Jam Report #5: 3/4/01

[annathepiper]

As originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 10/1/05.

Paul joins us on the guitar. I sing for once. Songs: "Old Black Rum", "Consequence Free", "Mari Mac".

Today's jam session started out with an intellectual challenge: trying to figure out exactly what key "Old Black Rum" was in. This proved rather difficult until my spouse pointed out that I was in fact playing half a step higher than the recorded version on Rant and Roar -- and when I retuned Shine and kicked down half a step and suddenly realized I was in F rather than F sharp, the song got a hell of a lot easier.

So after my mate and I futzed around with the flutes a bit, and the singers and guitars had shown up, this ditty of course became the first one of the session we played with. The results of this were:

1. There's no bridge in the song, so the singers had to figure out exactly where to breathe,
   
   
2. I still need to figure out interesting things to do on Shine to make the instrumentals vary a little more. Because we were pretty much all singing and playing the melody, and we need a bit more variety in there, and
   
   
3. kathrynt (Kathryn) with her lovely and operatic voice is just belting this ditty out way too darned pretty. ;) So I came in on the last time through to try to help with the "belting it out" aspect of the vocals.

(Side note #1: Kathryn now swears up and down I'm lying to myself when I claim I can't sing. Awww gosh. :) Though I did point out that I have two problems when attempting to sing, and these are trying to hold a key vocally, and also that I happen to sing with an Elvis Presley accent because I sang along with all of my Elvis records in my formative years.

Side note #2: Kathryn says I sing mezzo-soprano. And that I could probably train myself up into soprano range. So try to imagine Elvis Presley's Memphis drawl on top of a mezzo-soprano as she's trying to belt out "Old Black Rum" and you'll get an idea of what I sound like. Not to mention that I'm also from Kentucky, so Ah ten' t' drawl a lot when Ah ain't payin' attenshun. You'd think that this would mean I ought to be singing about Wild Turkey bourbon rather than the Old Black Rum, but well hey.

But, in the words of the immortal Tom Lehrer, I digress.)

Aaaaaaaanyway, we kicked into "Consequence Free" for a short interlude, but didn't actually try to do it formally, on account of Kathryn had put in a request for us to go straight into "Mari Mac".

And that was COOL. We actually dragged our housemate spazzkat (Paul) into the instrumentals with us, as he's been working hard the last several weeks on learning the guitar and he'd picked up the basic chords to "Mari Mac". So we had three guitars, me on Shine and my partner on one of her biggest bamboo flutes, and Kathryn and ssha (Cyn) belting out the vocals. We had some hitches trying to figure out the breaks between choruses and verses (that's three, count 'em, three measures there, counting the diddle-iddle-dums sung by Mr. McCann) and where exactly we want to speed up. But once we figured out to let the guitars set the tempo and everybody else should key off of them, we actually made it through the song at a pretty decent rate. I'm getting some decent twiddles on the piccolo as well, though I still need to figure out where I'm trilling and on what notes, and where exactly to play the higher twiddles towards the end.

Total roster of attendees: me, my spouse, our housemate Paul, Kathryn, her brother daspatrick (Patrick), Monica, and Cyn. No percussion as Fred was on duty and our housemate mamishka (Mimi) was occupied.

The pie: chocolate creme.

We may meet again on the 11th. On the 18th we'll all be too wiped in the aftermath of St. Paddy's Day to play, so if we don't meet on the 11th it'll be the 25th before our next report!