Drum Arabesque Communique: #4

I've been playing Cajon more than Darbuka lately, band practice with my band Iron Dwarf has been excellent, the more I relax into the music the better I get, prolonged drum rolls now flowing with much greater ease than ever before. I thought it was about confidence. Confidence is something that you build up, just like you build up skill, and so, the better one's skill, the corresponding confidence should make musicianship profoundly stable and reliable. But that's not the case is it?

Somehow, the greater the skill, the more teetering the vertigo is from atop that assumed height.

I think that somewhere there is a plateau where one's concern for the imagined outcome is no longer relevant to the music. When one's concern falls away, the real skill can stretch unburdened by thinking. Drum rolls flowing with much greater ease, nine beat gypsy limping finally feeling like skipping dancing and that tightness in my chest is gone as if it never were, and my shoulders no longer hunch up as I play faster, but rather each beat lets me sink further into a state of unconcerned attentiveness. Still passionate, still involved, still all the good things of music, but without the fear of falling. Without doubt my qualities make themselves know to me...

Igor Stravinski said Music restores order from Chaos, in particular, the relationship of man to time.

Tangled up in our ideas and feelings about time, how powerful are our expectations?

Anna Enquist, in her book Counterpoint, says this:

Music taught you strange things about time. Music transported you outside time, produced a state in you where there was not yet a question of time. Music filled you to such an extent that watches no longer ticked. Yet there was no medium that indicated the passing of time so exactly. Music synchronised the strokes of rowers, could make soldiers march in step effortlessly, let two thousand people in a concert hall breathe at the same moment. And music referred to her own silence because in every beginning an ending was announced. Despite the sorrow of the announced conclusion you longed for the unfolding of the melody, for the harmonies slipping by, even for the cursed ending. A puzzle.

I would like to share some music with you.

First, The Mexican, by Iron Dwarf. I share this one because it has some interesting timing changes that would serve as good drum practice just listening to it. It's a fast and furious instrumental piece.

Second, a snippet of my Saturday afternoon practice. I have been working on routine patterns a lot in drumming. Play a rhythm through, make a variation, return to the root, then play a second variation, then return to the root and back again. This rhythm is a heavy variant on the Nau Ashta 9/8 rhythm.

Third is a demo recording of new song I'm still developing on Ukulele. It's currently called HayAllah, for obvious reasons. When you listen to this song, keep your ears open for a melody that follows the HayAllah pattern, it will make for a good practice to drum along with this one.  Also, I think this might be the best thing I've ever done on uke.

And last but not least, a short video from your gig at the psychic fair.

So there you have it.

Also, if you don't already know about it, my new blog, Letters to Cicero (and my other dead friends) is off to a strong start. So if you're into the ancient world, or writing letters to ghosts, check it out.

Letters to Cicero (and my other dead friends)

Also Also, check out Matt Stonehouse on Facebook. He has been posting little videos for his frame drum classes in Victoria. He's one of my drum heroes.

Matt Stonehouse (Drum Teacher)

DoumDoumDoum-tekaTek-kaTek-kaTekka

Drum Arabesque: Communique #3 - Play for the Sun

Saturday. I drum in the morning, well, it is midday before I get out of bed, having spent the morning reading and writing. From my front steps I face the creek and the hillside, the grass a brilliant sandy white sea across the slope, waves lapping at a rocky shore. When my hands touch the drum I do not tell them what to do and they begin playing one of my deeply familiar rhythms, a Baladi with a variation every second cycle. So I practice my dance/drum solo patterns, interspersed with this first rhythm, then shifting to HayAllah, then Nau Ashta in 9/8, then Heavy Saiidi, then back to the Baladi variant, and round and round I go. Gradually I become aware of a resonance, like a second player with me, and I look up from my hands and hear the drum voice echoing back to me from the hillside. The landscape itself is my accompanist.

The afternoon light turns golden, pot plants in the house begin to glow against the western windows and I rush to grab my uke, heading for the back porch. Plucking and strumming, I lift my face directly into the light and let the warmth in. I let the magnificent glow of sunset in. I let the music that is inside me, out. I never play so sweetly as I do when I play for the sun.

As the light dims, broken up by trees and grasses, I get up and follow the sun across the hillside, still strumming and plucking, and I have never played so sweetly as I did standing there on the rocks.

*

I am rediscovering the pleasure of playing music for myself, and for the pleasure it gives me to play with no purpose, no outcome, no audience. I am disciplined in my practice because the pleasure of music is so lovingly bound to the discovery and development of new skills. Searching for, and finding new techniques, new melodies, new rhythm patterns is exciting. It is not daunting to think of finding something new to try, there are limitless possibilities, and inspirations that can be drawn from the most basic building blocks of life.

Two Carrots

Consonants = Doum, Vowels = Tek

T-w-o-C-a-r-r-o-t-s

D-D-T-DkTkD-D-TkD-T---

Rhythms can be sourced from any pattern. Melodies, harmonies, entire arrangements can be heard in the patterns of bird song, interspersed with traffic noise, kitchen cutlery clunking and clanging and kids jumping and shouting. A song could be built from that last sentence alone. Everything you see, hear, think, feel and do, can become an inspiration for music, and your perspective, your bias is actually the most valuable component, for music is an expression of you, as an individual, with a lifetime of baggage to help the groove along.

Your tough childhood,             Verse
your morning commute,         Verse
your aching back,                      Break
your candle-lit dinner,             Chorus

Today for me.

The Saturday sleep in,           Instrumental Intro
the breakfast in bed,              Verse
a book in my hand,                  Verse 
the kids in the lounge room,   Chorus

*     *     *

And this week, another video for you.  This one was recorded a few months ago.

Garyan by Zebulon