Jam Report #55: 12/1/02
Dec. 1st, 2002 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 2/6/06.
In which we have only four Jammers, but a whole lot of pie; in which we play with songs both new and old, and dip our toes into ragtime-flavored political humor. Songs: "Whiskey You're the Devil", "Mari-Mac", "Jolly Butcher", "Oregon Anthem", "Goin' Up".
I have, far and away, set a brand new record for lateness of posting of Jam Reports: nearly two months' worth of late, for our 55th Jam! Suffice to say... there has been much going on in life that has gotten in the way of being on time for reporting on our Jams. Here, though, is the long overdue report for that particular session, held the Sunday following Thanksgiving.
Since it was a holiday weekend, we had a very reduced set of jammers;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka (Mimi) was still off on the east coast on her two-month painting gig, and ssha (Cyn) was off visiting her kinfolk for Thanksgiving. This meant me, solarbird (Dara), Monica, and Fred for jamming, though spazzkat (Paul) popped in briefly at the beginning while we yakked about the chords and lyrics of "Whiskey You're the Devil". Paul remarked bemusedly upon the line that goes "over hills and mountains and to Ameri-kay", and we explained it was supposed to rhyme with "you're leading me astray" and "spunkier than tay!" Still, though, granted, it does tend to make one think "and to a Mary Kay" as well.
We decided in this session that we did still think the verses of this song suck, though no one had a problem with either the tune or the chorus. Monica proposed that I go on a search for better lyrics, and Fred noted that he had the lyrics of the version of the song performed by the Pogues; however, those are the same lyrics. And although I did conduct a search online, I couldn't find substantially different versions of the song. It would help if the various verses weren't just random; the first verse is about war, but the second and third ones just don't really go with it.
So I went wandering through my songbooks looking for some inspiration as to what we might do about the lyrics (hey, swiping verses from other songs worked for Great Big Sea and "Mari-Mac", so there ya go). I discovered a song called "The Moonshiner", which turned out to be the ancestor of a Star Wars filk song I know about Han Solo and Chewbacca. I giggled again over "Mountain Dew", which I need to learn at some point just on general principles of that being my favorite soft drink (I still have a line in my head that would go "but the dew that's green and toxic is the only dew for me!" for when I get around to writing a song about my favorite version of "mountain dew").
More giggles were also had over a song which had the lyrics "well it's all for me grog, me jolly jolly grog, all for me beer and tobacco, for I spent all me tin on the lassies drinkin' gin, across the western ocean I must wander", and another one with the title "Three Drunken Ladies".
While I looked through the songbooks, Monica got out the chords for "The Christians and the Pagans" and futzed around with them, but we wound up not doing a real take of it. I futzed around as well, but with the chords to "Mari-Mac". During the futzing, we got sidetracked with needing to give Monica some advice on a matter going on in her life; although this kept us from making any music for a while, it did rather need to be done. And well hey, jamming group bonding experience.
Eventually, though, we moved back to making some music -- after I knocked over my mandolin, and led Dara to make the first of a series of quips that pretty much set the tone for the whole session: "If you knock your instruments about, they'll be more likely to obey you. This message brought to you by the 18th century!"
Actual making of music resumed with more "Whiskey You're the Devil." Since Monica wasn't up to singing, Fred boldly offered to try to sing the song himself. Since we'd previously determined that this song's native key isn't too terribly nice to my voice, my singing wasn't really an option, especially since I wanted to play. I needed the practice on the chords, since I wasn't too solid with C7 on the guitar, and I'd decided that I could play this song more easily on Rags than I could on Autumn. This realization was helped when I figured out that C7 was pretty much the same fingering as C, only with my pinky added in to round out the chord. Once we decided what we wanted to do for a simple intro, basically playing the chord line that goes under "whiskey you're my darlin' drunk or sober", we took a stab at it. Fred was the primary singer, with Dara jumping in here and there to help him carry the melody.
Some debate arose about how the melody goes on the very last bit of the verses; in the first verse, this is the bit that goes "the devil a-home will come tonight". Dara opined that the melody sounded better hitting several consecutive D's, which turned out to be what we had in fact been singing. What was written out in the songbook had the melody dropping down to C at the beginning of that phrase. Since the chord being hit at that particular place was a D7, either C or D seemed to work there since both of those notes fit into that chord. We chatted back and forth about which way to sing it, and decided that it didn't really matter which way we did it so long as we were all clear on what we were doing... though it would still somewhat depend on who decided to sing it.
The second and third takes of this were pretty heavily mangled, partly due to my discovery that changing from G7 (which is awkward to finger on my wide-necked guitar) back over to C was tangling up my fingers. Fred also needed vocal assistance, though it can be said for Fred that he definitely has the right sort of vocal style for this song. Dara let out another quip as well while we were playing with these two takes, dubbing this song "Whiskey You're My Boyfriend".
On, then, over to "Mari-Mac". Monica took over the singing, counting us off with "and a 7 and a 9 and a 42, hike!", while I tried playing my guitar on this song for giggles and grins. I wanted the practice on the chords, and moreover, we needed the additional rhythm muscle since we had only the four of us playing. The fun result of this was that since without a piccolo in my hands my mouth was freed up, I could actually come in on some of the choruses, singing "my mother's makin' me marry Mari-Mac". Unfortunately, I couldn't do that consistently, especially after we got to the speedups in the latter part of the song. The "obviously needs further work" result of this experiment, though, was my determining that I was still shaky trying to follow the tempo changes and in remembering where the guitars are supposed to drop out on the choruses following the "wedding's on a Wednesday" and "sure to be a grand affair" verses.
We definitely missed Cyn on the fiddle, though, and Dara came in on the trill to signal the speedups a verse late. This turned out to be because Dara was listening for a particular guitar cue that Monica forgot to do.
"We sounded just like Carbon Leaf!" -- Fred, after we finished the first take. (Fred, you see, had commented upon that particular band's version of this song, and asserted that on a good day he thinks we play it better than they do. This, however, was not a good day for us playing "Mari-Mac".)
After the first take, Dara suggested that we really ought to try to shoot for speeding up a little every single verse, not play the first four verses at the same tempo or even slow down as we usually do. Useful tips, both of these, especially when we don't have Mimi on percussion to give us a backbone of rhythm to work from. We reminded Monica of her status as Mistress of the Tempo since she was the one singing, reminded each other to watch Monica to follow her tempo changes, and took another crack at it.
The second take had a bit less Suck to it. I sang again on the "my mother's makin' me marry Mari-Mac" line of the choruses, here and there; Dara missed the trill again, and I missed the speed up. I was shaky all throughout the latter verses, at which point I couldn't try to sing since I was playing too fast and couldn't do both things at once (something which I will clearly need to practice in the future since I would rather like to be able to sing on this song). And Monica took us out with a bit of a Tarzan yell on the final bars.
At this point, Dara came up with a brilliant idea, and her brilliant idea was this: that we should try doing the tempo changes by having the "umba-deedle" bits after every chorus be the place where the speedups happen. Up until this session we had been speeding up after those bits. It wasn't anything she'd necessarily actively considered, but just came as a realization that that must surely be how Great Big Sea is handling their speedups.
"Learning the secrets of Great Big Sea," I remarked happily, since it was very clear that the lovely and talented Mr. McCann has been having his bandmates key off of him every time he belts out an "umba-deedle", once Dara pointed it out.
Fred came back with, "Better than having Bob duct-taped to a chair right in the corner!" That got a whole pile of giggles. (Though we wouldn't really duct-tape the lovely and talented Mr. Hallett to a chair in the corner, honest, folks. Hells bells, I'd still be scared to talk to the man, if it happens that I actually get within vocal range of him again at some point! ;) But at any rate...)
I determined that I can sorta kinda sing "Mari-Mac" while strumming, but I can't do it in my upper octave. Which kind of makes sense, since this fits in with what I've noticed trying to sing along with GBS doing "Mari-Mac" while going somewhere in the car. Dara then volunteered to try to sing it, which required me to hunt down some lyrics since she didn't know them, and to also switch over to playing piccolo again since we needed the flute cues.
However, Dara then realized that the melody she has in her head for this song is her flute part, which while is not necessarily inappropriate, is also extremely difficult to sing. She decided it'd be way too fast for her to sing with decent tone at her stage of vocal skill, so we opted to try it once more with Monica singing and trying to implement Dara's suggestion about the tempo changes. So I switched back to my guitar, and off we went on take three.
As pretty much expected, the take sucked, since we were trying to do a brand new trick with this song that absolutely none of us had had any practice doing. Dara observed that Monica kept trying to speed up on the umba-deedles and right after them as well, which threw us off. But this didn't happen with all of the verses, and when it was done right, it gave us places where things came together noticeably solidly. This seemed to be a very good argument in support of Dara's tempo theory.
Dara teased us all about how we'd only been playing for well nigh unto two years, and it was she who'd clued in on this. I told her, "We've been playing it wrong just to fuck with you, Dara."
"Well, I am a genius," she blithely replied.
By then, though, we were pretty much done with working with this song, so we went on to butcher the Butcher.
Dara needed to remind herself of how the bridge went, so she shot through it at top speed just to put the notes back into her fingers; I finally played the piccolo for real this session, and at least on the recording came through louder than Monica. Monica, it must be noted, got in some nice solid rhythm with her guitar.
But I totally lost track of where we were, though, coming into the bridge; I thought I was heading into the verse right before. I managed to recover and picked up a couple measures into the bridge, but still, it came out rather sucky. Cyn's fiddle was sorely missed here as well; the added layer of voice the fiddle provides under the flutes is a good feel to have to the bridge. Overall we deemed it a train wreck, but at least one that occurred towards the beginning of the song and did some recovery towards the end, which is what you want to do if you have to have a train wreck in a song.
We moved on next to playing with a new ditty, a thing called "Oregon Anthem" which had in fact been written by Monica's uncle. Monica initially described it to us as an "anti-California" song, though she then downgraded to "a song that makes jokes about the fault lines in California and generally just makes fun of the state". It is in fact a political-humor song, done in ragtime style, though some of the humor is dated; there's a joke made about the governor of California dating Linda Ronstadt. Monica had come armed with a recording, so we took some time to listen to it and see if we could figure out what key it was in, and if we could pick up the melody.
The overall ragtime flavor of the song was a definite departure in style for us, as was trying to figure out how to apply the set of instruments we have to a ditty in which the primary instrument was the piano. Although we do have the electronic keyboard at our disposal, we haven't yet actually tackled playing the thing like a piano during a jam; mostly, it serves as an aid to picking out melodies and keys when we need to, and that's how we used it this time.
With the keyboard's aid, Dara determined that the song was in fact in C sharp. This, she informed us, makes for a trivial scale to follow on the piano, and can make a piano player sound far better than he or she actually is at the instrument. Initially this declaration of key confused the hell out of me, because I'd been hitting E's and A's all over the place trying to pick out a melody myself on my piccolo, and neither of those notes belong in that key. This naturally led to needing to doublecheck the tuning of my piccolo. And also led to my realization that I wasn't the slightest bit comfy with the native key of this song, on the grounds that I am not well-versed any more in producing the scale of C sharp. I proposed that we transpose the song into C or D, which met with a unanimous clamor in favor of D.
Monica wound up doing a considerable amount of futzing trying to figure out an appropriate chord line for this song in the key of D, and while she went about doing that I did futzing of my own, trying to figure out if I could play "Old Black Rum" in its native key of F on the guitar. Finally, though, once she had the chords figured out, we opted to put the song away for the time being and give Monica the chance to distribute the chords in email to those who wanted them, and I asked her as well if she could get her uncle to confirm the key of C sharp on the song for us.
Moreover, I pointed out that in case there was any doubt, this was an anti-California song. A line like "stand and cheer that good ol' fault line / as California slips into the sea!" in the chorus did rather give it away.
In the middle of Monica's chord-futzing Dara passed on another nugget of wisdom to us, this being that we should obviously never, ever, ever add the crumhorn to the list of instruments played by members of our group.
For those of you unfamiliar with crumhorns, they are a medieval instrument noted in literature of the time for their "sweet, melodic tone". Dara encountered one of these things at Lark in the Morning, and reported to us that trying to play one feels like "a joy buzzer in your face". She wound up proclaiming the instrument "a dirty trick". And we note it here now for general reference, in the hope that none of our unsuspecting gentle readers will pick up a crumhorn with the expectation that actual melody will emerge when it is played!
We also got major giggles out of some of the pictures in my songbook of various Irish tunes as arranged by the Clancy Brothers. One of these pictures had a very clean-cut, sober-looking man in it, and Dara proclaimed this picture "Fox Mulder, folksinger!" It was rather amazing how the guy in the picture did rather resemble David Duchovny, and although I promptly shot off on a tangent about how "Following their expulsion from the FBI, Mulder and Scully embarked on an unsuccessful folksinging career," the woman in the picture sadly did not resemble Scully nearly so much as her companion resembled Mulder. Dang.
Last up, we decided to play "Goin' Up". And I went back to the octave mandolin, since I can still (even as of this writing on 1/26/03) do the G-C-D chord changes better on Autumn than I can on Rags.
The first take fell apart as Monica lost track of how many measures go in between the choruses and verses. We had some issues as well with what octave to sing it in; this song is in a flavor of G that seems to fail to play well with most of our singers' voices. The rhythm section was all over the place, as I play a different strum pattern than Monica does, and when we get out of sync it really shows. Moreover, we still don't have a bridge for this song, because in addition to being lame about writing the Jam Reports I have been lame about transcribing the bridge for us to play with. And although I can kind of reproduce it in my head, I can't really do it on the piccolo yet. Ah well.
After playing with this for a single take we pretty much called it time for Pie. Of which there was a considerable amount, since we had both apple and pumpkin left over from Thanksgiving and Monica showed up with a pumpkin pie as well.
Now that I've gotten this Jam Report written hopefully #56 won't be too far behind -- but it's going to be a bit of a challenge as neither Dara nor I are exactly sure where the disc is! So that Jam will be coming... well, when it comes.
Till then, all,
Anna the Piper
In which we have only four Jammers, but a whole lot of pie; in which we play with songs both new and old, and dip our toes into ragtime-flavored political humor. Songs: "Whiskey You're the Devil", "Mari-Mac", "Jolly Butcher", "Oregon Anthem", "Goin' Up".
I have, far and away, set a brand new record for lateness of posting of Jam Reports: nearly two months' worth of late, for our 55th Jam! Suffice to say... there has been much going on in life that has gotten in the way of being on time for reporting on our Jams. Here, though, is the long overdue report for that particular session, held the Sunday following Thanksgiving.
Since it was a holiday weekend, we had a very reduced set of jammers;
mamishka (Mimi) was still off on the east coast on her two-month painting gig, and ssha (Cyn) was off visiting her kinfolk for Thanksgiving. This meant me, solarbird (Dara), Monica, and Fred for jamming, though spazzkat (Paul) popped in briefly at the beginning while we yakked about the chords and lyrics of "Whiskey You're the Devil". Paul remarked bemusedly upon the line that goes "over hills and mountains and to Ameri-kay", and we explained it was supposed to rhyme with "you're leading me astray" and "spunkier than tay!" Still, though, granted, it does tend to make one think "and to a Mary Kay" as well.We decided in this session that we did still think the verses of this song suck, though no one had a problem with either the tune or the chorus. Monica proposed that I go on a search for better lyrics, and Fred noted that he had the lyrics of the version of the song performed by the Pogues; however, those are the same lyrics. And although I did conduct a search online, I couldn't find substantially different versions of the song. It would help if the various verses weren't just random; the first verse is about war, but the second and third ones just don't really go with it.
So I went wandering through my songbooks looking for some inspiration as to what we might do about the lyrics (hey, swiping verses from other songs worked for Great Big Sea and "Mari-Mac", so there ya go). I discovered a song called "The Moonshiner", which turned out to be the ancestor of a Star Wars filk song I know about Han Solo and Chewbacca. I giggled again over "Mountain Dew", which I need to learn at some point just on general principles of that being my favorite soft drink (I still have a line in my head that would go "but the dew that's green and toxic is the only dew for me!" for when I get around to writing a song about my favorite version of "mountain dew").
More giggles were also had over a song which had the lyrics "well it's all for me grog, me jolly jolly grog, all for me beer and tobacco, for I spent all me tin on the lassies drinkin' gin, across the western ocean I must wander", and another one with the title "Three Drunken Ladies".
While I looked through the songbooks, Monica got out the chords for "The Christians and the Pagans" and futzed around with them, but we wound up not doing a real take of it. I futzed around as well, but with the chords to "Mari-Mac". During the futzing, we got sidetracked with needing to give Monica some advice on a matter going on in her life; although this kept us from making any music for a while, it did rather need to be done. And well hey, jamming group bonding experience.
Eventually, though, we moved back to making some music -- after I knocked over my mandolin, and led Dara to make the first of a series of quips that pretty much set the tone for the whole session: "If you knock your instruments about, they'll be more likely to obey you. This message brought to you by the 18th century!"
Actual making of music resumed with more "Whiskey You're the Devil." Since Monica wasn't up to singing, Fred boldly offered to try to sing the song himself. Since we'd previously determined that this song's native key isn't too terribly nice to my voice, my singing wasn't really an option, especially since I wanted to play. I needed the practice on the chords, since I wasn't too solid with C7 on the guitar, and I'd decided that I could play this song more easily on Rags than I could on Autumn. This realization was helped when I figured out that C7 was pretty much the same fingering as C, only with my pinky added in to round out the chord. Once we decided what we wanted to do for a simple intro, basically playing the chord line that goes under "whiskey you're my darlin' drunk or sober", we took a stab at it. Fred was the primary singer, with Dara jumping in here and there to help him carry the melody.
Some debate arose about how the melody goes on the very last bit of the verses; in the first verse, this is the bit that goes "the devil a-home will come tonight". Dara opined that the melody sounded better hitting several consecutive D's, which turned out to be what we had in fact been singing. What was written out in the songbook had the melody dropping down to C at the beginning of that phrase. Since the chord being hit at that particular place was a D7, either C or D seemed to work there since both of those notes fit into that chord. We chatted back and forth about which way to sing it, and decided that it didn't really matter which way we did it so long as we were all clear on what we were doing... though it would still somewhat depend on who decided to sing it.
The second and third takes of this were pretty heavily mangled, partly due to my discovery that changing from G7 (which is awkward to finger on my wide-necked guitar) back over to C was tangling up my fingers. Fred also needed vocal assistance, though it can be said for Fred that he definitely has the right sort of vocal style for this song. Dara let out another quip as well while we were playing with these two takes, dubbing this song "Whiskey You're My Boyfriend".
On, then, over to "Mari-Mac". Monica took over the singing, counting us off with "and a 7 and a 9 and a 42, hike!", while I tried playing my guitar on this song for giggles and grins. I wanted the practice on the chords, and moreover, we needed the additional rhythm muscle since we had only the four of us playing. The fun result of this was that since without a piccolo in my hands my mouth was freed up, I could actually come in on some of the choruses, singing "my mother's makin' me marry Mari-Mac". Unfortunately, I couldn't do that consistently, especially after we got to the speedups in the latter part of the song. The "obviously needs further work" result of this experiment, though, was my determining that I was still shaky trying to follow the tempo changes and in remembering where the guitars are supposed to drop out on the choruses following the "wedding's on a Wednesday" and "sure to be a grand affair" verses.
We definitely missed Cyn on the fiddle, though, and Dara came in on the trill to signal the speedups a verse late. This turned out to be because Dara was listening for a particular guitar cue that Monica forgot to do.
"We sounded just like Carbon Leaf!" -- Fred, after we finished the first take. (Fred, you see, had commented upon that particular band's version of this song, and asserted that on a good day he thinks we play it better than they do. This, however, was not a good day for us playing "Mari-Mac".)
After the first take, Dara suggested that we really ought to try to shoot for speeding up a little every single verse, not play the first four verses at the same tempo or even slow down as we usually do. Useful tips, both of these, especially when we don't have Mimi on percussion to give us a backbone of rhythm to work from. We reminded Monica of her status as Mistress of the Tempo since she was the one singing, reminded each other to watch Monica to follow her tempo changes, and took another crack at it.
The second take had a bit less Suck to it. I sang again on the "my mother's makin' me marry Mari-Mac" line of the choruses, here and there; Dara missed the trill again, and I missed the speed up. I was shaky all throughout the latter verses, at which point I couldn't try to sing since I was playing too fast and couldn't do both things at once (something which I will clearly need to practice in the future since I would rather like to be able to sing on this song). And Monica took us out with a bit of a Tarzan yell on the final bars.
At this point, Dara came up with a brilliant idea, and her brilliant idea was this: that we should try doing the tempo changes by having the "umba-deedle" bits after every chorus be the place where the speedups happen. Up until this session we had been speeding up after those bits. It wasn't anything she'd necessarily actively considered, but just came as a realization that that must surely be how Great Big Sea is handling their speedups.
"Learning the secrets of Great Big Sea," I remarked happily, since it was very clear that the lovely and talented Mr. McCann has been having his bandmates key off of him every time he belts out an "umba-deedle", once Dara pointed it out.
Fred came back with, "Better than having Bob duct-taped to a chair right in the corner!" That got a whole pile of giggles. (Though we wouldn't really duct-tape the lovely and talented Mr. Hallett to a chair in the corner, honest, folks. Hells bells, I'd still be scared to talk to the man, if it happens that I actually get within vocal range of him again at some point! ;) But at any rate...)
I determined that I can sorta kinda sing "Mari-Mac" while strumming, but I can't do it in my upper octave. Which kind of makes sense, since this fits in with what I've noticed trying to sing along with GBS doing "Mari-Mac" while going somewhere in the car. Dara then volunteered to try to sing it, which required me to hunt down some lyrics since she didn't know them, and to also switch over to playing piccolo again since we needed the flute cues.
However, Dara then realized that the melody she has in her head for this song is her flute part, which while is not necessarily inappropriate, is also extremely difficult to sing. She decided it'd be way too fast for her to sing with decent tone at her stage of vocal skill, so we opted to try it once more with Monica singing and trying to implement Dara's suggestion about the tempo changes. So I switched back to my guitar, and off we went on take three.
As pretty much expected, the take sucked, since we were trying to do a brand new trick with this song that absolutely none of us had had any practice doing. Dara observed that Monica kept trying to speed up on the umba-deedles and right after them as well, which threw us off. But this didn't happen with all of the verses, and when it was done right, it gave us places where things came together noticeably solidly. This seemed to be a very good argument in support of Dara's tempo theory.
Dara teased us all about how we'd only been playing for well nigh unto two years, and it was she who'd clued in on this. I told her, "We've been playing it wrong just to fuck with you, Dara."
"Well, I am a genius," she blithely replied.
By then, though, we were pretty much done with working with this song, so we went on to butcher the Butcher.
Dara needed to remind herself of how the bridge went, so she shot through it at top speed just to put the notes back into her fingers; I finally played the piccolo for real this session, and at least on the recording came through louder than Monica. Monica, it must be noted, got in some nice solid rhythm with her guitar.
But I totally lost track of where we were, though, coming into the bridge; I thought I was heading into the verse right before. I managed to recover and picked up a couple measures into the bridge, but still, it came out rather sucky. Cyn's fiddle was sorely missed here as well; the added layer of voice the fiddle provides under the flutes is a good feel to have to the bridge. Overall we deemed it a train wreck, but at least one that occurred towards the beginning of the song and did some recovery towards the end, which is what you want to do if you have to have a train wreck in a song.
We moved on next to playing with a new ditty, a thing called "Oregon Anthem" which had in fact been written by Monica's uncle. Monica initially described it to us as an "anti-California" song, though she then downgraded to "a song that makes jokes about the fault lines in California and generally just makes fun of the state". It is in fact a political-humor song, done in ragtime style, though some of the humor is dated; there's a joke made about the governor of California dating Linda Ronstadt. Monica had come armed with a recording, so we took some time to listen to it and see if we could figure out what key it was in, and if we could pick up the melody.
The overall ragtime flavor of the song was a definite departure in style for us, as was trying to figure out how to apply the set of instruments we have to a ditty in which the primary instrument was the piano. Although we do have the electronic keyboard at our disposal, we haven't yet actually tackled playing the thing like a piano during a jam; mostly, it serves as an aid to picking out melodies and keys when we need to, and that's how we used it this time.
With the keyboard's aid, Dara determined that the song was in fact in C sharp. This, she informed us, makes for a trivial scale to follow on the piano, and can make a piano player sound far better than he or she actually is at the instrument. Initially this declaration of key confused the hell out of me, because I'd been hitting E's and A's all over the place trying to pick out a melody myself on my piccolo, and neither of those notes belong in that key. This naturally led to needing to doublecheck the tuning of my piccolo. And also led to my realization that I wasn't the slightest bit comfy with the native key of this song, on the grounds that I am not well-versed any more in producing the scale of C sharp. I proposed that we transpose the song into C or D, which met with a unanimous clamor in favor of D.
Monica wound up doing a considerable amount of futzing trying to figure out an appropriate chord line for this song in the key of D, and while she went about doing that I did futzing of my own, trying to figure out if I could play "Old Black Rum" in its native key of F on the guitar. Finally, though, once she had the chords figured out, we opted to put the song away for the time being and give Monica the chance to distribute the chords in email to those who wanted them, and I asked her as well if she could get her uncle to confirm the key of C sharp on the song for us.
Moreover, I pointed out that in case there was any doubt, this was an anti-California song. A line like "stand and cheer that good ol' fault line / as California slips into the sea!" in the chorus did rather give it away.
In the middle of Monica's chord-futzing Dara passed on another nugget of wisdom to us, this being that we should obviously never, ever, ever add the crumhorn to the list of instruments played by members of our group.
For those of you unfamiliar with crumhorns, they are a medieval instrument noted in literature of the time for their "sweet, melodic tone". Dara encountered one of these things at Lark in the Morning, and reported to us that trying to play one feels like "a joy buzzer in your face". She wound up proclaiming the instrument "a dirty trick". And we note it here now for general reference, in the hope that none of our unsuspecting gentle readers will pick up a crumhorn with the expectation that actual melody will emerge when it is played!
We also got major giggles out of some of the pictures in my songbook of various Irish tunes as arranged by the Clancy Brothers. One of these pictures had a very clean-cut, sober-looking man in it, and Dara proclaimed this picture "Fox Mulder, folksinger!" It was rather amazing how the guy in the picture did rather resemble David Duchovny, and although I promptly shot off on a tangent about how "Following their expulsion from the FBI, Mulder and Scully embarked on an unsuccessful folksinging career," the woman in the picture sadly did not resemble Scully nearly so much as her companion resembled Mulder. Dang.
Last up, we decided to play "Goin' Up". And I went back to the octave mandolin, since I can still (even as of this writing on 1/26/03) do the G-C-D chord changes better on Autumn than I can on Rags.
The first take fell apart as Monica lost track of how many measures go in between the choruses and verses. We had some issues as well with what octave to sing it in; this song is in a flavor of G that seems to fail to play well with most of our singers' voices. The rhythm section was all over the place, as I play a different strum pattern than Monica does, and when we get out of sync it really shows. Moreover, we still don't have a bridge for this song, because in addition to being lame about writing the Jam Reports I have been lame about transcribing the bridge for us to play with. And although I can kind of reproduce it in my head, I can't really do it on the piccolo yet. Ah well.
After playing with this for a single take we pretty much called it time for Pie. Of which there was a considerable amount, since we had both apple and pumpkin left over from Thanksgiving and Monica showed up with a pumpkin pie as well.
Now that I've gotten this Jam Report written hopefully #56 won't be too far behind -- but it's going to be a bit of a challenge as neither Dara nor I are exactly sure where the disc is! So that Jam will be coming... well, when it comes.
Till then, all,
Anna the Piper