Two more NY groups

I can't believe my luck recently... got a last-minute flight change for free that is letting me stay in Manhattan till Nov. 1, so I can catch the Halloween parade. Then a friend who is out of town is letting me use his unbelievably fantastic Manhattan apartment for the weekend - HUGE (biggest place I've probably ever stayed in all year!), gorgeous, free wifi, cool roommates, great cat too! & incredible location on the Soho/Chinatown border. Plus, I got invites from 3 different groups to play in the Halloween Parade - Manhattan Samba, Samba New York, and Maracatu New York. That was a painful choice....I wanted to play with all of them! Chose Maracatu New York since I know I'll get to play lots of samba in Rio very soon.

I had a great time at Samba New York's advanced class on Thursday, then had a fascinating lunch with their director, Philip Galinsky, the next day. He is an ethnomusicologist with a broad music background (jazz, classical, etc.) who then went into ethnomusicology & did his master's on the music of Salvador, and his PhD on mangue-beat in Recife; and then lived in Rio several times after that, just to top it all off. It was so nice to be able to chat samba & maracatu nonstop for a couple hours with someone who knew exactly where I was coming from, and who understood exactly the sort of things I'd been noticing and thinking about.

Today, Saturday, I headed to Brooklyn to catch Maracatu New York's last rehearsal before the Halloween Parade. Maracatu New York is led by an American musician, Scott Kettner, who has been regularly bringing up a maracatu master from Recife, Jorge Martins. The rehearsal was wonderful; they took us out into a little concrete park near their rehearsal space, where Jorge led us through a very rich and elaborate maracatu repertoire. Scott asked me to play shekere; he had a hefty lineup of some 15 alfaia players, a pile of caixas and three bells, but only one shekere. So I got me a shekere and went out with them. The weather got crazy, gales of wind whipping storm clouds overhead, leaves blowing everywhere, bright blinding sun changing to chilly grey icy wind in a flash. The wind was blowing so strongly that it kept my shekere's netting of beads bellied out like a sail (made it a little hard to play). But it never quite rained, though it threatened to.

Partway through rehearsal, Annette the conga player showed up and joined me on shekere. She plays it with that beautiful light Afro-Cuban touch, very efficient; she kept horsing around with it and cracking me up, especially when she shook it upsidedown and a pile of tiny skeletons and rubber snakes came flying out of it.

It turned into a really fun evening; Annette and Jorge Martins and I ended up hanging out the entire rest of the day, and evening, and late night, till 1 am; first grabbing a beer at an Australian pub; then the incredibly long subway ride to Annette's place (from Brooklyn clear up to 200th St in Manhattan); then a trip to the corner place for a few more beers; then Annette's place, where I poked around Annette's pile of mementos and snapshots and slowly realized that she knows or has played with just about every great Brazilian or Afro-Cuban player on the West and East Coasts combined; then an impromptu conga lesson for Jorge; a few trips to the corner store for a few more beers; then somehow we ended up at a birthday party of a capoeira player who has recently married a Brazilian girl that Jorge somehow knew who just happened to live a few blocks away. The girl, Claudia, turned out to be just adorable - brand new to the United States, loving New York, and learning English at a lightspeed pace. She made some superb caipirinhas for us, and they gave us beers and pizzas and birthday cake, and Annette found the capoeira guy's pandeiros and we played until the neighbors politely complained. The mix of beers and caipirinhas and more beers, and the crazy fractured three-way conversation in scrambled Portuguese, English, and Spanish began to buzz my brain in and out of strange Alice-in-Wonderland language states. At the end of the evening, as Jorge and I started our epic subway journeys together on the A train (he heading to Brooklyn, me to Chinatown), we were in a fairly complicated conversation when Jorge said a word I didn't know and with a jolt I realized he'd been talking in Portuguese the entire time, and so had I. I hadn't noticed; I'd thought we'd been talking in English.

Scott has loaned me a shekere & invited me to come parade with them on Sunday too, as well as at the Halloween Parade. It's turning into a beautifully musical week. Now if I can just get some time to practice pandeiro, for once.....