Sunday, April 16, 2006

Anatomy of a Rehearsal.

This is a close up of the group I play with African Touch. Here are a couple of pictures from a rehearsal that we had yesterday. For the time being we have a guest among us. The girl in the picture is from Austria and she is traveling around Africa for 5 months. She'll be in Saint-Louis for an undetermined amount of time, but one thing is certain she is going to perform with us at least once. Yesterday we were practicing my very first song. I wrote it this week using some of the harmonies of another song we play (in the jazz tradition). What this means is that you take existing chords of another song and write a new melody over them creating a new song. There are tons of songs out the with the same chord progression, but what makes them unique is the melody. I also wrote some words to go with it. It was a weird experience hearing the song come to life, but one that I enojoyed nonetheless. I'm looking forward to writing more, however probably without words. It was kinda in this one case that words were necessary. Oh yeah, I didn't mention it was a love song. As embarrassing and hard as it is to share...here is the text.

I want you to be the one for me
I need you to be that one
but I know that it’s impractical
So I warn myself that I must stop
Now one thing I don’t understand
Is how, I still love you.

They say that love is unpredictable
And when love comes it’s undeniable
And you can’t stop what must be true
For us, although you think you know yourself
But one thing you can’t understand
Is why, you won’t love me too.

So what does this mean for the two of us
Does it mean that we should stop because
Not you, not me sense that love will work
For us, so we just keep holding back
Except the one thing we don’t comprehend
Is that love, is simply love.


So yeah once again below are pictures from the rehearsal....




The Bassit Vito is always all smiles.




Here is Jamal, Vito, and Verena working out a part together.


Our incomprable Bayiuma is on the other side of the room beating polyrhythmic delights


Here is Verena trying to work out a difficult line


And out leader Monsieur Jamal Thibault. He's the one who created the group and taugh jazz basics to these Senegalese guys. Because of all of his hard work I was able to just join seamlessly like it was a regular jazz group. Despite the fact that the Senegalese guys were talented musicians the rules of jazz are quite challenging...There's a form that you must respect and you must know where you are down to the beat in the song form at every moment. And that is difficult to learn especially if you are used to just playing something simple repetitively or a call/response format as is the case in African drumming.

Not bad for a weekend...
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