annathepiper | Jam Report #8: 4/8/01 (Reply)

As originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 10/2/05.

Kathryn shows up with her harp for the first time; Cyn brings her first loaner violin. Songs: "Jolly Butcher", "Cat and the Fiddle", "Little Beggarman".

Yet again a reduced jam session this past weekend, with the attendees being myself, my mate

solarbird (Dara),

spazzkat (Paul),

ssha (Cyn), Monica, and

kathrynt (Kathryn).

This was the jam session of New Instruments. Although Kathryn claims she is not in fact an instrument size queen, she now gets the award for Biggest Instrument Among the Murkjammers, now that she is renting a 36-string harp. She can't actually play anything on it yet, but it looks awfully impressive!

(This, of course, being said by the current holder of the Smallest Instrument Among the Murkjammers. I note with pride that I can kinda sorta pick out five, count 'em, five songs of the B'ys' on my little ocarina now, those being "Lukey", "Old Black Rum", "Rant and Roar", "Consequence Free", and "Trois Navires de Ble". I've tried "General Taylor" and "Jolly Butcher", but those don't seem to fit nicely into a single scale. Darn!)

Continuing the theme of New Instruments, Cyn showed up with her loaner violin, though when she tried to tune it the E-string snapped, much to her consternation. However, she was able to call up a guy from the shop she'd gotten the loaner from -- and he got into his Actual Car, came to our Actual House, and brought her an Actual Replacement String. He even put it onto the instrument for her! Talk about your service, huh? :)

The songs of this session:

"Jolly Butcher", yet again. On which we are slowly but surely improving. I actually managed to hit the high G on Shine heading through the bridge, though I'm still shaky playing it up to speed. We are also still shaky in general keeping all of us to tempo on this ditty, but we're slowly learning how to let Monica keep the tempo and the rest of us follow HER.
"Cat and the Fiddle" -- another GBS break, trying this ditty of Heather Alexander's again. This goes over well with the guitar players of the group, 'cause it has exactly three chords and pretty much the same strum pattern all the way through. Paul joined in with us at this point in the session, which rather improved the overall sound of the song -- he's been practicing blues chords, you see, and having them in there helped this song a lot. So did my figuring out what I wanted to do with piccolo twiddles to round out the song some.

We listened to a few snippets of other Heather Alexander songs as well, though nothing struck us immediately as easy enough for our amateur ears to try to pick out. Besides, we'd have to transcribe her lyrics since there aren't any on the Web! (We looked.)
"Little Beggarman" -- back to GBS again, sort of. Kathryn's treatment of this song is more traditional, akin to how Darrell performs it live rather than how Sean does it, sort of techno-style, on Play and Rant and Roar.

For this, though, we delved into our Actual Songbooks to get an idea of key and rhythm, and I discovered that the whistle twiddles that you hear on the aforementioned discs did not in fact work with how we tried to play the song, since they're rather major-flavored and our treatment was sort of minor-y, or at least Mixolydian-y, for those of you who are music geek enough to get an idea of what that would sound like. They were also in the wrong key. :)

The pie: bumbleberry! Which none of us had ever had before, and which was quite tasty.

More not this weekend, but the weekend after next. A significant subset of the Murkjammers will be attending the science fiction convention Norwescon this weekend, so we won't be getting together.

Anna the Piper