tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87525689900470403092024-02-18T19:35:07.881-08:00Samba gypsytales of a travelling samba drummersamba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.comBlogger149125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-31644857297839677202011-09-12T16:36:00.000-07:002011-09-12T16:47:59.035-07:00More posts coming....Just a quick explanation as to why there've been no posts recently. First, I've been completely swamped with my cross-country move, moving into my new place, and of course my new job doing marine biology at the New England Aquarium. The second reason is much more exciting, though: I'm finally making progress on my book. Books, actually; I'm writing two simultaneously (well, three, actually, but trying to focus on two). It's going incredibly well and I'm churning out a chapter almost every evening, but the downside is that I haven't had time to keep up the blog. <br /><br />But I've still got some stuff I'd love to post - updates on Afrobrazil, my trip to Germany for the Bloco X rehearsal, some updates from Rio, and my completely nirvana experience at California Brazil Camp. <br /><br />But for now I'm pretty busy on the Bay of Fundy, working my rather bizarre project to try to collect respiratory vapor from North Atlantic right whales. Suffice to say it is a military-funded research project involving twenty 2-gallon containers of Hawaiian Fruit Punch, 40 yards of puffy white bridal veil, several pairs of nylon stockings, and a 32' carbon-fiber pole on a 28' boat that is insanely motoring into excited courtship groups of 6 or more right whales at a time, every one of which is bigger than our boat and every one of which is rolling around like a maniac at the surface. <br /><br />(In a nutshell, when a friend at camp asked me "How close do you get to the whales?" my answer was "I have to jump out of the way" and I was not exaggerating. in fact... special thanks to the adult female yesterday who, just as she was about to roll directly into our boat, gave us a careful look with one eye and thoughtfully tucked her right pectoral flipper to her side rather than bash us off the boat with it as had been about to happen. Or maybe she was just trying to protect her flipper, I don't know. Anyway, thanks, and thanks for the two blow samples too, sweetie, we love you, you're beautiful!)<br /><br />But we were stuck onshore today by high wind, and will be fogged in for probably 2 or 3 days coming up, so I'm hoping to get some blog posts up soon. Plus get some time on pandeiro again, freshly inspired by Brian Rice's class at camp. <br /><br />In the meantime, happy drumming to all.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-3568389438145789652011-04-06T09:31:00.000-07:002011-04-06T18:32:04.030-07:00AfrobrazilSo, a couple months back I'd stumbled across a friend who does some Brazilian percussion in Boston. I went to a sweet bossa-nova type gig of theirs, sat in a bit (and had a great time), and afterwards, he and the guitarist both told me I needed to check out a group called Afrobrazil. <br /><br />At this point they both got a sort of religious-convert, wide-eyed look in their eyes. They kept repeating "You HAVE to check out Afrobrazil. It is going to BLOW YOUR MIND. They are AMAZING. You absolutely HAVE to check them out." They both kept saying the leader of this Afrobrazil group was some kind of amazing, incredible, awesome dude, best player ever, best leader ever, coolest repertoire ever, etc. etc. <br /><br />Privately I was thinking "yeah, yeah, I've seen a lot of groups before" and "Is this going to be one of those Cult-of-Personality things?" The kind of group where everybody worships a Big Dude, and the Big Dude is always front-and-center with the solos, and the group website has just a giant photo of the Big Dude, and Big Dude takes all the gig money and nobody else ever gets paid. Sometimes you have to pay a hefty sum just to be in the glorious presence of the Big Dude for a couple hours per week. I know a few groups like that, and (unless it's somebody truly phenomenal) I'm usually not interested in that kind of thing.<br /><br />So a few weeks later I finally managed to track down the group. They rehearse on Tuesday nights, someplace in Allston. So Tuesday night rolls around, I motor on over there in my ice-encrusted Forester, blundering my way through Boston's infamous 7-way intersections, and the twisting, turning streets that keep changing their names every three blocks, and the gigantic snowdrifts blocking your view on every corner. Finally managed to find the right street, managed to park my car (by driving it up at an angle onto the 4-foot-tall snowdrift that was covering all the parking spaces), found the street number I was looking for. It was a gorgeous new building with a gigantic "BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC" sign over the front. <br /><br />Berklee College of Music? What was I doing at a Berklee building? (note to foreign readers: this is different from Berkeley the research university, which is in California. Berklee is in Boston and does music only; it is one of the top music schools in the USA.)<br /><br />I walked in to a huge lobby full of drums. Down a hallway to the right were dozens and dozens of tiny, closet-sized, sound-proofed rehearsal rooms, all in a row, many in use by Berklee students practicing diligently. Down the same hallway to the left were a set of four or five larger rooms, each one big enough for a small band, and each equipped with a drumset and sound system. (Several groups were rehearsing - I could just barely hear their beautiful music drifting out through the double-airlock soundproofing doors.) And at the end of the hallway, past another double door for soundproofing: a bright, beautiful big hall for ensemble rehearsals. With stacks of surdos, repiniques, caixas, a box of sticks and straps, and a big box of earplugs. Plus a grand piano and a full set of concert tympani, just in case we needed them.<br /><br />Afrobrazil turns out to be a "student club" of the Berklee College of Music. And that means Afrobrazil gets (a) free rehearsal space, (b) free drums, (c) maybe 4/5 of the group is Berklee students, and, THAT means, the group has a ridiculously high average level of chops. Pretty much everybody seems to be either a drumset major or a percussion major. Brand-new people drift in at every rehearsal, and the brand-new people can immediately pick up a caixa or a timbal and just start ripping it up. Everybody's got good time. Everybody can pick up any pattern in a few minutes. Everybody can solo. Everybody can read music. <br /><br />So, the Big Dude turns out to be a Bahian guy named Marcus Santos. During Feb and March he was in and out a lot touring, and then when he was back, I was in Brazil; so one thing and another, we kept missing each other. Then last Wednesday at a little show in the Berklee cafeteria, a big friendly-looking guy I'd never seen before stepped forward and did a phenomenal timbal solo. Like... a TRULY beautiful timbal solo. I've seen a hell of a lot of great timbal playing, and this guy was GOOD. What I really liked about his playing was not the flash or the specific riffs, but that it was so well played. Superb clarity - no muddiness at all, no fuzz, every hit absolutely perfectly placed - and impeccable technique, with the basses, slaps and tones all incredibly bassy, slappy and toney, respectively. None of that blurred, half-djembe/half-conga technique that you see a lot on timbal in the US. <br /><br />"Who's THAT guy?" I asked somebody, and of course it turned out to be Marcus. <br /><br />He turned out to be truly friendly - always smiling, and giving big, ebullient bear-hug greetings to everybody. Then last night he led rehearsal, and it turns out he's also got a really cool leading style. He hits that hard-to-attain balance of being very cheerful and encouraging and fun, while also simultaneously pushing the group to play better, better, better. (Kind of reminded me of Brian Davis actually.) He pushed us so hard we stayed 45 minutes late drilling a new maracatu piece over and over and over. So, my two friends were right - this really IS a great group, and the leader is a Big Dude in the very best way. (oh, and, rehearsals are free, and gigs are paid. Yeah!)<br /><br />The one thing I am going to have to adjust to is that this is emphatically not a traditional group. That is, Afrobrazil's real aim is to do original compositions, NOT to play traditional genres. As Marcus said last night (paraphrasing:) "We don't play samba, we don't play samba-reggae, we don't play baiao, we don't play maracatu. What we play are original compositions that are drawn somewhat from those genres, but we're not trying to play those genres exactly." <br /><br />That said, though, it seems to me that Afrobrazil's actually got a quite traditional Olodum/Timbalada foundation. Their instrument lineup is pretty much straight Olodum: there's a couple fundos at the back (first and second surdos), then a very strong lineup of thirds who all do very flash choreographies; then a big line of caixas, and another big line of repiques. Then a couple of red-hot players on timbal. (That's Timbalada influence of course. Olodum didn't originally have timbal, but does have a few now.) Surdos are short and are slung low from a double waist strap, caixas are mostly parallel to the ground and are played pretty square, repiques are all 8" and played with plastic rods, the third surdo is mostly called "cortador" (cutter) or "dobrado" (doubler), and is played with two mallets. (Almost all the thirds even played the samba with two mallets, in fact - giving the samba a very samba-reggae feel.) The group doesn't have hand-and-stick repique at all, and in fact when they need to do a repique samba call, rather than do it on repique they do it on timbal - but playing the timbal with hand-and-stick as if it were a repique! Even though they've got repiques right there! (Worked surprisingly well actually.) All that's very Olodum ish, right?<br /><br />(Also, just to complete the picture, there are a couple other people on stray other stuff like bell for maracatu, triangle for baiao, and ganza. The ganza player, btw, totally kicks ass. I ended up watching him for a large chunk of the Wed show.)<br /><br />Anyway, all in all it seems very Olodum/Timbalada influenced. Yet they do not play classic Olodum or Timbalada style. They do use a pretty common Olodum-derived break in their samba-reggae... but shifted by one beat. ("AND FOUR" rather than "AND THREE".) They use a really classic Timbalada entrada (the one from Toque de Timbaleiro) ... but changed at the end. They use a really classic Rio repique samba call... but played on timbal, like I said, and with the bateria starting the clave two beats early. (Uh-oh.) (Hands up, all of you who know why I am saying "uh oh" about that...) They don't really do Rio-style samba at all, in fact - they only do 1 samba piece, and it's very Bahian in flavor, very slow and groovy, sort of like Ile Aiye's "antigo" style circa late 70s. (It's so different from the Rio samba that I usually play that I didn't even recognize it as a samba till we got two minutes into it.)<br /><br />So the whole group's this fascinating mix of top level chops, with elements of traditionality, but all in a nontraditional context that sort of floats around Brazilian genres without really BEING those genres. Overall... SUPER cool repertoire. Their thirds have some especially amazing patterns - long loopy things that cycle through three or four variations, all with groovy, showy choreography. The group's got some rhythms I haven't even seen any other US groups tackle - a galope, for example. AND, they've got a couple pieces where most of band scatters to the sides, and all the surdos come dancing forward and take center stage! Rah surdos! I seriously love a group that features the surdos like that. <br /><br />It'll be a bit of an adjustment for me to go Bahian style instead of my usual Rio style, but I'm excited about it. (Except for that two-counts-early thing in the samba....) They are really going to push me! And I'm thrilled to have found them. <br /><br />Now I gotta go plow through my rehearsal recordings and write out that maracatu....samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-49594275861596772092011-04-06T09:23:00.001-07:002011-04-06T11:01:50.185-07:00Some updatesOops, 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:<br /><br />- 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. <br /><br />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!)<br /><br />- 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.) <br /><br /> 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.<br /><br />- 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!<br /><br />- 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.<br /><br />- But the big news is that I found a REALLY cool afrobrazilian group here in Boston. They're called Afrobrazil. See next post.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-62757438782134398652011-02-09T17:40:00.000-08:002011-02-09T21:31:09.611-08:00Leaving PortlandI haven't been doing any blog writing since mid fall. Starting in early October I've been in an intense grind of laptop-based writing - first a sea turtle grant, then a series of textbook jobs, then two whale grants. The sea turtle grant turned out beautifully but also gave me tendonitis in my right hand, which became persistent enough that I decided I wouldn't do any other writing, beyond that which was absolutely required. And no drumming.<br /><br />Actually though the other reason I haven't been writing is that I've been kind of bummed. About leaving Portland. Just didn't want to write about it.<br /><br />My teaching job in Portland ended way back in December 2009. There's not really that many jobs around in Portland for endangered-species biologists, so for all of 2010 I've just been burning through savings. The savings are gone - I was just about down to zero - and I'd finally got an awesome new job starting in January in Boston. So in October and November I wrote my sea turtle grant (for the new job) and started preparing for my cross-country move to Boston. <br /><br />Kind of fun packing up, actually. Jettisoning everything. I'd just watched a friend do a Seattle-to-Maine move, and watching her shell out $5000 for the cross-country moving truck convinced me that I would be better off just getting rid of everything. So I sold/discarded/scanned all of my cds, photos, all my paper files, all but one box of books (The Handbook of Marine Mammal Medicine, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Windward Road, a copy of my mom's PhD thesis, a copy of mine, and not much else.) I sold all my camping equipment, more than half my clothes, and half my shoes. I sold or gave away my dumbeks, frame drums, the beautiful zabumba, three huge surdos, my white-rim caixa, a tan-tan, a fine shekere.... I gave away my fabulous Samba Gata black-feather headdress (to a great young player who'd joined our group recently). On and on it went. Toss, sell, toss, sell. I even finally repaired my strange, beautiful, cracked, hand-carved timbal, the one that was damaged in transport way back in my very first trip to Salvador. I spent a couple hours one afternoon gluing the cracks, hammering the bottom hoop back on, drilling in new bolts to keep the hoop secure. The whole drum pulled back together amazingly and actually started to sound good. (It went to a mom who bought it as a birthday present for her capoeira-addicted son - a fellow who's not really a serious drummer but who wanted something beautiful, something from Salvador, something unique, just so he could have something to practice some capoeira patterns on. The perfect home for that timbal.)<br /><br />One by one all the drums left, off to their new homes, or packed up. It felt good, actually, to clear it out. Enough already with the hoarding of multiple things that I never play. Do I really need five surdos? Three timbals? Four shekeres? Three caixas? I mean, seriously. <br /><br />I stored a few things I just couldn't bear to part with: The two alfaias from the brilliant maker Recife. My favorite timbal that Kaboduka picked out for me in Salvador. The wonderful 16" skin-head surdo that I played in my first season at Banga. My 2010 Cubango costume, which took up an entire crate, and which I'd sworn I would give away... but somehow I just didn't.<br /><br />December arrived. Two days before my departure date. I packed up my car as a trial run; would it all fit? No, it turned out. I shipped a couple boxes. I decided I had to leave the repique behind. It just wouldn't fit. Maybe I'll get it shipped later.<br /><br />In the end I took: One caixa, my favorite choro pandeiro, my best shekere, and my tamborim, frigideira, and a chocalho. A small selection of mallets and sticks and just two straps. And, in an odd moment of Boston Irish sentimentality, my Irish bodhran that I haven't touched in years.<br /><br />On December 4th I started driving. Three thousand miles in mid-winter and across a half dozen mountain passes, stopping in almost every city to see friends and family. Through Snoqualmie Pass over the Cascades, past vast eastern Washington, then seemingly a year crossing the snowy Rockies in Montana - possibly the most beautiful state in the nation in winter? - and then the vast, endless, flat white plains of North Dakota, past the mysterious huge North Dakota billboards that just say "BE POLITE" and "BE KIND". Christmas in Chicago. Then suddenly in the dense ugly East Coast toll roads, past the grim Great Lakes industrial areas, shooting through New York State, and suddenly in Massachusetts.<br /><br />I pulled in to Boston on December 30th, moved into a new house on January 1 (a place I'd signed a year lease on without meeting my housemates nor seeing the place in person), and immediately threw myself into my new job - setting up a new marine biology lab at the New England Aquarium. The first two weeks were a ceaseless whirlwind of grant-writing; twelve-hour work days and scampering home through the blizzards, with not enough warm-weather clothes (oh... subzero... I just forgot what it FEELS like, subzero temperatures. I forgot how it bites the inside of your lungs.) One of my new housemates flaked out almost instantly, storming out of house discussions and moving out, but the other three turn out to be amazing, and the house is incredible.<br /><br />It has been terrifically surreal and strange to be flung back into this snowy, wintry, beautiful city from my childhood. This rich, vibrant, city, with its ten thousand squirrely, wiggly streets that change names and directions every block; its amazing history (I trot through the old City Hall, under the old gilded colonial lion & unicorn statues, and over the paving stone that marks the site of the Boston Massacre, every morning on my way to work); working on the beautiful waterfront, with the sun rising every morning over the sailboats just outside my office window. Excellent clam chowder and lobster rolls in every one of the eight Irish pubs that stand side-by-side in the three blocks around my work. Walking past world-class hospitals, colleges and universities on almost every other block (there are fifty-two major colleges and universities just in the metro area alone).<br /><br />But what's surreal is that I'm not playing samba. Instead I'm back in a full-time lab job - the same kind of job I had before Brazil - the kind of job that I ran away from, five years ago, to go play music in Brazil. Suddenly it seems I'm back where I started, writing grants again, buying pipettors and vortexers and stirring hotplates again, planning fieldwork again, setting up a lab again.... On the plus side, I love the job, the city, my incredibly fun new housemates, my house, my rapidly-gentrifying-but-still-very-Hispanic neighborhood. And I definitely love having family nearby. But on the minus side - No Lions. No Gatas. No Axe Dide. No Portland. My wonderful circle of musician friends has been torn away. <br /><br />I can't shake the eerie feeling that I'd imagined the entire last five years... all my Brazil visits, all my gigs with all my West Coast bands, all my Lions history. All my friends. Best circle of friends I ever had. I wake up at night periodically, sometimes just baffled and disoriented about where I am - what city am I in? what country? what bed is this? - and sometimes almost shuddering at the sense of something disappearing out of my life, something lost. Half awake and half dreaming, but aware that something is fluttering away, getting just out of reach, something important.<br /><br />A new TV show called "Portlandia" has just started up on cable tv - a comedy about Portland, Oregon! The place "where young people go to retire", "where you can put a bird on something and call it art." I watched an episode last week, and the characters were referring constantly to Portland landmarks and streets - Hawthorne, Burnside, Powell's - and each time, I'd think "Oh, that's about a mile away to the southeast, isn't it?" and ten seconds later would come the slow, puzzled thought: "No, it's not a mile to the southeast. It's three thousands miles to the west." (The first time this happened, I started to choke up.) Later in the episode I thought "Portland is just such a cool city. I'm so proud to be a Portlandian!", and again, the delayed, slow, stumbling thought "I'm not a Portlandian any more. I don't live in Portland any more."<br /><br />I'm still on the Lions email lists and keep getting emails referring to new rehearsal locations, recent meetings, big restructuring discussions (about which more later). It's so frustrating to get these scattered, out-of-context, puzzling emails, knowing major changes are going on in the Portland samba scene and wishing I could be a part of it. I've been here a month and a half and haven't even put my caixa back together yet! For three weeks it was frozen into the rooftop carrier of my car, actually; I finally chipped the thing open and got the caixa pieces out, but now it's just sitting in pieces all over the floor.<br /><br />I put a picture of a lion up on my wall by my mirror. (It's a painting by one of my Portland artist housemates.) To remind me of what I am. Or of what I want to be, I guess. Of what I must not lose.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-6981958596646163812010-10-15T11:59:00.000-07:002010-10-15T12:06:45.602-07:00Bloco X at the 2010 Frankfurt MarathonI just got an email from Bloco X, inviting me to their annual samba bash at the 2010 Frankfurt Marathon on October 31. <br /><br />They will have a "rehearsal" on October 30th. <br /><br />And you know what that means! The phrase "Bloco X rehearsal" is, as far as I can tell, code for "massive samba party".<br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-53680096669026476222010-10-11T19:34:00.001-07:002010-10-11T21:01:47.020-07:00Batucaxé calls down the storm godsI 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. <br /><br />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"):<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTaD5jQ5INqcNJp_zk9E3lf791d-lLf8Kn4Vdcj5uRzJgy2r3acfTAkLq_jEuVgRJS6qHxsd8bEHuZbM0drmh0KO2VYAHBINFSBfW76FNp8y-F7MXKmOFsUY4u2lQNTRjrU_UekLMs74EB/s1600/EuropeSeenByUS.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTaD5jQ5INqcNJp_zk9E3lf791d-lLf8Kn4Vdcj5uRzJgy2r3acfTAkLq_jEuVgRJS6qHxsd8bEHuZbM0drmh0KO2VYAHBINFSBfW76FNp8y-F7MXKmOFsUY4u2lQNTRjrU_UekLMs74EB/s320/EuropeSeenByUS.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526983315753500242" /></a><br /><br />(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?<br /><br />So anyway, the group she'd joined turned out to be Batucaxé.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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. <br /><br />So here's the deal on Batucaxé: They are not a fluff group. They are a Heavy-Duty Group. <br /><br />****<br />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.)<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-75491505972166312102010-10-11T18:57:00.000-07:002010-10-11T19:30:29.587-07:00The Germans are already hereJust 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. <br /><br />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:<br /><br />Andrezza: <br />"where are you??"<br /><br />Chris:<br />"where are you????"<br /><br />Dudu:<br />"where are you? Sergio just got here and Dennis is coming next week. You're the only one missing!"<br /><br />Daniel:<br />"Where are you? All the Germans are here already!" [at Cubango rehearsal]<br /><br />To which I can only reply:<br /><br />ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGRRRRRGGGRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHGRRRRRGHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!<br />lucky Sergio! <br />lucky Dennis! <br />lucky lucky lucky lucky Germans<br />ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGRRRRRGGGRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHGRRRRRGHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!<br /><br />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. <br /><br />Here's a little guy who was saved by our program:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb0KYgpDa_XryA-cIDzgyBpmNw9KUY69A-YSQBaPizE-ZIcNFfnldHV4YQpCFxEErjYx2Cgceol1Sy1Av8tsjYT27ms-jxZ5uEBHR16PEyEMvaOX33TsI4jbxFwyPxrxCqv1QRKJ8eTeSf/s1600/Picture+2.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb0KYgpDa_XryA-cIDzgyBpmNw9KUY69A-YSQBaPizE-ZIcNFfnldHV4YQpCFxEErjYx2Cgceol1Sy1Av8tsjYT27ms-jxZ5uEBHR16PEyEMvaOX33TsI4jbxFwyPxrxCqv1QRKJ8eTeSf/s320/Picture+2.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526977793905884162" /></a><br /><br />Here's a nice <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Saving-the-Worlds-Most-Endangered-Sea-Turtle.html">story about our turtle program.</a><br /><br />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.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFZUGqvNHTA55d15GMpZYQCn1rxabYYAAHnr5i9CuJPf-BOb24G-6qOwAfyyOtNs5VdNv2nMQbSJ-RBq-8OuNKnzGVh_ZCYd1IMY2o3NtQGMcs8ob3_7Y9TVPFsX-c70Epwm2vJLRcwcip/s1600/Picture+3.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 226px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFZUGqvNHTA55d15GMpZYQCn1rxabYYAAHnr5i9CuJPf-BOb24G-6qOwAfyyOtNs5VdNv2nMQbSJ-RBq-8OuNKnzGVh_ZCYd1IMY2o3NtQGMcs8ob3_7Y9TVPFsX-c70Epwm2vJLRcwcip/s320/Picture+3.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526977792459743186" /></a><br /><br />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?samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-107170678767328392010-10-10T23:28:00.000-07:002010-10-11T00:36:31.624-07:00Auld 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.)<br /><br />But first this update! Just to say, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joy-World-Pink-Martini/dp/B0041QSZJM">Pink Martini's Christmas cd</a>, 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />This caixa moment features, of course, ME! ta-daa!!!!!! <br /><br />(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!) <br /><br />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.<br /><br />***<br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-3299159297212469252010-10-07T17:59:00.001-07:002010-10-07T18:01:10.016-07:00Why your group needs a Big ParadeIt's mid-September. Back in Portland, Oregon, fresh off my thrilling parade weekend with Jorge Alabe's Samba Rio. <br /><br />That parade was so much fun!<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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??<br /><br />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? <br /><br />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.) <br /><br />This music evolved for parading. So I feel you will never really "get" the spirit of samba unless you do an annual Big Parade. <br /><br />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.) <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-82715304752733742592010-10-07T15:59:00.000-07:002010-10-07T16:27:01.304-07:00Post-parade partyWe 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. <br /><br />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?). <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.... <br /><br />[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??]<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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? <br /><br />Of course not! It was time to go inside and pull out the congas and play candomble songs!<br /><br />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? <br /><br />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!<br /><br />(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.)<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-77027864668130599062010-10-07T15:51:00.000-07:002010-10-07T15:59:23.967-07:00The Solano StrollThe 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!" <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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") <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Jorge called in the caixas, then the thirds. All around us people start smiling and tapping their feet. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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?<br /><br />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)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />One mile long and all downhill. The perfect parade.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-65634816342524114332010-10-07T00:30:00.000-07:002010-10-07T00:50:25.945-07:00Home is where you find itAfter 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />***<br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-34163273751209158562010-10-07T00:16:00.000-07:002010-10-07T00:29:58.661-07:00When Dancers AttackEpisode 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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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....<br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-44983792815196992432010-10-06T16:31:00.001-07:002010-10-06T16:37:54.104-07:00Forced, FORCED, I tell youGot 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?<br /><br />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).<br /><br />Dang. Got to move the ticket.<br /><br />After a full hour on the phone with two rather traumatized American Airlines agents, I established the following:<br />- I can't move my ticket to later in November because the US flights are all booked up because of Thanksgiving.<br />- 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.<br />- 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.<br />- Apparently I'd booked the ticket in July. Dang. That means I have to rebook before July 2012. <br /><br />So I had to rebook the ticket for March, April or May... when all the blocos and escolas will be on hiatus. Double dang. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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? <br /><br />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!<br /><br />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!!! <br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-21229876513478045592010-09-17T18:56:00.000-07:002010-09-18T15:24:44.086-07:00If I only had a brain, just a brain! Yeah!Burning Man Samba Moment #2 occurred during the marching band competition, which was one of the best events of the week. But I was a little late because I had run into some fire dancers. Yeah, I know you've all seen fire dancers - they're a dime a dozen at this point - ho hum, fire dancers, more common than alley cats - actually I've started feeling sorry for all the acrobats and street jugglers and buskers of the world, because I guess it's just not enough any more to just juggle machetes any more, or play drums - now the machetes have to be ON FIRE, the drums have to be on fire, your leotard has to be on fire, every goddam prop you have has to be on fire. Sheesh. BUT, I had not seen a hundred of the nation's very best fire dancers, top of their form, in a head-to-head competition in an actual gigantic Mad Max Thunderdome geodesic dome, complete with gas-masked spectators howling from the beams and a ruthless judging panel ripping the contestants to shreds. Seriously, I almost expected them to put the losers to death!.The girl who finally won could dance on her hands while keeping four flaming hula hoops going all at once. And during the whole competition, only 1 flaming fire implement went zinging into the crowd, and it hardly even touched anybody. <br /><br />I could not ever seem to get anywhere at Burning Man because I was always running into random stuff like that. Anyway, so where was I, I was a little late to the marching band competition because I had run into some fire dancers. ANYway, the marching band competition was EVEN BETTER THAN THE FIRE DANCER COMPETITION. There were five bands competing:<br /><br />The first band was an adorable old-school marching band composed of adorably cute people in their 60's with adorable cruise-ship type outfits, singing some kind of innocuous and adorable tune. I was afraid the cooler-than-thou, techno-dancing burner crowd would eat them alive; but to my surprise they got a HUGE ovation from the audience.<br /><br />The second band was Gamelan X. Gamelan X's rhythms were so weird, and so highly arranged, and so tight, that I actually got kind of scared; it was sort of like a 60's Hitchcock film track, all gongs and cymbals going off at random moments until you almost expected Tony Perkins to come ripping through the crowd with a steak knife. Gamelan X had a large number of strange and eerie gongs, and they also had six people with teeny-tiny cymbals who were running around doing unbelievably tricky, syncopated, bursts of clattering at the most unpredictable moments. I could not get a handle on any of it, but it was UNBELIEVABLY TIGHT. Knocked my drummer socks off.<br /><br />The third band seemed to be pieces of March Fourth and the Kazum acrobat troupe, but under another name. So, basically, a punk marching band. You know the type - a bunch of highly skilled drummer kids who have come up through the drumline ranks, but have finally escaped from their regimented college football bands, and who now want to put their skills to work in something much cooler and weirder and funkier, and who have drafted a bunch of crazy horn player friends to put together a slightly evil, twisted, funkified, sort of vaudeville act, with maybe some sexy dancers out front, and some fire dancers or acrobats or contortionists just to spice things up. There's a whole subculture of this type of punk marching band. Portland's got a couple bands like this, most famously March Fourth, who they are fantastically good, and man do they put on a show!<br /><br />The fourth contestant was a samba band! Well, sort of. It was the Lloyd Family Players, an Oakland-based group who I've heard about but had never seen. I say "sort of" because they weren't playing traditional samba or samba-reggae; more like a funkified version of samba-reggae. But definitely samba-rooted and using a samba instrumental lineup. They turned out to be super tight. (generally speaking, the playing quality at this whole competition was off the hook) And I have to add that the Lloyd Family Players had The. Very. Best. Stage Presence. That I have ever seen from any bateria outside of Brazil. What I mean is, not only were they playing tight, but they were DANCING. They were dancing their HEARTS out! Like they MEANT it. Like they COULD NOT KEEP STILL. Like they were having the VERY BEST TIME OF THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. With GREAT BIG HUGE SMILES!! And boy did the crowd respond!!! I so wished that certain of my band members could have seen this. (And learned something from it.)<br /><br />The fifth and final contender was another punk marching band, a really killer one from Seattle, Titanium Sporkestra. <br /><br />All five bands gave stunning performances, but in the end the winner was supposed to be decided by audience response, which the organizers were carefully measuring with an actual decibel meter. <br /><br />I felt sure Gamelan X would win, because not only were they tight as hell but they also seemed to me to be the most original. But the decibel meter turned up a tie between... Titanium Sporkestra and the Lloyd Family Players! Modern punk marching band versus a samba bateria!<br /><br />The tie-breaker turned out to be that each band had to draw, at random, one of 5 possible song titles - classics of the American marching band tradition, I gathered. And then they had to perform that song. But wait, I thought, that's totally unfair!!! Why would a samba bateria know any American songs? This wasn't advertised as an "American marching band" competition, just as a "marching band" competition. Why should any Brazilian bateria - or Gamelan X, come to think of it - know any American songs? <br /><br />More to the point, how on earth is a Brazilian bateria going to be able to perform any song at all WITH JUST DRUMS? The Lloyd Family Players don't have any melody instruments!<br /><br />But them's the rules, and the Lloyd Family Players drew "If I Only Had A Brain". You know, the Scarecrow's song from the Wizard of Oz, the one that goes:<br />"I could while away the hours<br />Conferrin' with the flowers<br />Consultin' with the rain. <br />And my head I'd be scratching, <br />While my thoughts were busy hatchin', <br />If I only had a brain!"<br /><br />And Titanium Sporkestra drew "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." As if the whole situation weren't unfair enough already, it turned out that Titanium Sporkestra ALREADY PLAYS "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" - it's in their repertoire - so all their horn players know it - damn! argh! and! plus! The Lloyd Family Players had to play immediately with no prep time at all. So, while the Lloyds were playing, Titanium Sporkestra had several precious minutes to plan their own strategy (and indeed they spent the next several minutes in a tense, excited huddle - right next to me - working out an elaborate arrangement).<br /><br />I was standing over on the side positively STEAMING about all of this, when the Lloyd Family Players trooped out gamely to the center of the performance arena. What could they do, really? It was clear they didn't know the song. (why would they? They play Brazilian music! Not old American show tunes! argh! damn!) But, hell if they didn't just charge into an awesome funky reggae-based beat. Totally a damn-the-torpedoes moment. Dancing like hell and leaping around and having a grand old time, while one of their members grabbed the microphone and started singing the following song:<br /><br />If I only had a brain!<br />If I only had a brain!<br />Just a brain, just a brain!<br />Yeah baby! A brain! <br /><br />He was totally making it up. I could NOT stop laughing, the whole thing was so ridiculous. And the thing was, his randomly made-up melody was actually kind of catchy, and he had such a great funky voice, and the groove was so cool, and they all looked like they were having so much fun. <br /><br />It was definitely the most creative, coolest, grooviest version of "If I Only Had A Brain" that I have ever heard.<br /><br />Titanium Sporkestra then played a perfectly fine version of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," And they won. But honestly, trying to describe it now I can't quite remember exactly what Titanium Sporkestra did with that song. I'm honestly sorry, but I actually can't seem to remember much about Titanium Sporkestra... (hey, they had the disadvantage of going last, and I was a bit sleep-deprived and had had to sit down at that point because I was so tired. I'm sure they were great, I just can't remember, I'm really sorry!). While I have an EXTRA-VIVID memory of "If I Only Had A Brain" that is probably going to stay with me my entire life. So in the end it was the Lloyd Family Players who knocked this one out of the park. Kudos, guys, and keep up the dancing.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-40613931892864287762010-09-17T18:07:00.000-07:002010-09-17T18:22:08.393-07:00Does anybody know how to play a samba?In the midst of that Burning Man week of dragon cars and 1,001 Fire Dancers, two samba moments stood out. <br /><br />Samba Moment #1. I was heading to a drum jam at Center Camp. Actually, I was a little late because I'd been distracted by the most terrifying free climb I've ever witnessed - a man was climbing UPSIDEDOWN, FIFTY FEET IN THE AIR, with NO NET AND NO HARNESS, along the OUTSIDE of the massive towering sculpture in Center Camp. This was witnessed, as far as I could tell, only by me and another girl who'd also happened to glance up. We both stood there transfixed, in mixed dread and amazement, for nearly twenty minutes, certain that he was going to fall and die and that we were going to have to run over and attempt CPR on him after he fell. But he climbed alllll the long way up, and then, thank goodness, alll the long way back down. (At first I'd thought he must be stoned or insane; or that possibly I was stoned or insane. But he turned out to be a professional climber, and I, of course, was just at Burning Man.) <br /><br />Anyway, so I got to the drum jam a little late and it was already well under way. To my surprise it was really quite good; several skilled conga players and bass drummers, two solid bell players and quite good snare drummer who had his snare under control. The few djembe players that were present actually knew how to play djembe. (poor djembe, it's gotten such a bad reputation, because of the hippie drum circle guys who insist on abusing djembes whenever possible.)<br /><br />So we played a variety of West African and then Cuban rhythms for a while. I joined in on chocalho for a while and manage to terrify several nearby people, then switched to a bell to try to spare people's eardrums a bit.<br /><br />And then a marvelous dancer entered the circle. She was fantastic. She was incredible. She was gorgeous. She transfixed us all. Because everybody was watching her, she managed call us all out to a stop. An expectant silence fell over the whole drum circle, and she looked around the entire circle and said hopefully - with a slight Brazilian accent -<br /><br />"Does anybody know how to play a samba?"<br /><br />I was standing in the back with some kind of bell thingy in my hand. I thought someone would start playing a samba, but nobody did. All the conga players and djembe players looked at each other mutely. <br /><br />She looked around again plaintively and said again<br /><br />"Please! DOES ANYBODY KNOW HOW TO PLAY A SAMBA???"<br /><br />Then I suddenly remembered that I had my pandeiro tucked between my feet - it was already out of its bag, ready to go. I dropped whatever I'd been holding, grabbed the pandeiro and launched in with a simple, fast samba. Nothing flashy, just a good groove, but the dancer girl SCREAMED in delight - then she saw that I even had a real pandeiro, and she screamed again, with a huge smile, and started samba'ing at top speed. She and I just blazed away fora few bars (and of course she turned out to be a killer awesome samba dancer). All the other drummers got the idea, and they all came charging in on their own drums, and we were doing a ROCKIN' samba. YAHHH!! and the dancer chick gave me dozens of thumbs-ups and big beaming smiles, and then she pulled me up front and center and made me dance too; and all the other girls that were standing around started dancing, and everybody started dancing. Even the inevitable (at Burning Man) Weird Old Naked Dude Wearing Nothing But A Dust Mask, he started dancing too, like crazy, and things were all flopping around like crazy, but I'll spare you any more details about that.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-41330696299402757472010-09-17T16:41:00.000-07:002010-09-17T18:07:01.758-07:00Burning Man is .... um....So after CBC I drove straight to Burning Man. Like most people who have been to Burning Man, I struggle when I have to explain Burning Man to those who have never heard of it before. You're talking about Burning Man and somebody says "Wait, what's Burning Man?" and you start to say "Burning Man is ... um ... well, it's this festival... party ... event.... thing.... for a week ... in the desert.... um... Burning Man is like...." <br /><br />My artist friends had all been telling me it was the most wonderful event they'd ever been to, and kept insisting I had to go, yet seemed incapable of describing what it was exactly. They'd say stuff like "You cannot imagine the things people build for this event. They spend ALL YEAR building stuff just for this one week." I'd say: "What stuff?" and they'd just start babbling. "Oh... thing like.... jeez, my god, the art cars! They're just... and there was this one thing - I can't even describe it - it was like - this giant lizard thing, except, it was a bicycle! No, but it wasn't exactly... And the desert, the dust is... there's this temple thing too, oh, I just can't describe it."<br /><br />In contrast to those raptured and incoherent comments, other people were telling me it had been nearly the worst experience of their life: "You have NO IDEA what the duststorms are like. Don't bring ANYTHING you care about. Do NOT bring your own car or your own bicycle, they'll NEVER be the same." "The music is SO loud and annoying." "It used to be cool, before it got so popular, but now so many tourists go - tons of all drunk college kids - it's horrible." "Three hundred dollars just to be crowded and exhausted and see a bunch of stupid art cars! Totally not worth it!"<br /><br />The more I listened, the more I kept hearing echoes of how people used to describe Carnaval to me. In fact, some of the sentences were word-for-word identical to descriptions of the Rio Carnaval that I'd heard long before I ever went to Rio: "You cannot imagine the floats and costumes they build for this event. They spend ALL YEAR building stuff just for this one week!" "The music is SO loud and annoying" ""It used to be cool, before it got so popular, but now so many tourists go - tons of all drunk college kids - it's horrible." "Three hundred dollars just to be crowded and exhausted and see a bunch of stupid floats!" <br /><br />So.... is Burning Man the North American equivalent of Carnaval? The one crazy, annual, blow-out party to end all parties? The indescribably topsy-turvy event that turns the world inside-out temporarily, in ways that some people adore and others hate? I decided to I had to check it out for myself.<br /><br />Since this was my first Burning Man, my friend Bola at California Brazil Camp insisted that I needed to "practice" before going. So we inaugurated the First Annual CBC Mini-Burning-Man. "Practice" consisted of getting drunk and stoned and then (once sufficiently drunk and stoned) running after a simulacrum of the Burning Man water truck (aka Bola with a fire hose), dancing around like maniacs in the water, and then burning a tiny little wooden figure (6" tall, made out of twigs) that was pulverized to ashes in about 2 seconds with a blast from Bola's propane torch. Mini Burning Man was a grand success!! Meaning that we (a) had a great time and (b) managed to shock all the hundreds of campers in the entire lunch line into a stunned and puzzled silence. (Many thanks here to my fellow Mini Burners, Golban, Ara and Barbara; and special thanks to Bola for arranging the whole event. I can't wait for the 2nd annual Mini Burning Man! Also thanks to George for the bottle of Bulgarian rakia, which was an essential part of the process.)<br /><br />Despite the excellent practice, though, I still wasn't quite sure what to expect from the real Burning Man. So now I've been. So here's my try at describing what Burning Man is. Burning Man is 50,000 insane people who build an entire city in the Nevada desert in a couple of days, and live there for a week ... bringing all their food and water with them, living in rows and rows and rows of elaborately constructed camps, in the middle of a razor-flat, barren and empty, duststorm-filled, alkali-flats prehistoric lakebed. There's no bands or stages; it's not a music festival. There's nothing for sale. Actually there are no scheduled acts at all. What happens all week long is up to the 50,000 people who have chosen to come.<br /><br />But wait, that doesn't really explain it at all. Burning Man is like... um...<br /><br />Burning Man is like, you know how you were at that wild party that one time, with your three craziest friends, and you all had that ridiculous idea to build a giant gumball machine out of helium balloons, and you all were laughing your asses off about your silly idea? <br /><br />It's just like that, except, instead of just laughing about the idea, you actually BUILD it, and instead of three crazy friends, you have 50,000 crazy friends, and they've each spent a full year (and tens of thousands of dollars) building their giant helium gumball machine. Or their home-made roller coaster. Or their full-sized disco roller rink (with 100 pairs of roller skates available, and giant sound system blasting out vintages Bee Gees). Or their whatever-it-is. And they actually BUILD it. And everybody can go try out everybody else's insane ideas. For free. All week long. Everything is free.<br /><br />So that's one difference; instead of escolas building crazy stuff in a slightly organized way, it's random people building crazy stuff in an entirely disorganized way. <br /><br />Another difference is the drugs. As caipirinhas are to Carnaval, so drugs are to Burning Man. I've never been offered so many drugs of so many kinds so fast! On my first night alone I was offered pot three times, ecstasy once, and mushrooms twice... and that was all in the first half hour, from the same 5 people who were camped right next to me. <br /><br />But oddly I felt no interest in drugs; because it had instantly became clear that drugs are redundant at Burning Man. What I mean is, suppose you accept the drugs from your campmates. And you get stoned. And you hallucinate that you're riding a clump of fuzzy, ten-foot-high, glowing, pastel-colored mushrooms through a blinding sandstorm ... for hours... sailing through the desert on a pink glowing mushroom... only to reach a miniature, pocket-sized movie theater that is all alone in the middle of the desert! And is only eight feet wide, contains a total of six chairs, and is showing a different triple feature every night. For free! Then your mushrooms get stuck in a sand drift, and you all have to jump off and push the mushrooms.<br /><br />Or maybe you dream that you're on a functioning fishing purse-seiner boat that is cruising around... IN THE DESERT!! And you have all just spotted a GIANT NEON TUNA FISH that is also cruising along about a mile away, and your fishing-boat turns out to be staffed by real live Alaskan fishermen who simply cannot BELIEVE that there is a GIANT NEON TUNA FISH at Burning Man, and they immediately give chase after the unsuspecting neon tuna fish, in their impossibly fully-functional desert fishing boat, and they ACTUALLY CATCH IT.<br /><br />Or imagine that you're so deeply lost in a blinding, swirling dust storm, visibility zero, and you think "Hell, I'm so totally lost I might as well just start playing chocalho, just to practice, till the dust storm ends" and there you are covered in dust and playing chocalho at top volume, when out of the dust comes looming... a giant motorized plate of nachos. The giant plate of nachos has heard your chocalho and has come to check you out. The giant plate of nachos does a neat circle around you, and then it heads away and vanishes into the swirling wind.<br /><br />Or maybe you hallucinate that it's night time and the vast sky is filled with stars, and you're tugging a 1200-foot-long string of hundreds and hundreds of glowing, blue, helium balloons through your hands, against a star-filled sky, looking up at them and getting so dizzy that it seems that you're pulling a string of actual stars through your hands... and three random people converge from all directions, all on bicycles that are lit up like Christmas trees... and when you finally reach the end of the 1200 feet of balloons, you let all the balloons go, and they sail up into space, like a galaxy floating away, and it's THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING YOU'VE EVER SEEN, and you and the three random people on the Christmas-tree bicycles all cheer! And you all hug each other in a spirit of shared camaraderie and triumph like you've just climbed Mount Everest together. Even though you've never met each other before.<br /><br />Or maybe you hallucinate that you're riding in a parade of 5000 topless women on bicycles, with all your 10,000 breasts painted like flowers, while hundreds of men fling themselves to the ground all around you, crying out "You're all so beautiful!! Thank you! Thank you!!!!", or, you think you're on a homemade Tilt-A-Whirl made of sofas (with a sign reading "Safety Is Rule #3!") ... Or lost in a giant home-made maze made of sheets .... ... Or you dream that the camp organizer who you've been corresponding with over email for months turns out to be a 300-pound nudist who works for a major city ballet company, and who also has a successful side business selling whips, and who, when you arrive, is teaching an incredibly popular class called "Introduction to Flogging And Caning" that is so popular that there are lines of people stretching out the door. And who turns out to be a total sweetheart and becomes a great friend.<br /><br />How ironic it would be if you thought these were all just drug-fueled hallucinations, when it actually IT WAS ALL REAL. <br /><br />Like I said, drugs are redundant at Burning Man. The entire thing is a living, breathing, walking hallucination.<br /><br />And yes, at the end of the week, on Saturday night, they finally burn the big wooden Man, which has been looming over the whole event all week. Tens of thousands of people sit all around the Man, and all the art cars form a gigantic outer ring. You all sit, rapt, watching the Man burn. Until he falls, and then everybody runs around the bonfire like maniacs (until they all get scared by a sudden windstorm of sparks and suddenly everybody flees in all directions). On Sunday night, they burn the eerie gigantic wooden Temple, which people have spent all week covering with thousands, upon thousands, of heartfelt written messages, to everyone from recently dead mothers to traitorous ex-boyfriends. All of it goes up in smoke. The next morning, the 50,000 people disassemble the entire city in a day - giant gumball machines, roller rinks, roller coasters, fire-breathing dragons, and all - and disappear... leaving not a scrap behind.<br /><br />[cue whistling wind and lonely tumbleweed rolling across the desert]<br /><br />Yes, it IS the North American Carnaval, I'm convinced. Nowhere else in North American have I felt the Carnaval spirit in such force as Burning Man - that free-wheeling, joie-de-vivre, damn-the-torpedoes, carpe-diem, joy-to-the-world spirit that is the heart of Carnaval. Yeah yeah, so some of the details are different. Yeah, there's a lotta techno music. So if you don't like techno, you camp in Hushville and you bring your earplugs. Yeah, hordes of college students come on the Saturday to watch the Man burn; but really they just swoop in on the Saturday; the rest of the week is great. Yeah, there are the 70mph duststorms, whatever, it's just camping, just dustier than most camping. You just resign yourself to washing all your stuff afterwards, scrub your car down (twice! with q-tips!), give it an oil change and an air filter, and clean the chain on your bike.<br /><br />If you are the kind of person who loves Carnaval... the kind who loves not just the bateria, but also the floats, the spectacle, the whole crazy annual cycle, the topsy-turvy spirit that is at the heart of Carnaval; if you're the kind of person who would enjoy catching random rides on a mobile Victorian house, or a pirate ship, or a giant fire-breathing dragon, or a moving tiki bar, or an ichthyosaur, or a motorized porch swing; or if you would just like to hold a string of stars in your hand, then maybe you should check out Burning Man.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-49135434631123458502010-09-17T16:37:00.001-07:002010-09-17T16:41:38.255-07:00CBC placeholder postI need to write about 20 posts about California Brazil Camp this year.... starting with the phone call that I got while I was pulled off at a gas station in southern Oregon, from the director of camp, asking about maybe getting in touch with Dudu Fuentes to see if he could come up at the very last possible second. Mestre Jonas's US visa had been declined and Brazil Camp was scrambling to find another top-notch Rio bateria director who already had a visa and who could come up to the US for two weeks (with about 48 hours' notice). We wouldn't be able to find an escola mestre at such short notice; but how about a bloco director? How about one of the new blocos that does other rhythms besides samba. Enter Dudu Fuentes, my dear friend from Bangalafumenga. <br /><br />Long story short, Dudu came and we all loved him and it was fantastic and it was one of the great high points of all my time at CBC. And I translated (badly but gamely) all week for Dudu - not because my Portuguese is so good (it SUCKS, it SUCKS!!) but since I pretty much know all the Banga repertoire already and knew how to explain certain of his hand signs and what Banga is and so forth. And I ended up staying 3 days extra into Week 2 and pulling into Burning Man three days late. <br /><br />But like I said I've got to write about 20 posts about all that. OK, this is just a placeholder post, check back later for more!samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-50780057850474077152010-09-17T16:24:00.000-07:002010-09-17T16:37:12.817-07:00PackingAn intelligent person, when faced with a year sans income, would intelligently hunker down and try to not spend any money and try not to burn through one's precious and embarrassingly tiny savings. But, in the middle of July I had just wrapped up a five-figure contract job for a college textbook publisher (ok, just barely five figures, but still, five instead of four...). Armed with that bit of savings, plus the reassuring knowledge that I have a job waiting for me in January, off I went to Episodes 4 and 5 in Kathleen's Excellent Year Off. Episode 4 was California Brazil Camp; and Episode 5 was Burning Man. <br /><br />(If you missed the earlier episodes, they were: Episode 1, a three-month Carnaval trip to Brazil; Episode 2, a stunningly beautiful month in Greece; and Episode 3, three weeks of high-altitude mountain fieldwork, complete with grizzly- and bison-dodging, in Grand Teton National Park.)<br /><br />The problem with Episodes 4 and 5 is that they were right in a row in the same trip in the same car, and right on the heels of Episode 3, the Tetons fieldwork. And so I had to pack for them all at once, more or less simultaneously (though I did get a one-day turnaround in Portland to dump some of the Episode 3 bird gear, and pick up the Episode 4 drums and the Episode 5 water jugs). All three were camping expeditions, but all requiring slightly different sets of gear: from the drenching thunderstorms of the Tetons, to the chilly nights in the California redwoods, and then to the shimmering heat and notorious duststorms of the Nevada desert. <br /><br />So I spent a week in July carefully studying my trusty midnight-blue Subaru Forester and all its possible configurations of gear-storage.... (while trying to ignore the small voice in my head that was saying "Hey... since the car is that nice blue color, you could paint stars all over it and turn it into an astronomically accurate constellation map!" Shh, Art Car Voice, that will only happen with the Forester is 10 years old, and it's only 8 right now.) <br /><br />First I arranged my basic fieldwork gear. (I'm writing this out mostly just to make a list that I can refer to next year.) First, a sprinkling of new clean earplugs everywhere. New earplugs! Like manna from heaven - a pair stashed in every possible drum bag, purse, backpack and container that I own, plus a few more pairs scattered throughout the car and even some attached to the bike. Then the major packing begins. Tucked under the driver's seat: Jumper cables, duct tape, paper towels, extra pair of hiking shoes, scissors, jackknife, mallet, spare tent stakes, screwdriver, wine bottle opener; a little cutting board, camping dishes & silverware; a sack of spare batteries; and a big bag full of bungee cords and various lengths of rope. In the glove compartment: the Mini-Office, containing envelopes, stamps, paper and pens, and my brand new passport, birth certificate and international driver's license (just in case. Cause you just never know when you will suddenly be headed to Mexico.)<br /><br />Under the passenger seat: rows and rows of canned food (tuna, pears, pineapple, peaches), with boxes of Triscuits and Cliff Bars piled on top. Nothing that requires any cooking. In the door pockets: band-aids, sun block, bug spray, sunglasses, compass, flashlight and headlamp. On the back seat: A big 5-gallon jug of drinking water, my Clothes Bag, my Bathroom/Shower Bag, and two towels. In the way back: A huge cooler stocked with beer, cheese, yogurt, fresh blueberries (which last way longer than any other berry, ya know), bread, and the Emergency Drug Bag, (containing a whole pharmacy of goodness, from high-altitude Diamox, to malaria medication, to prescription-strength painkillers and an enormous supply of at least four different antibiotics. All triple-bagged in ziplocs and kept in the cooler). Stuffed everywhere else: tent, tent fly, 3 tarps (one for under the tent, one for over, and a third for emergencies); and a sleeping bag AND 2 Ecuadorean wool blankets AND a comforter AND a pillow AND a big fat sleeping pad, AND the Sleep Bag (containing eye mask, earplugs, sleeping pills, fuzzy hat and warm socks); because if I've learned anything from twenty years of fieldwork, it's that You Need Your Sleep. <br /><br />Finally, wedged in the corners, the Bag Of Foul-Weather Gear, plus the Bikini Bag, plus a helmet; cause you just never know when you going to unexpectedly be either on a beach, or freezing to death, or caught in a thunderstorm, or in a kayak or on a horse and needing a helmet. Or sometimes all of those simultaneously. You just never know. <br /><br />OK. That's the basics that I take on any fieldwork. Then for the Tetons I added: solar shower, hiking pack, hiking shoes, binoculars, all 3 bird books (Peterson, NG, and Kaufman), the guide to Mammals of the Rocky Mountains, a giant can of pepper spray (ok, I didn't buy this till after I met the grizzly bear...), and my trusty old Banding Bag containing bird-banding pliers, color bands, my calipers for measuring tarsus length, my wing chord ruler, and a couple of soft clean bird bags. Last of all, a bag of spices and the necessary ingredients for Field Station Scones and the Amazing No-Bake, High-Altitude, Chocolate-Oatmeal-PeanutButter Cookies.<br /><br />So far so good. Four weeks later I came zooming back into Portland. Sunburned, dusty, and full of that ineffable serenity that only comes from a month of falling asleep under the stars to the sound of nighthawks, and waking with the dawn.... but that's a whole nother story (see previous posts for a bit about the Tetons). Who would have thought pandeiro would go so well with cowboy tunes? Anyway, now it's time for the swift changeover. Feeling rather like an Antarctic explorer heading his dogteam for a crucial cache of hardtack, I headed straight to my staging ground at a friend's house, where I took a shower (running water!! oh my god!), dumped the Tetons-only gear, and grabbed the two piles of gear that I'd left there for myself a month earlier:<br /><br />The Brazil Camp cache contained a repinique, caixa, pandeiro, tamborim and frigideira, the Edirol sound recorder (plus batteries), and the required straps and sticks. <br /><br />The Burning Man cache contained: a bicycle; 15 more gallons of water; two camp chairs and a small carpet; two strapless silver sequinned tops; a variety of odd skirts and pants; three iguana hats, because, you know, you just never know when you are going to need an iguana hat; goggles and dust masks; a fistful of glowsticks; and several battery-powered strings of colored LED lights.<br /><br />OK, so this is not all going to fit. <br /><br />One trip to ReRack later, the Forester was freshly equipped with a rooftop cargo carrier and a rooftop bike rack. Said the ReRack guy: "You can't put that cargo carrier and that bike rack side-by-side on the same car. Well, I guess technically you could, but...." Me: "Technically? Technically is good!" The "but" turned out to be that I have to take off the bike every time I want to open the cargo carrier, but that's infinitely better than no bike at all!<br /><br />I LOVED my new cargo carrier. I LOVED my bike rack. I packed everything in, got it all in with good clear rearward visibility, even; got the bike on top, and last of all I strapped the big foam sleeping pad on top of the cargo carrier. <br /><br />I got in the car feeling so happy and free. No commitments; no jobs; my textbook contract job all wrapped up; all the supplies I need right here in my trusty car; free, free, free. I could go anywhere, follow any whim. I had two days to get to Brazil Camp. I thought: I want to sleep in a tepee. I've never slept in a tepee. So I found a hot springs resort near Mount Shasta (the stunningly huge volcano that dominates the northern California skyline) that had tepees for rent. OK, headed for Mount Shasta tonight for a hot springs bath and a night in a tepee!<br /><br />And so I headed for Interstate 5. Southbound.<br /><br />Half an hour later the foam pad almost flew off the car because I'd forgotten to loop one of the straps through a crucial brace. No damage done, though, so I just hopped out, grabbed the strap and secured everything. And then my cell phone rang; it was two sambista friends who'd just zoomed past and seen me by the side of the road. I assured them I was fine, and we all went on our way; but then I thought, jeez, how many sambistas are on interstate 5 right now, that within 5 minutes after I pulled over, a fellow band member would have seen me? Dozens and dozens, I soon realized; I passed some, and others passed me. (My favorite phone call from that trip was just: "Want a piece of gum?" - from a sambista friend in a car directly behind me) All of us southbound on I-5; from Vancouver, Seattle, Olympia, Portland, Eugene; all on our annual thousand-mile-or-more migration, down the Pacific Coast to California Brazil Camp. And all around the continent, whole bands were mobilizing, packing, catching flights; from Boulder, Tucson, Calgary, Austin, from New Orleans, from New York City, from Boston. (sambistas from Boston! I have to talk to those people!) Even from as far afield as Hawaii and Hong Kong and Tokyo, sambistas were en route. California Brazil Camp, here we come!samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-17669386893644414372010-08-15T20:23:00.001-07:002010-08-15T20:33:47.390-07:00Pandeiro at the Hoot!Just a short note to say that my friend Jerry and I were pressured/encouraged into playing at the Hootenanny, the local country-music open-mic in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last Monday. It's a very local, very genuine scene - the same locals come week after week. There's a surprising amount of talent, actually - some great guitar, singing, banjo, and the tiniest little harmonica I have ever seen, accordions, goofy songs ("Glory glory HalleLUUU-jah, MY SUMMER GUESTS ARE GONE!") and even a guy playing a train whistle. <br /><br />So naturally Jerry and I signed up, and he played guitar and yodelled while I accompanied him on pandeiro. I think it's the first time there's been pandeiro at the Hoot? The highlight was definitely Jerry yodelling his way through "Ol' Montan" (that's the one that goes "I'm going buy me a painted pony, I'm gonna ride ride ride away"). Which, who knew, turns out to make an EXCELLENT fast samba. The Hoot crowd gave us an extremely warm response. Or as our friend Taylor put it, "You guys got a whoop!" My little contribution to bringing samba to the Wild West. People were walking up to Jerry for hours afterwards saying "Nice yodellin', mister! (and I got one "And, you, there, nice job on that little tambourine!")<br /><br />Taylor and Jamie then brought the house down with a heart-rending rendition of "Angel From Montgomery" that actually made me cry. My god, Jamie has a Voice. OK, so maybe not every song needs a pandeiro, but Ol' Montan definitely does.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-53181301431409417262010-08-15T20:09:00.001-07:002010-08-15T20:37:42.905-07:00The best ever bear bellSo that was my little bear incident, and it made me realize that all the time I was carrying that damn annoying bear bell last year, it probably actually was working. (You always think your bear bell is unnecessary, because you never see any bears when you are hiking with a bear bell. But that's the thing about bear bells... was it unnecessary? or was it doing its job really, really well?) <br /><br />So I went into town the next day to the hiking store to buy a bear bell and pepper spray. But they didn't have bear bells! They were out of bear bells! Oh noooo! I did buy the pepper spray ("35 FOOT MAX DISTANCE ULTRA 2% CAPSAICIN PEPPER SPRAY! Caution, do not provoke bears with pepper spray on purpose") <br /><br />The idiotic salesman kept telling me pepper spray "works better" than a bear bell - well, it's true that a bear bell won't stop a bear from charging, but the POINT Is, the bear bell keeps it from charging in the first place. You want to have both, but if you have to pick one I honestly would've picked the bear bell. The bear bell lets it know you're coming. <br /><br />I did buy the pepper spray. But I was really bothered by the lack of a bear bell. I couldn't find my bear bell from last year. I'd been planning on hiking Signal Mountain the next day, and while Jenny Lake is only on the fringe of grizz territory, Signal Mountain is what you could call Heavy Duty Grizz Country. And the trail is not heavily hiked. Often it's completely deserted all day. You really do not want to be alone on a trail on Signal Mountain without letting the bears know that you're there.<br /><br />I had to find some way of making noise. <br /><br />Driving back to camp I heard a familiar little rattling in the back seat... my tamborim, frigideira and pandeiro, bouncing around together in my drum bag. Oh, of course! <br /><br />My tamborim!<br /><br />I've really been wanting some practice time on tamborim - want to get it seriously up to speed and get my stamina up. I realized that if I am really going to keep on travelling like this, I need to play little instruments. Not surdos and timbals and alfaias. <br /><br />So I spent the next entire afternoon doing the spectacularly beautiful Signal Mountain hike, practicing tamborim the ENTIRE tie, while hiking. All the wildlife of Signal Mountain now know all about the distinction between the dois-e-um and tres-e-um styles, and the frigideira style as well; and they're all well acquainted with Lions Break 1 and with Junior Teixeira's Mao-Morta (Dead Hand) break from Monobloco. I am pretty sure I heard the ravens and some ground squirrels singing along with Mao-Morta after a while. <br /><br />I practiced super-slow, super-duper-slow, and fast, and faster; I discovered that practicing tamborim in time with your feet, while hiking uphill at high altitude, is extremely good for making you not rush, because if you rush, you begin to pass out; I practiced in the sun and in the shade and in the rain.<br /><br />A few days later I found I am for the first time EVER able to play sustained tres-e-um at 140 bpm, and my dois-e-um is suddenly up to 110bpm, and both are far cleaner than they have ever been. My annoying, hard-to-shake habit of missing the upbeat occasionally on tres-e-um is GONE. Even the frigideira pattern (played on tamb) is bipping along pretty well. <br /><br />Tamborim as bear bell. I recommend it highly. It'll clean up your tamb playing like you wouldn't believe, and it'll save your life.<br /><br />PS I walked directly past a blacktailed deer buck while I playing tamborim at top volume, and he didn't bat an eye, just kept on grazing. I guess he knew I was coming.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-45780700973162591082010-08-15T19:38:00.000-07:002010-08-15T20:09:01.270-07:00My grizzI was hiking around Jenny Lake (Grand Teton National Park) the other day. I hadn't really planned it, just was driving down that magnificient, stunning, most-beautiful-in-the-world drive along the feet of the great Tetons range, when I saw the sign to the Jenny Lake pull out and I suddenly thought: I've never been up to Inspiration Point yet. <br /><br />So I hiked the whole way around, eight miles; a pretty easy flat hike most of the way, with one grueling uphill to the stunning Inspiration Point (where I met the fattest, tamest, golden-mantled ground squirrel I've ever had the pleasure to meet. His good luck that his territory is smack at the lunch spot of the most-hiked hike in all of Grand Teton National Park.) There were lots of other hikers around at first; but then it got late (I'd been netting for birds since 5:30am and hadn't started on the hike till 3pm. Still plent of daylight, but it was definitely getting darker and duskier. Rainclouds moved in; and a tremendous wind picked up; and all the other hikers scurried for the Jenny Lake boat that would whisk them to the parking lot back on the other side of the lake. But I was all set for rain, and it was only a couple miles on a very easy trail back, so I kept on walking. <br /><br />The wind was whooshing, a few fat raindrops were pelting down, the tree leaves were rattling overhead, when I stepped around a corner and heard a HNFF! I looked up; there was a bear, about fifteen feet away. Its head was down in a bush. It was furiously digging; probably going after a ground squirrel or something. I thought "Wow, cool, a black bear! And what a pretty one too; that lovely brown color with those pretty blond streaks all over its big humped shoulder..... oh, it's a grizz."<br /><br />I used to work in Alaska and so I've dealt some with working in grizzly and polar bear country. Grizz are usually fairly sensible. (Polar bears scare the living shit out of me, on the other hand). I never have worried about grizz much because 99% of the time, if they hear you coming, they will get the hell out of your way and be long gone and you will never even know they were there. There are currently a MILLION tourists going through the Tetons and Yellowstone every month, and there are several thousand grizzlies living in the area who must see tourists every single day, and there have been hardly any "incidents". Which means, 99.99% of the time, the grizzly quietly goes the other way. Most bear "incidents" occur when a bear is taken by surprise by a lone, quiet hiker that the bear didn't know was there till the hiker got too close and the bear panicked.<br /><br />However, there's always that 0.01%. Two days before, a female grizzly had gone on a rampage near Yellowstone and had attacked two people and killed and eaten a third, a man from Michigan camping by himself. The next day the "grizzly response team" caught and euthanized that bear (with a trap baited, creepily enough, with "pieces of the dead man's tent"), even going so far as to confirm, with DNA, that it was the same bear that had killed the man. <br /><br />So usually people carry a bear bell to let the bear know they're there; and pepper spray in case it charges. I like bear bells; I'd rather keep the bear from charging than hope the pepper spray will work during a charge. (Some bears continue the charge despite the pepper spray.) Of course I had neither, that day; but that's why I'd chosen the Jenny Lake hike, it's the single most highly travelled hike in the whole park and bears usually avoid hikes that are that well travelled.<br /><br />I stood there and watched the huuuuuuge bear ripping up the ground, with its head down in the bush, what seemed inches away from me, with the wind howling overhead and the rain pelting down, and the wind in my face, blowing my scent away from the bear, and I realized: It doesn't know I'm here. I'm about to take it by surprise.<br /><br />A very stupid part of my brain said "Ooo, a bear! Get out your camera and take a picture!"<br /><br />Another stupid brain part said: "You got this close without it minding; just walk right on past; I bet it won't mind."<br /><br />A much smarter and very ancient module of my brain, one that had long been sleeping, suddenly spin up into high overdrive. It lit up brightly and said: "THIS IS THE ANCIENT ENEMY. THIS IS THE OLDEST GOD. BACK UP SLOWLY, NOW. DO NOT GET OUT YOUR CAMERA. DO NOT TRY TO WALK PAST. BACK UP SLOWLY." <br /><br />I backed up slowly and as dead quiet as I could. I backed around a turn. I backed up some more. I backed around another turn. I backed up a little more. I backed up till I was perched right above icy Jenny Lake, figuring I could maybe jump into the lake if the grizz started galloping toward me. <br /><br />Then I started singing the Hey Bear Song. All the people around here know this song. The lyrics go: "Hey Bear! I'm here! I just want to go past, I don't want any trouble! Hey Bear! I'm just gonna walk on by, okay?" (I've literally heard people sing it. My favorite version, which I heard a guy singing in the dead of night in the middle of Signal Mountain: "I'm a HU-man, I'm a HU-man, I'm a HU-man, you're a BEAR! I gotta BEER, I gotta BEER, and you DON'T, cause you're a BEAR!") <br /><br />It was six miles back; too far to get by dark; I couldn't go back that way. So I inched forward, and further forward, and around the critical turn:<br /><br />There was the dug-up ground squirrel hole.<br /><br />No bear.<br /><br />Wind sighing overhead. Rain pelting down. <br /><br />Nobody in sight. <br /><br />99.99% of the time, if the bear knows you're there, it just sneaks away.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-3612697076574447572010-08-15T18:11:00.000-07:002010-08-15T19:38:27.923-07:00Progressive car insurance vs. the gypsiesI'm finally back on the West Coast from my Grand Teton National Park fieldwork. We had no electricity this time (we were in the no-generator part of the Gros Ventre campground) so I wasn't on the laptop much and was not keeping up any of the blogs, obviously. But I'm going to squeeze in a couple updates.<br /><br />Got into a fight with my car insurance company, Progressive, last week. I'd made the tactical error of getting a chip in my windshield fixed while driving through Seattle on my way to Wyoming, which suddenly convinced Progressive that I either live in Wyoming or Washington, but NOT in Oregon. They sent me a little email that I didn't get till I was living in a campsite in the Tetons: "We are cancelling your car insurance policy effective September 1st unless you can provide proof of residency in the state of Oregon." <br /><br />Where do I live, anyway? If you tally up all my time this year it comes to:<br /><br />Ten weeks in Brazil (Carnival)<br />Two weeks in Boston (whale research)<br />One week in Seattle<br />Three weeks in Portland (music)<br />Another week in Seattle<br />Three weeks in Greece (fun)<br />Three weeks in Portland again (music, working on book)<br />Three weeks in Wyoming (fieldwork)<br />One week in Seattle <br />Two days in Portland (picking up drums for Brazil Camp)<br />One week in California (Brazil Camp)<br />One week in Nevada (Burning Man)<br />FIVE whole weeks in Portland!!<br />Three weeks in Brazil<br />One week in Chicago<br />Four weeks in Boston.<br /><br />Portland wins, right? Eleven whole weeks in Portland! But all my mail goes to Seattle, I've spent almost half the year in foreign countries, I've put in more rehearsal hours with Cubango and Monobloco (my groups in Brazil) than with my own Portland-based Lions; and I've been at living in so many Portland addresses that I'm incapable of remembering my own zip code. "Uh, wait a minute, it's either 97203 or 97211 or 97212... or 98115 or 98195... wait a sec..." I actually have to look up my damn zip code, every time, in my iPhone, where I have it filed in a little electronic note. <br /><br />Anyway, I placed a phone call to Progressive:<br />Progressive agent: "All you need to do to prove residency is fax us a utility bill that has your current Oregon address and that is dated within the last 60 days."<br />Me: "But, I don't have any utility bills."<br />Her: "We also accept bank statements. Or an evidence-of-residence letter from your Oregon employer. Or a copy of your lease."<br />Me: "But I don't have any of those."<br />Her: (befuddled pause) "...How can you not pay any utilities and have no lease and have no bank statements and no employer and still say that you live in Oregon?"<br />Me: "I'm unemployed this year. I don't have a lease; I pay week-to-week. Utilities are included in the rent. I don't have any paper bank statements because I do all my banking online - they don't send me physical statements any more."<br />Her: (silence)<br />Me: "But I could have Bank of America mail me a paper statement, but it always takes them at least two weeks to do that."<br />Her: "That's too late. We need it within, oh, ten days at the very latest."<br />Me: "What if I had AT&T mail me a paper cell phone bill?"<br />Her: (snippily) "That's no good, because you can have a cell phone bill mailed anywhere." <br />Me (thinking: but you can have a bank statement mailed anywhere too... ): "What if I show you my Oregon driver's license, or my Oregon car registration?"<br />Her: "Sorry, we don't accept those. According to this list I have here, let's see, if you don't have a bank statement or utility bill, you'll have to show us an Oregon voter registration card." <br />Me: "But I don't have an Oregon voter registration card right now. 'Cause I'm moving before the next election anyway."<br />Her: "I'm sorry, you'll have to get one."<br /><br />I wondered what the state of Oregon thinks about all this. Does Oregon think I live in Oregon? Oregon always has seemed happy enough to take 5.8% of my income in state taxes every year, and has never asked me to prove residency. I looked up Oregon's own criteria for whether or not you live in Oregon, which turned out to be rather charming: You live in Oregon "if you think of Oregon as your home."<br /><br />New call to Progressive Insurance Company:<br />Me: "I think of Oregon as my home." <br />Her: "That's nice, but we have to see a utility bill, bank statement or voter registration card, with your Oregon address on it, dated within the last sixty days, or we will be forced to cancel your car insurance policy as of September 1st." <br /><br />But, but, I pay taxes in Oregon! I have an Oregon driver's license and an Oregon car registration! I even changed my phone number so it would start with that beautiful Oregon 503! <br /><br />Sigh. I drove the 20 miles through the vast valley of Jackson Hole, dodging bison (literally; they were all over the road) to get to the town of Jackson, Wyoming, so I could use their library to print out an Oregon voter registration card application, and then drive to the Jackson post office to mail it off... <br /><br />... and I discovered ALL you need to get an Oregon voter registration card, mailed to ANY address that you care to make up, is an Oregon driver's license number. Progressive requires the Oregon voter registration card, but won't accept the actual Oregon driver's license? Ours is not to reason why.<br /><br />As it turned out, the voter registration card didn't arrive in time, nor did the paper statement that I requested from Bank of America. So I solved the whole thing with one simple call to State Farm ("I live in Oregon and would like to insure my car starting September 1st." "Sure!"). Got a better rate, and a much friendlier attitude. So much for Progressive. <br /><br />But the whole thing did remind me of how ill-suited our society is for the concept of people being nomadic and not having a permanent address. If you spend your year in five different states, or half the year in a different country, where do you actually live? The same problem occurs with wildlife management, actually - I've run into it in my professional career. Those $*!% bison and elk keep migrating out of Yellowstone National Park and crossing state boundaries. They just won't stay PUT in one state like they are supposed to! Stupid bison! The Yellowstone wolves have recently gotten clear across Idaho to Oregon. (And Oregon, perhaps realizing that these wolves clearly "think of Oregon as their home", has allowed them to stay. Unlike the other states recently colonized by gray wolves, Oregon has announced it will not be doing any wolf hunting.) Then there's the time that we found we weren't allowed to carry Lapland longspurs (birds) through Canada between Alaska and the United States, because they are "American birds" - even though, as we explained exasperatedly to the customs agent, they FLY through Canada on their own when they migrate to Alaska every year. ( "What if we let them out of their cages, and they fly through Canada, and we follow them, and we re-catch them once they leave Canada?" "Oh, that would be fine; but you just can't bring them into Canada yourselves, because they're American birds.") And then there's the entangled right whales that swim blithely across the US/Canada border in the Bay of Fundy, requiring the American and Canadian whale-disentanglement teams to do a ridiculously bureaucratic hand-off of the care of the whale from one team to another. The American disentanglement team goes home, the Canadian disentanglement team motors out...Then the whale swims back across the invisible border a day, or an hour, later. <br /><br />So, me and my birds and whales; migratory, nomadic, call it whatever you want, but it's the original way to be. <br /><br />After five years of samba-gypsy travelling, I have been through long, alternating phases of frustration, exhilaration, disillusionment, exhaustion, freedom, resignation about having no permanent home. First, you love it. Then, about two years in, you get "SO FUCKIN' SICK of being a FUCKIN' NOMAD!!!", as one of my world-traveller friends memorably put it one evening. <br /><br />And then, as you settle into it for the long haul - beyond two years - you realize it's not a temporary phase any more; it's a permanent way of being. Your sense of "home" simultaneously vanishes, and also expands, as the other places that you've stayed also become your home. Rio, too, becomes your home. Then London. Then Crete. All beds become equally comfortable, all roofs equally beloved. When you wake up in the morning you have no idea which way you are facing; where the street is, where the door is; what city you are in. It ceases to bother you. Your physical possessions shrink. Your land-based ties are successively jettisoned, simplified, or moved to the Internet. And the knowledge that you can up and go to Thailand in a moment if you want, or London, or Crete, or wherever you want.... or... New Zealand! Istanbul! .... and STAY there, for weeks and weeks and months and months. To know that you can hop in my car and go live in Grand Teton National Park for months, if you want; to hear the nighthawks calling overhead, see the stars, to dodge the bison in the morning, to walk in the lupine meadows all day... without having to arrange anything. Or notify anybody. Or stop any mail or set any of those friggin' stupid light timers. Or pay a mortgage or pay any utilities.... you can just GO.<br /><br />When people ask 'Where do you live?' I sometimes now get a deer-in-the-headlights look. I have tried to train myself to just spit out "Oregon", but sometimes I stall, because though I do indeed think of Oregon as my home, I also know perfectly well that I sure don't spend much time there. Eleven weeks ain't much. Recently when people ask me the inevitable "Where do you live?" I say "Here." If I'm in Athens that day, I say Athens; if I'm in Jackson Hole, I say Jackson Hole. Even if I'm only going to be there for that one day. 'Cause I'm living there at the moment that they asked me the question. I'm ALIVE, RIGHT HERE, right now, this moment, so "here" is where I live.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-17081479445692310462010-07-14T21:16:00.001-07:002010-07-14T22:08:45.370-07:00New toysSometimes if you're in the musical blahs a change of instrument is just the ticket. I suddenly got addicted to tamborim, frigideira and repinique practice again. I don't know why; I just found the frigideira one day and thought "I ought to work on this sucker - I bought it and I've never tried it" and now suddenly I CAN'T PUT IT DOWN.<br /><br />Frigideira is a little frying pan - yes, literally, a little frying pan - that you hit with a whippy stick that has a metal ball on the end. It sounds kind of like a bell, swinging along on every little 16th, and is wickedly loud; just 2 or 3 frigideira players can be heard over an entire 300-person bateria. Typically it'll play nonstop swing for a long stretch, then stop completely and take a long break; then come back in again. Kind of like chocalho, and with the same function as chocalho: lifting the energy tremendously, and also locking the swing. Beija-Flor has long had featured frigideiras, and Mocidade recently added them.<br /><br />What's fun about frigideira for me is that it's a totally new hand trick! Frigideira has a constant rotation in the left hand, and a constant down-up-down-up in the right hand. That doesn't sound that hard, does it; but I am spending quite a bit of time fighting unhelpful tamborim and pandeiro impulses that kept trying to take over my hands and jerk them out of phase. (Pandeiro impulses are the least helpful, since they cause me to miss the frigideira completely on every single stroke: swish, swish, swish! It's air frigideira!) <br /><br />Awesomely enough, it seems that frigideira is one of those muscle-coordination tricks that comes pretty fast if you just do a few minutes a day, or even every other day - just enough to give your muscles a taste of what sort of coordination they need to be learning. Every practice session it's magically 5 or 10 bpm faster, smoother, and going longer. Probably some of this is thanks to Junior Teixeira, my first tamborim teacher, because he recommended to me early on that beginner tamborim players should practice that very hand pattern - basically, the frigideira pattern played on a tamborim. Some tamborim players play that way routinely. Junior recommended including a few measures of it in a little warmup before every practice. Just to make you nimbler, and to strengthen up your hands, and to give you an option for another way of playing in case your hands ever tired out in the middle of a samba. Honestly I haven't been all that diligent about it, but I did fool around with it now and then, and I think it helps.<br /><br />So the frigideira happened to be stored in the same bag as my tamborim. So, if you're like me, once you've been playing frigideira for a while you notice the tamborim and think "well, might as well do some tamborim too" and then "Hey, this is fun" and then "Might as well practice both the multi-strand and the single strand" and "Hey, if I get good at single strand, maybe I could learn to play a bottle cap, like Junior!" and then you remember "Hey, don't I have a superb video of Mestre Jonas superbly demonstrating the dois-e-um pattern in slow motion?" and you rummage around on your laptop and find the video (along with several hundred other highly distracting Rio drum videos that you'd forgotten all about), and you try it. And dang if dois-e-um doesn't seem like almost a piece of cake. (Almost) Ten minutes on it and you're already at 120bpm!! - shaky, sure, erratic, short, but definitely a promising start for a brand new technique!! It's just so relaxing....with dois-e-um it almost seems like your right hand can just stop entirely and rest for half of every beat. I must say, Jonas teaches dois-e-um extremely clearly and swings it beautifully, and it suddenly makes so much sense. <br /><br />And you remember "Jonas is coming to Brazil Camp this year! For the first time ever! So wouldn't it be sweet to be able to play that style when camp time rolls around?" And then you think, hey, wouldn't it be SMART, if you are a constantly travelling drummer who moves ten times a year, to finally learn the two SMALLEST instruments in the bateria, instead of always lugging around the LARGEST? <br /><br />So that's frigideira and tamborim. Repinique, now, repinique's because of a well-timed kick in the butt from Pauline, and that's becoming very fun too. But more on that later.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752568990047040309.post-80799679400239126902010-07-14T19:26:00.000-07:002010-07-14T21:16:11.221-07:00A drmes from the pastA 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? <br /><br />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! <br /><br />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? <br /><br />Better still, by the third time I heard it, I'd successfully reconstructed the entire dance. <br /><br />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! <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.samba kathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12118589725634832840noreply@blogger.com0