[I took this workshop over a month ago, and am just getting around to posting my thoughts that I wrote down right after the worskhop....]

This weekend I took a caxixi workshop from Cabello. (In keeping with Brazilian tradition, we'll just stick with his first name, even though he has a last name). Cabello is like every Brazilian capoeiristo I've met outside of Bahia: small, wiry but muscular, tattooed, reminding me of a sailor. He smiled broadly the entire time, and almost never stopped moving.

Caxixi [KA-shee-shee] are Brazilian shakers, woven bell-shaped instruments with seeds inside and a hard gourd bottom. I knew that you could shake the seeds against the bottom and get a hard accent, and you could turn it sideways and get a softer sound (the seeds against the weave). I've also put in enough "shaker-time" to get the requisite accented samba swing (an oversimplification is FORWARD-back-forward-back-FORWARD-back-forward-back).

But all it took was one other student - someone who had done this before, obviously - to pick up a caxixi casually, start rocking forward and back, and then turn the bottom of the gourd towards himself and create the hard accent on the upbeat... and a huge cog in my head went CLICK. All of a sudden I saw a whole new set of rhythms you could create using that upbeat accent. (My previous experience has been with different sized shakers that create different sounds, using one in each hand to create a series of heavy and light accents).

The "upbeat" accent was a revelation. We practiced a series of patterns, always with two shakers of the same size, moving a the same time - so the upbeat accent became the main way to create syncopation. If you think of any major clavé - 3/2; 5 note "Brazilian clavé"; baiao or samba-roda, even rumba clavé - you can break them down into 16th notes, or 8 notes of alternating "sides." I've always thought of these alternating sides as "right / left" because I'm a conga player, and I tend break down rhythms by tapping them out with alternating hands. Here the patterns were broken down into forward-back. Suddenly, with the ability to make upbeats with these shakers, we could play every major clavé, and subsequently dozens of variations. CLICK. Wow.

The other revelation was the power of what I call "the holy trinity" - dance, music and song. By the end of class, we had a simple two-step going, working a rhythm on the caxixis and singing additional melody (or rhythm) parts. That was magical. I've always known the combination of singing and drumming it pretty special, but moving as well is pretty tough for me. I've danced in clubs for years, and usually dance to the syncopated accents. So trying to stick to a straight two-step while playing a syncopated rhythm works against every dancing instinct I have. Ultimately it's about letting go - letting your body to the work (drumming and moving), and letting the song come out of your mouth. Between the new world of caxixi rhythms and the group chanting / music we created at the end of class, I was on a high for the next week.

(A nod and big thanks goes to Robert Wallace for bringing Cabello to town.)