Robert Wallace is releasing his newest instructional DVD on how to play caxixis (see my experience in one of his workshops here), and as usual he's throwing a free party - at one of my favorite Oakland wine bars to boot!

[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).