Thursday’s concert was the usual, it’s getting to seem like, mixed bag. Basically the crowd had a few speeches to listen to before making there way into the concert hall, and the plan was that we start playing once the speeches ended… Whoever among the organizers thought that the speeches would only take 1/2 an hour was pretty naif, especially in this area where folks take their speeches very seriously.
We were ready, hyped up and on scheduled at 18h30. At 18h45 it became clear that the speeches would last another 45min at least. Not wanting to stay in the over hot and stuffy theater, this week’s heatwave had made its way inside by then, off we went to have a beer…
On the positive side, I think we were all more relaxed at 19:30 when the concert actually started and the first piece “African Shuffle” seems to have gone well. We had moved a bit closer to one another after the last rehearsal to make sure we would hear each other, and although the crowd was relatively noisy it all seems to have balanced out. This was the first time we actually played it for the 10 minutes it was meant to last and I could see folks below pointing our way.
“Steve’s 96” was next and I believe it went OK too. I had a brass washboard with nylon brushes and a repetitious rhythm to keep steady, also for about 10 minutes, only interrupted by a couple of breaks. The break pattern was where I had most of my worries since I had a tendency to speed it up and sometimes lose it entirely. In any case besides the fact that after 4-5 minutes sweat was pouring off of me like rain it all went smoothly.
Towards the end of it, the technician who had warned us when to begin, helped set us up, and all that came by to tell Bill something and he immediately had us begin the transition towards the third piece: “Sylvie’s Seven”.
About the transitions: all the tonatems were organized by tuning and lined up against the uppermost back wall of the theater’s balcony, so after each piece we had to walk up to the back while plucking randomly on our instrument, put it in place, find and pick up the tonatem tuned for the next piece, and while playing random notes on it too, move down to our next playing spot since we were to rotate our position on the balcony between each piece too. Meanwhile the had been percussionist would continue playing their rhythm until the percussionist to be came and replaced them creating a sort of fade into effect.
In this case Sylvie had just replaced me at the percussion desk and I was heading up back to get my next tonatem when Bill gave a sign to stop it all and the theater’s organ started to growl; which it was planed to do but only after we had finished playing.
It turns out that the theater’s director became worried that because of the extra hour of speeches, people would leave before the end of the event and decided to shorten our performance (which shows were we where as far as the order of importance goes). The technician had come to tell Bill we would have to end it all in less than ten minutes but then received another call from above saying it was over…
Cellphones, you got to hate them…
So we only where able to do half the show which, as Bill gallantly put it, was pretty much the coitus interruptus.
Rehearsing "Steve's 96"