The 2007 songs are chosen

Friday:
This afternoon I went to help out at a percussion/dance after-school club for disadvantaged New York kids. I heard today about 3 different programs of this type (in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn). This was in Manhattan, taught by Glenn and Annette (percussion) and a great dance teacher, Kenia. The kids were minority, disadvantaged, high-school freshman, special-ed kids in a "troubled" school - try all that for a teaching challenge.

I played primeira most of the time to help anchor the little group. I was really impressed with a black teen girl next to me who was alone on samba-reggae cutter - the first time she'd tried that part - and doing a great job. Really good natural sense of time and able to do a steady strong roll; quick at learning breaks and calls. She was acting unimpressed and bored, but was playing her heart out! Later a teacher told me "She pretends she's not interested. A few weeks ago she made a big announcement about how she was quitting the club. But then every week she comes by, to remind us about how she has quit from the club, and then she just happens to hang out and drum for another hour."

A nice time afterwards hanging out with Annette and talking about teaching. We found a great little bakery and sat there looking at all the goodies ("Hey buddy, don't take that tray of cupcakes away!! What? Oh, no, we don't want one. But we were enjoying looking at them.") All the classic teaching questions of: how do you keep control - especially with wild kids in bad schools in the Bronx or Brooklyn? What do you do with kids who don't want to learn? What do you do with kids who do want to learn, but have to act like they don't care because it's not cool to enjoy a class? Annette had an interesting take on folding in lots of other topics in with the music - geography, history, politics etc. Turns out she's got a master's in music education (on top of her other degree in music). She invited me to come up to the Bronx on Monday to check out "the eighth-grade girls - they're cool" and a Latin Jazz ensemble at a new performing-arts high school. Told me to bring my pandeiro. hmm, I'd better practice...

Today I decided to try to stay till Halloween to play with Maracatu New York (if they let me) in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade - supposedly the best in the country, and the best holiday in New York, and the best costumes on the entire planet, everybody says. (though I have a hard time imagining that the costumes could top the Rio Carnaval costume contests - some of those costumes cost half a million dollars!) I called American Airlines today, but their flights are all booked for the first half of November - every single flight booked solid. I'll keep checking every day.

Had a bunch of blasts from the past today. My old friend Robyn wrote - my friend who paraded with me in Rio last year with the escola Imperio Serrano. It made me very happy to hear from her again. Then at almost the same moment, who else should write but Imperio Serrano itself! To announce that they have chosen their new samba-enredo for 2007! Well, that brought back a whole flood of other Robyn memories from 2006 - our ridiculous spiky outfits and crazy crowns and little golden trays. Our ala director's ecstatic delight that we had actually learned all the words.

Imperio's enredo this year is "It's normal to be different", and the samba composers are the same team who wrote Imperio's prize-winning samba from 2006, the one Robyn and I learned. I remember us singing it over and over in my little Copacabana studio, and singing it on the beach, and a month later, the two of us trying to remember the whole thing while we were curled up chatting in our tent on the Inca Trail. Yes, I still remember the whole thing! "Cantando de forma de um oracao, Serrinha pede paz, felicidade...." kinda been my theme song this year, come to think of it: Singing in the form of a prayer, the serrinha (Imperio Serrano member) asks for peace, happiness.

The escolas have just chosen their songs! I haven't heard any of the songs yet, not even Imperio's, but word is that this is a great song year. The Carnaval songs (samba-enredos) are different every year, and there are good years and bad years, and apparently this is shaping up to be a great year. This next two months are going to fun. November is one of my very favorite months in Rio - the songs just chosen, the community learning the lyrics, the drum directors (mestres) developing new percussion breaks for their song, the costume and float prototypes being unveiled. And everyone starting to get excited as they see the shape that it is all taking.

I remember the incredible Imperio terceira players and their amazing solo breaks, and the way they developed huge terceira structures that extended the entire length of the song. Hey... as much as I wanted to play in the Halloween parade with Maracatu New York, I guess going to Rio right now ain't a bad option either.