last lesson from Jonas

I've been asking Jonas for months for a lesson, but it was always "Depois de Carnaval! Depois de Carnaval!" (actually it's been like that with everybody). Finally I got him! Set up a one-hour lesson on Friday, arranged a little room at Casulo Artes Musicais in Botafogo, rounded up two other friends to take the lesson with me - Vincent and Party Jason.

It was a cool, cool lesson. Vincent, Jason & I turned out to be a well-matched trio. Jason's a pro drumset player with pretty advanced formal music training, also a pro conga player, so though he hasn't had a huge amount of Brazilian experience, he's unbelievably quick at picking stuff up (he's kind of scary quick, actually - if he weren't such a nice guy I'd be intimidated!), and his hands are ready to reel off any kind of fast anything. (Jonas watched him pick up several long complex repique calls almost effortlessly, and then just said "Baterista?" - drumset player?) Vincent's also got a set background, plus a pretty wide fix now on both Brazilian and Cuban, plus conga. I'm the lone non-set player, non-conga player; not-been-playing-since-I-was-a-teenager player, so my hands are pretty clumsy still; but I was pleased to find out I could easily hang with them. I've got a deeper grasp of the Brazilian, which turned out to keep me in the game more than I'd expected. And I was surprised how comfy the repinique felt, since I haven't touched it in a couple months. I even managed to do some fairly fast sestuplet rolls that were not completely incompetent! Kind of surprising.

So Jonas could whip forward really fast and show us a huge variety of stuff. This is what he covered in 1 lesson:
Scrutinized each of us separately on repinique technique
Some classic callins and callouts
Some lovely variations for solo'ing. Jonas had a nice method of keeping 2 of us on the basic while he & the 3rd student traded off a certain solo motif. When that student had it, he'd rotate to the next student.
Eventually he turned all 3 of us loose for freestyle solo'ing, but warning us to not step on each other's solos. "Wait till the other guy finishes and returns to the basic before you start your own thing."
Some of Mocidade's paradinhas
Third surdo, solo style, for when the bateria is not playing yet and it's just you and the cavaquinho player starting off the samba-enredo. He made a clear distinction between having a very audible left hand slap ("escola style") or a completely silent left hand touch ("Studio style. For when you are recording the samba-enredo in the studio.")
Third surdo, Mangueira style. They call the third surdo the mo ("maw") surdo. (I read on Roda de Samba that this is a contraction of "maior", greater, referring not to its size but to its higher-pitched sound)
Third surdo, Salgueiro style. He emphasized how it fits with the song (using Explode Coracao as an example)
Third surdo, Mocidade style. From here we went into a ton of third-surdo solos... very fun....
Caixa, "generic escola style" (Viradouro/Salgueiro)
Caixa, Mangueira style. He played it single-stroke! I've never seen anybody do that! He also left out the 4.
Caixa, Mocidade style, to finish it off.

whew, what a lesson!! We'd arranged 1 hr and it ended up going 2.5 hrs.

I learned he uses different terms for some particular kinds of third-surdo motifs:

To play a string of just "and's" is to cut, "cortar":
--X- --X- --X- --X-
..."cutting" right between the main beats. One AND two AND three AND four AND.
Third surdos almost always do a couple measures of this when the samba-enredo song moves from the first part to the second part. The cutting helps stabilize the band during those song transitions. (Hence "cutter", by the way, another name for third surdo.)

To play a string of just ee's and uh's is to turn, "virar":
-X-X -X-X -X-X -X-X
This is the classic third-surdo motif that appears in all third-surdo solos. You're not really a third-surdo player till you can do an endless string of these and never, ever, lose your place, never lose your swing, and never return crossed.
And he signals it deliberately, Jonas said, whenever he wants the bateria to speed up. He said the thirds can speed up the whole bateria just by themselves.

Then there's another third-surdo motif
-XX- -XX- -XX- -XX-
... which Jonas seemed to regard as a variant of the -X-X. He recommends this one to stabilize the bateria after you've just sped it up. "First you play -X-X to speed them up, then when they arrive at the tempo you want, you switch to -XX- to stabilize them," he said.

And for freestyle solos, of course, anything goes! Except, well, there actually IS a subtle vocabulary to it. You always close out your variations with a left hand slap on a 1. You drop back to the basic now and then. You trade off with other third-surdos and don't step on their solos. And you always fit your solo in with the song. And there's some things you would never do on third surdo....you'd never do half-note triplets.... you'd never do 3-across-4. Throughout your playing, even the solos, you're supposed to be HELPING the bateria, providing a clear reference for everybody, not just doing whatever the hell you want! Jonas described how caixa players around a certain third-surdo player will tend to cue in on him, time their playing off his, even cluster around him physically. I've seen them do this, and they did it to me sometimes. It's partly a challenge ("Show me what you got!"), partly a compliment ("hey, that's cool! Do some more!"), and partly they're using you as a reference for their own playing. Sometimes you'll get little subsets of the bateria clumping up in separate bunches around the different third-surdo guys.

It's the repinique guys who can play the crazier stuff. Jonas said "The repiniques go off and do their own thing - " - gesturing with his hand veering way off to the side - "for a while, for a minute or two; but not very long. then they come back and settle down again for a long while." - his hand swooping back to the center. "The caixas just go straight." Hand arrowing straight forward. "They go straight the whole time, like a motor. But the thirds and tamborims are the two with the longest solos, the longest desenhos, the most interesting stuff."

A couple other vocab things while I'm on it: A "gargalhada" (gargle) is the repinique call that starts with the sestuplet roll. There is a "long gargalhada" and a "short gargalhada" . He also uses "sapatinho" instead of "carreteiro" for the fast tamborim turn. Gotta ask Nana about that terminology....

I am so glad I managed to get him for one more lesson!

And it felt so good to be playing again.