Fun at Folklife 2002
May. 27th, 2002 03:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThree Good Measures did not meet to Jam this past weekend, on the grounds that a significant number of us were going to be attending the annual Folklife Festival here in Seattle, even if we weren't ready to busk at it yet. The members of the Murkworks household, to be sure, have had this as an annual tradition for some time and we weren't about to skip it!
For those of you unfamiliar with Folklife, it is a huge folk music festival they hold here every year over Memorial Day weekend. It runs for four days, brings in hordes of people, and is chock full of musical goodness of dozens of varieties from all over the world.
We wound up not being organized to make a group outing of it, this year, though several of us wanted to go. Specifically,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird and I attended yesterday and expressed a goal between us of doing a bit more active viewing of the various musical acts this time around than we have done in past years, which have often simply involved wandering around the craft displays (though I make a point every year of visiting Romy Benton's flute table in the musical instruments emporium), eating fair food, and taking cursory glances at whatever performances we happen to pass.
This year turned out to be a bit different, though. Dar and I watched some Hawai'ian hula dancing, then went and watched a show by a Canadian band out of Vancouver, by the name of Blackthorn. They were most enjoyable, especially their flute player, who pleased me to no end by pulling out a piccolo during parts of her performances -- it was great to see that somebody besides me had thought to use a piccolo in Celtic-flavored music.
While we were watching Blackthorn, though, I happened to glance at the schedule I was carrying around and saw a little blurb about something called the "Band Scramble".
This is apparently a yearly tradition at Folklife, though I only just now found out about it this year. It involves you tossing your name and what you play into a box, and they pull all the names out and randomly assign them into groups. You and your group are given an hour to rehearse and then you have to get on the stage, the very same stage where the professionals have been playing, and play something in front of the audience. The idea is to see how well you can come together as a band. And the guy in charge encouraged us to not worry as much necessarily about sounding good as much as trying to be a cohesive unit; moreover, he also encouraged 'cheap theatrics' as a means to get us all doing something and contributing to the overall flow of the group. Lastly, we needed to come up with a name for ourselves.
I told Dar it sounded like fun, and Dar said she would do it if I would. The problem I had with it was that the only instrument I had with me was my flute Sage -- whose native key is A minor, and I was kind of leery about the ability to improvise something in a group with that flute. However, Dar gave me a very distinct "WUSS!" look, informed me that I knew I wanted to do it, and so I gave in!
Dar and I wound up getting assigned to different groups, about which we were not surprised, especially after the guy in charge specifically said that they wouldn't put people married to one another in the same group. We weren't exactly easy to miss, though, with a surname like Korra'ti, and we were standing right in front of him as well and helpfully pointed out how to pronounce our name.
My group, in addition to me, included two guitar players, a fiddle player, a hammered dulcimer player (who I actually recognized as someone who had performed at the filk at Norwescon this year, which was a pleasant surprise), a lady with a whistle, and an old fellow with some spoons and a most charming ability to stick his fingers in his mouth and whistle. Once we started trying to work something out, though, it quickly became apparent that I was a bit of a liability!
First of all, my instrument's limited key meant that the whistle player and I weren't under any circumstances going to play nicely together in the same song. She could do D and G, pretty much, and I was going to be best able to improvise in C and A minor in the short time we had available. So we had to figure out things that she could play and things that I could play, and ways to make smooth transitions between them.
This left me without anything to do when I wasn't playing the flute, though. The old fellow tried to show me some dance steps -- but that didn't work out at all. I apparently don't have much physical rhythm, or at least not enough to learn dance steps in the short time we had allotted! Nor could I really try to sing anything, since the various things I know got blank looks from everybody else, except "Mari Mac". The dulcimer guy had in fact sung that at the Norwescon filk, though he knew a more trad version of it than Great Big Sea's arrangement; however, Dar had called dibs on trying to talk her group into playing that, so I didn't want to try to swipe it.
We finally got something that more or less came together, at least in terms of transitions. Tempo was another question. We didn't have any of the bodhran players that showed up, so we didn't have the luxury of a drum to keep time for us, and we didn't really have enough time to get solid enough on our tempo. The old fellow -- I didn't catch his name, unfortunately -- did some neat things with counting us off in Gaelic and inserting some lyrics for "The Irish Washerwoman" in between the whistle player's performance, and between that and his fingers-in-mouth whistling trick he easily had the best 'cheap theatrics' of the lot of us. ;) I settled for just sort of jigging around in my down time while the whistler was playing.
When our rehearsal hour was up we headed back to the stage. En route Old Gentleman recommended me trying a different instrument if I do this again -- which, I told him, had already occurred to me. I told him about the "wuss" look that Dar had given me, which got me a bit of amusement, so that helped me feel better about not being much on the improv with Sage!
Dar's group was performing when we got back, and I have to admit it was pretty keen to see Dar up there on the stage with a bunch of other musicians. I didn't recognize the instrumentals they did, but they did do a version of "Ramblin' Rover" in the middle of their little set, a song I know from the Fables! Their singer had the verses in a different order, but it was very much the same song that I've heard the Fables do. They sounded tighter than we did, which was doubtless helped by their getting one of the bodhrans; they had the accordion player, too. Their "band name" turned out to be Over Twenty, Under Ninety.
My group was up next, and we wound up calling ourselves the Screaming Jeebies just because that's the name that the Old Fellow came up with and none of the rest of us had thought to come up with anything better. Oh well!
I didn't feel as nervous on the stage as I might have expected. Thinking about it, I realize that this was not in fact the first time I'd ever been on a stage; I played plenty of band concerts in school, after all. And it helps immensely to be in a big group of people, as opposed to standing out. If I'd had to sing, I might well have been more nervous though!
The stage crew got us arranged, and adjusted the mikes, and then we went at it. Our tempo was messy -- though I got a giggle out of the fiddle player turning to me and getting me to dance with him in the middle of one of the whistle player's segments. That was pretty fun, even though we almost tripped over the cords on the stage.
It turned out that we came in well under the amount of time we had allotted; I think I'd heard the guy in charge tell us we needed to shoot for 6-8 minutes' worth of material. Our falling short of that, though, I think was another side effect of me having a not-useful instrument with me. We were done quite quickly, and yielded up the stage to Tequila Before Breakfast.
They were far and away the best of the lot of us. They had the tightest overall sound, and furthermore had the best 'cheap theatrics' -- like all of them yelling "TEQUILA!" at a suitably dramatic point, as well as two of them jumping down off the stage and running out to dance in front while the rest of the group continued to play. They had all the coolest instruments as well; they got the banjo.
Dar and I waited to see how they would come out, and neither of us were surprised in the slightest that they won the Scramble and got as their award the live tree that was standing in this year for a trophy (since the Festival had an overall forest sort of theme). But while we were listening to them play, we had one final note of amusement as this complete stranger wandered over. Dar had spotted him dancing in front of the stage while her group was playing... and during the third group's performance, the guy just gently tugged me out to dance with him, without saying a word. It was weird but kind of cool, even though I didn't get an opportunity to put down my stuff, so there I was in front of a couple hundred people dancing around with my backpack!
Dar's main lament, aside from tempo issues and the general awfulness of the sound mixing, was that she didn't have a camera with her so that we could get pictures of the two of us from a couple of angles on the stage, to use as "tour photos".
Overall verdict: very, very fun. I am very likely to try to do this again next year, but if I do, I'm coming armed with either Shine or one of my mandolins to be better able to handle a wider range of keys. It made for a whole new added level of enjoyment to the Festival!
For those of you unfamiliar with Folklife, it is a huge folk music festival they hold here every year over Memorial Day weekend. It runs for four days, brings in hordes of people, and is chock full of musical goodness of dozens of varieties from all over the world.
We wound up not being organized to make a group outing of it, this year, though several of us wanted to go. Specifically,
solarbird and I attended yesterday and expressed a goal between us of doing a bit more active viewing of the various musical acts this time around than we have done in past years, which have often simply involved wandering around the craft displays (though I make a point every year of visiting Romy Benton's flute table in the musical instruments emporium), eating fair food, and taking cursory glances at whatever performances we happen to pass. This year turned out to be a bit different, though. Dar and I watched some Hawai'ian hula dancing, then went and watched a show by a Canadian band out of Vancouver, by the name of Blackthorn. They were most enjoyable, especially their flute player, who pleased me to no end by pulling out a piccolo during parts of her performances -- it was great to see that somebody besides me had thought to use a piccolo in Celtic-flavored music.
While we were watching Blackthorn, though, I happened to glance at the schedule I was carrying around and saw a little blurb about something called the "Band Scramble".
This is apparently a yearly tradition at Folklife, though I only just now found out about it this year. It involves you tossing your name and what you play into a box, and they pull all the names out and randomly assign them into groups. You and your group are given an hour to rehearse and then you have to get on the stage, the very same stage where the professionals have been playing, and play something in front of the audience. The idea is to see how well you can come together as a band. And the guy in charge encouraged us to not worry as much necessarily about sounding good as much as trying to be a cohesive unit; moreover, he also encouraged 'cheap theatrics' as a means to get us all doing something and contributing to the overall flow of the group. Lastly, we needed to come up with a name for ourselves.
I told Dar it sounded like fun, and Dar said she would do it if I would. The problem I had with it was that the only instrument I had with me was my flute Sage -- whose native key is A minor, and I was kind of leery about the ability to improvise something in a group with that flute. However, Dar gave me a very distinct "WUSS!" look, informed me that I knew I wanted to do it, and so I gave in!
Dar and I wound up getting assigned to different groups, about which we were not surprised, especially after the guy in charge specifically said that they wouldn't put people married to one another in the same group. We weren't exactly easy to miss, though, with a surname like Korra'ti, and we were standing right in front of him as well and helpfully pointed out how to pronounce our name.
My group, in addition to me, included two guitar players, a fiddle player, a hammered dulcimer player (who I actually recognized as someone who had performed at the filk at Norwescon this year, which was a pleasant surprise), a lady with a whistle, and an old fellow with some spoons and a most charming ability to stick his fingers in his mouth and whistle. Once we started trying to work something out, though, it quickly became apparent that I was a bit of a liability!
First of all, my instrument's limited key meant that the whistle player and I weren't under any circumstances going to play nicely together in the same song. She could do D and G, pretty much, and I was going to be best able to improvise in C and A minor in the short time we had available. So we had to figure out things that she could play and things that I could play, and ways to make smooth transitions between them.
This left me without anything to do when I wasn't playing the flute, though. The old fellow tried to show me some dance steps -- but that didn't work out at all. I apparently don't have much physical rhythm, or at least not enough to learn dance steps in the short time we had allotted! Nor could I really try to sing anything, since the various things I know got blank looks from everybody else, except "Mari Mac". The dulcimer guy had in fact sung that at the Norwescon filk, though he knew a more trad version of it than Great Big Sea's arrangement; however, Dar had called dibs on trying to talk her group into playing that, so I didn't want to try to swipe it.
We finally got something that more or less came together, at least in terms of transitions. Tempo was another question. We didn't have any of the bodhran players that showed up, so we didn't have the luxury of a drum to keep time for us, and we didn't really have enough time to get solid enough on our tempo. The old fellow -- I didn't catch his name, unfortunately -- did some neat things with counting us off in Gaelic and inserting some lyrics for "The Irish Washerwoman" in between the whistle player's performance, and between that and his fingers-in-mouth whistling trick he easily had the best 'cheap theatrics' of the lot of us. ;) I settled for just sort of jigging around in my down time while the whistler was playing.
When our rehearsal hour was up we headed back to the stage. En route Old Gentleman recommended me trying a different instrument if I do this again -- which, I told him, had already occurred to me. I told him about the "wuss" look that Dar had given me, which got me a bit of amusement, so that helped me feel better about not being much on the improv with Sage!
Dar's group was performing when we got back, and I have to admit it was pretty keen to see Dar up there on the stage with a bunch of other musicians. I didn't recognize the instrumentals they did, but they did do a version of "Ramblin' Rover" in the middle of their little set, a song I know from the Fables! Their singer had the verses in a different order, but it was very much the same song that I've heard the Fables do. They sounded tighter than we did, which was doubtless helped by their getting one of the bodhrans; they had the accordion player, too. Their "band name" turned out to be Over Twenty, Under Ninety.
My group was up next, and we wound up calling ourselves the Screaming Jeebies just because that's the name that the Old Fellow came up with and none of the rest of us had thought to come up with anything better. Oh well!
I didn't feel as nervous on the stage as I might have expected. Thinking about it, I realize that this was not in fact the first time I'd ever been on a stage; I played plenty of band concerts in school, after all. And it helps immensely to be in a big group of people, as opposed to standing out. If I'd had to sing, I might well have been more nervous though!
The stage crew got us arranged, and adjusted the mikes, and then we went at it. Our tempo was messy -- though I got a giggle out of the fiddle player turning to me and getting me to dance with him in the middle of one of the whistle player's segments. That was pretty fun, even though we almost tripped over the cords on the stage.
It turned out that we came in well under the amount of time we had allotted; I think I'd heard the guy in charge tell us we needed to shoot for 6-8 minutes' worth of material. Our falling short of that, though, I think was another side effect of me having a not-useful instrument with me. We were done quite quickly, and yielded up the stage to Tequila Before Breakfast.
They were far and away the best of the lot of us. They had the tightest overall sound, and furthermore had the best 'cheap theatrics' -- like all of them yelling "TEQUILA!" at a suitably dramatic point, as well as two of them jumping down off the stage and running out to dance in front while the rest of the group continued to play. They had all the coolest instruments as well; they got the banjo.
Dar and I waited to see how they would come out, and neither of us were surprised in the slightest that they won the Scramble and got as their award the live tree that was standing in this year for a trophy (since the Festival had an overall forest sort of theme). But while we were listening to them play, we had one final note of amusement as this complete stranger wandered over. Dar had spotted him dancing in front of the stage while her group was playing... and during the third group's performance, the guy just gently tugged me out to dance with him, without saying a word. It was weird but kind of cool, even though I didn't get an opportunity to put down my stuff, so there I was in front of a couple hundred people dancing around with my backpack!
Dar's main lament, aside from tempo issues and the general awfulness of the sound mixing, was that she didn't have a camera with her so that we could get pictures of the two of us from a couple of angles on the stage, to use as "tour photos".
Overall verdict: very, very fun. I am very likely to try to do this again next year, but if I do, I'm coming armed with either Shine or one of my mandolins to be better able to handle a wider range of keys. It made for a whole new added level of enjoyment to the Festival!