fieldwork in the Bay of Fundy goes so amazingly smoothly that I can bolt away for a week to California. But I won't know till the last second (depends on the weather in the Bay of Fundy and on how many boat days we get). Fingers crossed!

- And I've got my ticket to go to Bloco X! It's coming up in just a few weeks! In Germany, at Bad Orb, on the first weekend of May. CAN'T WAIT. God, it's so nice to be closer to Europe. I'm going to London first to see some samba friends there, then to the Max Planck Institute for some biology stuff, then to Bloco X. I'm working really hard on tamborim for this, practicing every day. I hope I will be up to Bloco X standards on tamborim by the time I go - though, given their level of skill, maybe not. If not, I'll have to haul a caixa all over Europe again, and I really am sick of traveling with a caixa. It is way past time to switch to a smaller drum. So, me and the tamborim, we are becoming best buds at last.

- But the big news is that I found a REALLY cool afrobrazilian group here in Boston. They're called Afrobrazil. See next post.