- Reflections on Learning
- My play excerpt at the Playwright's Festival
- Robert Wallace and Total Rhythm
- Reaffirming a committment
- State of Grace
- The Holy Trinity of Music's Appeal
- Cold weather and drumming don't mix
- Cheb-i-Sabbah and the spirituality of the musical moment
- Refound: The English Beat's "I Just Can't Stop It"
- Lessons from a yogi
process
Reflections on Learning
Submitted by Palmito on July 12, 2008 - 7:03pm.I've often wondered what was the (dare we say "karmic"?) reason for me to spend 2 years as a Tech Director at a school. I think one of the significant things I gained was an interest in examining the learning process. One thing my time at the school taught me was the basic concepts of not only learning, but reflecting on your learning. How do you learn? What makes learning easier or harder? And what have you learned? What came easily, and what took work - and how do you feel about either?
Cold weather and drumming don't mix
Submitted by Palmito on May 12, 2008 - 8:31am.Over the winter I was pretty frustrated, because I wanted to do more "micro-drumming" - i.e. spend 5-10 minutes practicing the pandeiro, or on the congas remembering some of the old rhythms I used to play with my first drum teacher. But I was cold, and the circulation in my hands is terrible. Drumming is not made for cold weather. In a very non-rigorous scientific observation, I can't think of any hand drumming tradition that comes from cold countries. Barring the Irish frame drum of course; but there is ample evidence that this drum came up from North Africa anyway. (No, I can't cite sources - I told you this was non-rigorous).
Lessons from a yogi
Submitted by Palmito on February 29, 2008 - 5:36pm.I've been thinking about the process of learning a lot lately. Partly because I work at a school, so it's a topic that comes up a lot anyway. And I'm looking a lot at my own learning, particularly since I'm learning how to play the pandeiro, and also partly because I recently got a chance to sit down with my first drum teacher, Sango Muyiwa, which was exhilarating and humbling at the same time. It made me realize how far I had come, but also how much farther ahead he was that I ever imagined.&a
Caxixis and the upbeat
Submitted by Palmito on December 14, 2007 - 5:00pm.[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).
