A lucky day

wow... crazy busy day today.... Since I'm not going to choro camp to study pandeiro this week, I decided instead to "do right by my local groups" and also to do every damn Carnaval thing that I could do this week, including squeezing in a quick visit to Recife! I found a cheap ticket online and jumped on it, found a cheap room and jumped on that too. I also decided, optimistically, to see if Marcos Suzano might be available for another private lesson. He hardly ever is; he's on tour constantly; but about once a year I get him in a lucky free moment.

Well, today was my lucky day!
First a THREE hour lesson with Suzano - holy moley, am I ever set for pandeiro stuff to work on now! It'll only take me about 5 years to assimilate everything he showed me. He was so nice. He showed me TEN THOUSAND DIFFERENT THINGS, and the best part was, they spanned a huge variety of techniques and genres. He drilled me in samba swing again (which I still, still, still, infinitely, forever, need to work on), gave me a pile of funk stuff, some new technique tricks including something I'd just been pondering the other day - a backwards buzz!; and then showed me several completely different ways of playing frame drums from other cultures: finger rolls from India; platinela tricks from North Africa; hand-flips from Italy; and a peculiar vertical style from the northeast. He's a very eclectic percussionist - his house is full of all kinds of stuff, talking drums, Peruvian cajons, everything, and he incorporates absolutely everything into his playing. Just my kind of thing.

Then I zoomed to Leblon for a two-hour session with Dudu of Bangalafumenga - I've been trading him English lessons for tamborim & repique lessons, which turns out to be REALLY fun. I love teaching English. Love it. And the tamborim and repique stuff I've gotten from him is phenomenal. He's a brilliant teacher, really gifted at breaking things down and explaining things. He seemed especially pleased that I could pick up long patterns quickly and get the timing right - "You're the kind of student we pray to God for," he suddenly said, and got into a hilarious account of some past students of his who could not even STEP TO THE BEAT. Literally, they could not walk to the beat of the music! He got me laughing with his imitations of the very clumsiest students. Truth is, though, I've seen him with those students, and he's unbelievably patient with them.

Then I zoomed to Lapa to catch Monobloco rehearsal. I'd put in that big practice session on Monobloco stuff on Monday and things really felt better tonight. I could finally do the funk stuff at tempo. But my nemesis rhythm in Monobloco has always been the Marcha 3, right? The only levada (pattern) that I really cannot play at tempo. So I was waiting for that one. Well, I walked in tonight, late from Dudu's lesson, and they were all playing some weird new thing, super simple. I got it in a second, wondering what it was, and then Fred pantomimed to me "This is the new Marcha 3! We decided to ax the other one!" RAH!

THEN I zoomed to Bangalafumenga to catch the second half of their rehearsal. They have all kinds of stuff going on this weekend! shoot, I didn't know! They had had nothing scheduled this weekend, so I thought it'd be safe to take a trip to Recife, but now they've gone and arranged a big show AND a parade. goldangit, I'll miss them both. But, I'll still be here for their main Carnaval parade on Carnaval Sunday, which is the most important thing.

I was so exhausted during Banga, my stomach cramping up, and took me a while to identify why: I'd forgotten to eat all day. I'd been running from lesson to lesson to rehearsal to rehearsal, from noon straight till 10:30pm, without eating anything. All I'd had was whatever my teachers happened to feed me: Suzano gave me three strong cups of coffee (very excellent coffee), and Dudu gave me a pile of Toblerone chocolates - he'd given me one at the end of the lesson, watched me eat it, then wordlessly poured six more into my hands.

Bless Suzano and Dudu too for something they each happened to do that turned my thinking around a little bit. I'd been feeling a little bummed recently at the thought of having to table music for a while - I am so broke, and I decided it'd be really smart to work a whole year next year. Rebuild my savings so that I can then take the two years after that for music again. Taking the long view, right, actually planning for the future for a change. A great job possibility magically appeared, teaching biology at the University of Portland, so I decided to hop on it. Sent my cv off today for that job; and arranged textbooks for another job this spring at UW; and also accepted an offer to teach a little ornithology course at the Seattle Audubon Society.

These job decisions are what is underlying my recent panicking about music. It was so odd to be revising my cv today and remembering my life of North Atlantic Right Whales and grizzly bears, and my years with the tundra birds and prairie birds... in the middle of all this samba...

I love biology, and adore teaching, but I have been feeling a little dismayed at the thought that I am "just a scientist and not a Real Musician" and couldn't shake the sensation that to put music on the back burner, even just temporarily, is some kind of failure. I somehow had picked up an attitude, from some pro musicians, that science is something lesser, something mundane.

But today, I walked in to Suzano's apartment and heard a bird cheep. I recognized the cheep. Suzano saw the change in my expression and said delightedly "Do you want to see my bird??? Come see my little bird!!" We went over to a corner where he had the cutest little zebrafinch in a cage. It was the tiniest little thing and it came hopping right over to nibble at his finger in that fond zebra-finch way, and let him scratch its head. He had a whole story about having rescued it and how it had a thread tangled around its foot, and how it loves water baths, and likes to sit in the sun, and really loves millet seed, and... It was obvious he was fond of the tiny little thing! So cute.

Well, he was excited that I actually knew what species it was and where it comes from (he'd never known) and we progressed into a huge conversation about birds, conservation biology, tapirs, jaguars, deforestation.... So nice to find a musician who values that sort of biological knowledge.

Then I went over to Dudu's place for the tamborim lesson, and, again, somewhere along the line it came out that I am a biologist. Dudu immediately said, unbelievably, "Biology! That's such a cool field! I always kind of wished I'd been a biologist. It's so fascinating." Turns out he gets a kick out of marine biology & microscopic life, & even does some biology-related art in his spare time.

Well, it was really nice to be reminded, by these two world-class Brazilian percussionists, that the biology side of my life is something valuable too.

And ... I navigated all of those 10.5 hours of lessons & conversations entirely in Portuguese! yay.