Stuff to Ponder

Had a good rehearsal tonight. School show stuff is coming together. I wrote that matsuri solo and actually played it, if imperfectly, tonight. All that shekere practice was worthwhile, and I finally got the sequence down, and it's not as hard as it seemed. I've spent many hours in my abandoned field, so I've been pretty confident with my rudimentary shekere skills. Have you ever seen a shekere solo? I mean, I've seen shekere played as narimono in a larger taiko context, but a solo? Tonight Janet did things to her shekere that I never even thought to imagine could be done to a shekere. She did things to her shekere that I would not (at this point) even dream of attempting. Not even in sleep. Not even as a wild fantasy. Wow. Afterwards, I asked: are your ears ringing? Because mine were, and I think that early onset hearing loss will be knocking at my door soon (if I hear it).

But tonight was a more philosophical night. Janet wanted to work on Mokuyobi solos, and I was just dreading that. And yesterday and today I was working all day on trying to compose a solo, and getting frustrated, and so I pulled back and started thinking about solo stuff. Like, what is a solo really? Is it movement? Is it the patterns? I listened to cds and watched a bunch of solos on dvds, and the thing that I wanted to know was what was going through Janet's mind when she is soloing, and I asked her that much, and she gave me a really thoughtful and thorough answer. And it gave me a lot to think about, and she actually gave me some pointers that were really useful. Actually, she did what I always thought she was really good at, which is to make you feel that whatever it is you're working on is important and meaningful and worth working on even more. Sometimes I'm so caught up in learning new stuff and stressing that I forget that she is really good at encouragement. I told her about how what I do is create loops of the basic, and then spend all day listening to the loop and trying to put a solo on top of it, and how frustrating it is to work on something for a year and still not be happy about what I'm doing. So I have my Mokuyobi solo, which I think sucks and is unoriginal, and she was like, what do you like least about your solo? And nothing much came to mind (well actually everything came to mind but it was too hard to point out one thing), and then she was like, what do you like best? And I found a part that I liked and we worked on that. And then she said, I'll just be your human metronome, and I won't listen to what you're playing, so I played my solo, and she lied because she really was listening, and had me work on projecting my energy in a certain way and also on this one little technique, and it totally rocked my world, and will no doubt influence my form, technique and playing forever. It was just about how I held my bachi, and it was so little and so simple, but really, people, just a little tweak can change everything.

So now it's like I'm a little more energized about creating the Mokuyobi solo, and she spent like what, 15 minutes with me giving me pointers and encouragement, and my mind is spinning, and it's like 1:00 am and my mind is still very much in the 'on' position.

Oh, and another thing. She was saying that I ought to learn more narimono, so she leant me some of her Okinawan--I don't know what they're called--they're kind of like castinets. When I was in Okinawa the street vendors were playing them on the sidewalk and I should have bought some, but never did.

She never really had any formal lessons, so she passed on what she knew about playing them to me, which is hold it like this and then run your fingers over them like that, and just keep messing around with them till you figure something out. I'll have to work on it. They have a nice crisp sound and it would be cool to be good at them. Anyone out there ever play these and have any advice to pass on?


And something really cool is that my little bro came into town because he is going to ride his bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a benefit for the Arthritis Foundation. He was saying that the other day he rode for 100 miles! Isn't that amazing? Oh, and he brought a bunch of really cool birthday presents, and one of them was a shaker, which I've had my eyes on for a while, plus koinbobori kites, and a cool cd, and special wires for my MD, and a moleskine notebook and best of all, a New England Patriots jersey that has the quarterback's name and number. Good luck to little bro and his trek down the California coast!!