My first jam on congas went much better than I anticipated. Really fun, actually.
Mark Soth gathered a group of us at his place last night to jam a bit in prep for a gig in mid-October ~~ Mark plus Mike Scanlon, Danielle Nance, and David Bordow. Others will probably join later ~~ players will come and go from practice to practice, and from song to song during the gig. Mark is calling the project Out of Context, which has layers of meaning . . . and a specially personal meaning for me: doing percussion in a band sure is a new context for me!
This is not just a whim, though, this is a strategy.
We, Burnt Sugar Blues, have been without a percussionist for three months and I figured to jump into the breach as a supplemental percussionist to fill in a little during parts of songs when I'm not singing. Never having mastered snapping my fingers in steady rhythm while singing with focus, I set my goal for alternating between singing and percussion without awkward fumbling of percussion pieces and microphones. Nominal grace would be a significant accomplishment for me.
When my children started lessons in West African drumming from Fonziba Koster, I started right along with them to give them a little boost of confidence in the new endeavor. Even before that, I'd been joining in at drum circles, but I did not have much confidence for keeping a rhythm for a band during a whole song, plus pounding it out loud enough to make a difference instead of just scooting around on the edges. So confidence was the next goal after nominal grace.
After confidence I wanted creativity ~~ to be able to tune into the needs of the song and add a rhythm to support it. I figured I'd be asking for a lot of advice from other band members.
Well. Maybe it was beginner's luck.
Mark Soth heard I wanted to learn this new skill, so he invited me to the jam and set up a nice pair of congas plus a microphone on a stand, which was weird for me because I like to hold the mic in my right hand. So I ignored the mic and started with r-e-a-l-l-y simple rhythms, just to keep the 1 and 3 going, sometimes all 1, 2, 3, and 4. It was fun, though, having two drums in front of me, so I played around a little, and a little more.
By about the middle of the jam, we played "Can't Find My Way Home," for which I happen to know most of the words without a lyric sheet in front of me, although I wondered if I'd freeze up and forget them all. What a shocker to find myself playing all the way through while singing at the same time!
Maybe I'll be able to work with a mic stand. Maybe I'll be able to juggle multiple pieces and parts without dropping them. Seems I can maintain some kind of beat while singing, although I don't have the perspective to know how steady it is. It was a heckuva a lot more fun than I thought it would be to play one single rhythm all the way through a song without changing it up. I always wondered how drummers could do that without going crazy. Well, gosh, it felt cool, not crazy.
To add to my astonishment, I found enough creative juice to use a different rhythm pattern for nearly every song we played that evening. I thought it would take several jams to learn some grace, confidence, and style with percussion, so I'm really pleased to get this far the first time.