Jam Report #24: 9/16/01

[annathepiper]

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

In which all of us are present for once to jam, despite several of us having recently been afflicted by plagues (and Anna manages to jam while on Nyquil); in which we manage to roll out two printable takes; and in which we wax patriotic, because we really kinda needed to. Songs: "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Mari-Mac", "Jolly Butcher", "The Chemical Worker's Song", "General Taylor", "America the Beautiful".

Today, the Murkjammers were out in full force for jamming. All nine of us. This hasn't happened in a while, and even though more than one of us have been wrestling colds and sinus infections and other nasties and plagues all week, we did nevertheless all get together to make some music. Considering the week we've all had, it was really needed.

This session saw a lot of in-between-take jamming; the presence of the electric instruments seems to foster this. We did a bit of a chord progression that sounded like it belonged in "La Bamba", and we also played with "Y.O.D.A." -- if you can imagine a take of that particular Weird Al ditty with almost choral harmony. Fred's concertina made several rounds through the group as well, between mamishka (Mimi) and daspatrick (Patrick). Monica did a few stabs at "Sexuality". But in terms of formal songs we actually tried to do, we had six of 'em, as follows:

• "You Woke Up My Neighborhood" sounded fairly decent with the entire horde of us, though yours truly had a bit of an issue trying to get in all the chord changes from D to A to G on her mandolin, and not to mention that I kept coughing in the initial takes. I'm starting to learn about different fingerings to do the same chord, and the A I actually want to use here is a bit of a stretch for my teeny tiny fingers. It also took me a bit to figure out how to get in the same strum pattern that the guitars were doing -- and listening to the recording of us, I have an interesting time trying to differentiate between me on the mandolin and Fred on the dulcimer.
  
  

  
  (I am, however, getting better at playing suitably loudly to be differentiated from the guitars. And something fun and magical happened between this session and the last one -- I suddenly figured out how to play chords on the upstroke as well as the downstroke, so suddenly I'm able to get a lot more volume out of my instrument.)
  
  

  
  We have a bit of debate amongst us as to whether to play this one with a drum. Mimi thus far has chosen not to play any drum whatsoever on this ditty, but then again, this means we have tempo issues. Next time, perhaps, we'll try it with Mimi on a drum of some sort.
  
  

  
  Patrick broke out his electric guitar on some of the subsequent takes as well, which sounded very good and blended nicely with the other string instruments.
  
  

• "Mari-Mac" had definite issues with me on the piccolo, since this cold of mine made it a trifle difficult to get all my twiddles on Shine in the right places; I forgot to trill in the right place as well on the first take, where I'm supposed to clue in everyone else that the tempo's speeding up. The guitars had issues remembering when to drop out from under Kathryn's "umba-diddles". kathrynt (Kathryn) had issues with her jaw aching -- and in fact commented on not being able to believe that "Mari-Mac" does her actual physical hurt! We broke her out a heat pad and let her soak up heat out of that for a while, to help take care of that.
  
  

  
  We have a consensus now though that when we have all nine of us, we have the requisite phalanx of stringed instruments we need to give "Mari-Mac" the power it requires -- three guitars and the dulcimer. I am under orders, though, not to play mandolin on this ditty since I am needed on the piccolo. Still, it was rather satisfying to look over at Monica's chords for this song and realize that I do in fact know the chords.
  
  

  
  Alarmingly enough, we got this song up to positively blinding tempo -- as Patrick described it, "the fastest we didn't do it." We did in fact get it out faster at the end than the B'ys have done it, and I had images of us blazing past four startled looking Newfoundlanders, but unfortunately we didn't in fact manage to hold the song together at that tempo.
  
  

• "Jolly Butcher" had some more issues with me on the piccolo; I pretty much determined that I was playing the mandolin easier today, since this cold of mine made it difficult for me to keep my breath steady on Shine. ssha (Cyn) reports to all of us that while she was singing her part on this song, she was doing so in a complete daze. Which is rather where I was, as it happens; this is what you get when trying to play your instrument on Nyquil! That, and a lot of squeaks and spikes on the piccolo part.
  
  
• We touched again on "The Chemical Worker's Song", which we hadn't done in a very long time. Mimi broke out her bodhran and Fred broke out his bones, which gave us a bit of depth to the percussion, though Mimi and Fred decided they needed to work out a rhythm for him to be following there; Mimi also changed the way she was holding her tipper on the last take, and got her bodhran to put out a louder, deeper tone which this song really needs. We also need some lower voices on this to round out the vocals; Patrick's making noises about joining in on the vocals with us.
  
  
• We also touched again on "General Taylor" -- with a full seven of us singing, and Mimi on the lead. solarbird (Dara) played on her very lowest flute. But with Patrick, Fred, and Cyn all singing low parts, and me singing vaguely low, we got some lovely rounded harmony out of this. Our group consensus is that we sound rather Christmas-carol-y... and, well, we have a take for y'all to check out for yourselves.
  
  
• Last but not least, because Kathryn felt a need and because a number of us rather agreed with her, we did "America the Beautiful". We had some issues digging up the lyrics and chords for it, but Monica did in fact have some chords. Which, we discovered, were rather similar to the chords for "Puff the Magic Dragon", and we debated whether this meant "Puff the Magic Dragon" was in fact a patriotic song -- to which I pointed out, yes, if you happen to be from Honalee.

The pie: apple. Because it seemed appropriate. And we had it with vanilla ice cream, too.

We decided to punt back to a two-week jamming schedule this session, as well, though we may continue to have off-schedule jamming sessions depending on how many of us show up. So our next report will be either in one week or two.

Cheers all,
Anna the Piper