Jam Report #20: 8/12/01

[annathepiper]

As originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 10/4/05.

In which most of us are not here, and those of us who are left are pretty sleepy, but we try to make music anyway! Songs: "Dancing With Mrs. White", "Si Bheag Si Mhor", "The Floral Dance", Mimi's title-less guitar piece.

Not much of a jam session today, because:

1. Most of us were gone, what with the Tewsons off for a family reunion, Fred on duty, and Monica -- well, we're not sure where Monica was, but she wasn't here;
   
   
2. solarbird (Dara), spazzkat (Paul) and I spent most of yesterday driving and hiking out on the Olympic peninsula to look at the Perseids meteor shower last night. Which, I might add, was quite fine, but it also meant that although we got back in time for jamming, we were all pretty sleepy. Paul sat out entirely, though Dar and I did take a stab at trying to make at least a little music with ssha (Cyn) and mamishka (Mimi).

What we wound up doing:

• "Dancing With Mrs. White" -- Dara and I have been working on this one off and on outside the formal jam sessions, just to see if we can make it sound good with two flutes. We have a way to go yet on this, though it was cool to have Mimi playing along on her drums to give us a beat.
  
  
• A brief passing stab at "Si Bheag Si Mhor" -- which I've been trying to learn on the mandolin. The problem with this is that I can't really play the chord changes on this very quickly yet, so I'm not quite up to performing it in full jam.
  
  
• Random mandolin jamming, with "The Floral Dance" -- one of the exercises out of my mandolin book. The book has you play it in three different keys, A, D, and G, and so I played through it several times while Dara and Cyn and Mimi tossed random other things underneath it to jam along. A was determined to be the key of preference, at least by Mimi, who liked the sound of my upper strings on this particular exercise.
  
  
• Random guitar jamming, with a piece Mimi composed on her guitar some time ago. It has no title, and the extra special impressive thing about this is that Mimi claims she can't play the guitar. She has since told me that she did take a summer class, but this ditty of hers doesn't appear to have any 'official' chords in it. She pretty much built it by deciding what sounded good. We played around with this for a while to try to figure out what key she put it together it, and we came up with a tentative answer of E minor, E major, D minor, and D major. (Yes, it changes. ;) )

And she has a lovely guitar, too, it must be noted. It used to belong to her grandfather, and she says it's a "classic" acoustic guitar, which means it has a wider neck than most. It also has this lovely warm patina of age all over it -- a look I hadn't really ever had a visual reference for, until I looked at her instrument -- and a rich, mellow sound to it. Half her strings are metal and the other are nylon, which adds to the depth of the sound.

After a while we kind of petered out, though, since Dara and I were both very groggy. Next time, hopefully, we'll have a bigger session again!

In the meantime, in case any of y'all are interested, we have decided to admit that we, um, er, actually HAVE been recording ourselves for some time now -- in fact, since our 6th sesison. We have a small assortment of MP3's from this and that session over the last several weeks online, including a couple we think will be our Kitchen Tapes submissions unless we manage to do something better. These MP3's will be going onto the website we're making -- as we appear to have officially labelled ourselves "Three Good Measures", we pretty much figured we needed a webpage ;) -- but until then, if anybody wants me to post specific URLs to the MP3 files in question, holler and I'll make 'em go. We've got versions of "Mari Mac" and "Jolly Butcher"!

This week's pie: cherry. We've still got some left, too!

Cheers,
Anna the Piper