La Peña Flamenca de Seattle: Fiesta Navideña 2007

This was the big winter Peña show--and the culmination of a flurry of year end engagements and performances. And big it was--two roughly forty-five minute sets replete with meaty dance and cante numbers over two nights. Ouf!

But it was also heaps of fun (as these things are wont to be). And a bit (read: lots) less stressful than my small group performances: all those bodies on the stage makes one feel a bit less "exposed." (As if vegetables and other foodstuffs of questionable freshness might come flying over the footlights.) Perhaps this is also why I rather like being at the back of the stage. Odd thing, that, for someone who sets out to do something as inherently exhibitionist as public performance. Go figure.

In any case, both nights went off pretty much as well as I had hoped. No major train wrecks, no produce thrown. I wasn't even suffering from the caprices of my peripheral nervous system all that much. I'm not sure if that was due to my having learned to calm down as a performer, or to the flask of good German schnapps circulating backstage before the curtain went up. I'll keep you posted on any future discoveries (although, honestly, if the formula works, I'm loathe to tinker with it).

But enough blather. How about a video? Here is the first installment of the Bamberas, one of the longer numbers we worked up for this show. You can see parts 2 and 3 by following the links that come up when this section finishes (it's a long beastie). If the window gives you any hassles, you can also check out the videos directly on the Peña's YouTube channel.

I'll post more clips (and likely some more blather) as the videos go up. You'd think this would be a faster process, wouldn't you?

~A.

Dance Workshop with Maria "Cha-Cha" Bermudez

No, don't worry--I'm not branching out into dance (believe me, none of us wants that!), but I did get the chance to accompany Maria Bermudez during her three day workshop at the American Dance Institute in Greenwood. For those of you not "in the know," Maria is a vivacious, globe-trotting dancer with the Jerez-based group Sonidos Gitanos. She is also a longtime friend of Rubina Carmona, who occasionally coaxes her out to Seattle to give a dance workshop.

As I'm sure any of the dancers who attended the workshop would corroborate, this was an eye-opening opportunity for all of us. Maria "created" much of the workshop on the spot, so not only did the dancers get to learn some new steps and sequences (fresh from Jerez, as it were), but we all got to watch the process of creating those sequences in action.

Luckily for me, my job as a guitarist was mostly to back up Markus Kolb, who has done this sort of thing before. The workshop was broken up into two ninety-minute sessions each day, with "level 1" in the first block, "level 2" in the second. The routine for each session was built from day to day, so at the end of the workshop we had all covered quite a bit of material. For the level one sessions, we worked primarily on Tangos; for the level two we worked in Rondeña.

As far as the actual playing goes, it was at times a lot like playing for a dance class and at times completely different. As in dance classes, while we worked religiously within palos and compás, there wasn't really any "song" to learn beforehand that provided a musical template to work from. A lot of this kind of playing, I'm coming to find out, is the dancer gesticulating at you and going something like "da-da-di . . . da-da-di . . . di-di . . . di-di-di." Somehow -- bizarrely -- it makes sense, but musical flexibility is an absolute must (as is knowing some stock phrasing in the palo in question).

Unlike dance classes, the whole thing goes really fast. There's no taking an idea home, incubating it, and coming back the next week with some saucy little melody you've worked out in your spare time. Luckily for Markus and I, Maria (like Rubina) is from the "compassionate" school of flamenco, so she didn't scream at us when it took us a few takes to interpret her onomatopoeia.

"Eventually getting it," however, all changed for me when it came to the Rondeña: Markus was familiar with the form, but I, much to my alarm, learned right then and there that Rondeña is played in an alternate tuning: your low 'E' goes to 'D' and your 'G' goes to 'F#'. Oye! "Lost" about sums up how I felt about this on Friday (the first day of the workshop). In fact, so lost was I that I think I actually played palo seco (i.e. rhythm on muted strings) through much of that sequence.

On day two, however, I bucked up, detuned, and dove into the world of goofy Rondeña chords. And here I was lucky (again) that Markus is also of the compassionate school of flamenco: he showed me the six or seven basic chords and I fumbled through them while he did most of the accompaniment legwork. By Sunday I was, if not quite competent, at least not quite so painful to watch (or, I imagine, to listen to).

The moral of this story, I suppose (if we must draw one), is not to be afraid to plunge into the unknown--even if you sound like a truckload of angry housecats while you do it. I find I constantly have to remind myself that flamenco is traditionally a "by ear" form and that often the first I may hear of what someone wants me to play is when he or she hums it at me. There's something redeeming in this. It's good to be able to pick things up off of recordings or sheet music, but the immediacy of having a live person standing there in front of you, I think, tunes you in a bit better to listen to the music in your head as well. That, I suspect, is where the stuff that actually means something comes from. (Though I thoroughly recommend ignoring the voices in your head . . . .)

A.

PNA Winterfest: Rolling With the Punches

Yes, winter has--yet again--been fested. I guess we really like winter around here. Who knew?

Anyway, Winterfest this time around (sponsored by the Phinney Neighborhood Association) was a whole different ball game than last week's gig: no Peña-huge support group of musicians and dances, but just the Zamani Flamenco trio: Rachel, baile (dance); Stephanie, cante (vocals); and yours truly, toque. Overall impressions: it wasn't perfect, but there were no major train wrecks and no decomposing produce thrown. This is a good thing. And I think we all learned something. This is a very good thing.

I won't speak for my fellow musicians, but I know my lesson is all about the importance of "rolling with the punches." I.e., that there's a big difference between missing a note and messing up a whole song--or set.

Artist's disclaimer: Before I go into examples, I feel the need to issue a caveat: in general, performance artists weed out their trip-ups and only make public the material that "works." This is what I do on the Zamani Flamenco website. I have a hard time buying, however, that any performance history is nothing but a long string of perfect sets. That's why I'm giving it all to you here--the good and the . . . otherwise. This blog isn't about showcasing the things I do well, but about discussing the ups and downs of Toque. End of caveat.

We opened with a Sevillanas. I'm a fan of these for starters because they're not especially technically demanding and since they're a fixed form, there aren't any arrangement surprises. This one, I think, went over pretty well. Here it is for your bemusement:

The second number we did was a Tangos. This is where the "punches" I refer to in the title come in. Remember my mutinous nervous system from the last post? I haven't shaken it off yet. I had arranged the introductory falseta for this Tangos to be about twice as long as I play it here. In the fifth bar, however, when the Moraito melody line came in I found myself in the most ridiculous of panics: is that first note on the fifth fret, or the sixth? In general, there are no fret markers on a flamenco guitar; since we use capos for almost everything--and we move them around depending on the tonality we're after and the range of the singer--they would probably be more confusing than helpful. In any case, I lost my point of reference and had to guess--and guessed wrong.

I recovered the next beat, but by then I was shaken. It's amazing the thoughts that can go through one's head between beats. At this point they were something like, "I could keep going and probably play the rest of the silly thing in the right key--but if I do goof something up, the trip I just had could turn into a full-on plunge-off-the-balcony-pelvis-shattering-catastrophe. One mistake: largely unnoticed; two mistakes: now you're permanently labeled--'Oh, yeah, Andy--that guitarist that can't keep track of his frets. Lovely turtleneck; shame about the music.'"

So I chickened out and closed, hopped over the next few bars and went right to the end of the intro. To the careful listener (which I'm sure the vast majority of the audience was not), this sounds, I suspect, rather inelegant--but still potentially "correct." Kind of a short intro, doesn't really develop musically very well, lunges a bit into the song. But, aside from that first missed note, at least it sounds like it was played the way I intended it. Rolling with the punches. Here's the clip:

The bit in the middle goes for the most part, I think, pretty well. Brilliant? No. But "correct"? I think so. And at this point (remember this is only my second small group performance) that's all I'm going for. There is a bit of chord confusion at the end--I should have hung on a C7 one more bar than I did. Having realized that I'd gotten out of sych with the vocals, I closed three or four bars early to avoid making the same mistake as the progression continued. Same frenzy of thought as above. Because I signaled it clearly, however, we all ended at the same place. Rolling with the punches.

Notice Rachel (the dancer) here--she's a model of composure. If Stephanie and I hadn't reacted, I don't think anyone would have been the wiser. In fact, I don't really think anyone was much "wiser" anyway--you might not have been if I hadn't pointed it out. But this is the lesson--or at least what I got out of it: it may be the hardest thing in the world not to react, but the musician's reaction might just be the only thing that signals that something has gone awry. Granted, major train wrecks are a different story, but if you're making changes on the fly, there's no reason to let the whole world in on it. If your fellow musicians are astute, you can get away with murder up there (musical murder, that is) and come out smelling like roses--instead of decomposing produce.

Just for kicks, here's out third number, an Alegrías. I'll spare you the analysis--the song is long enough as is:

And that, my friends, is enough for today!

Now go play!

A.