Jazz man,
play your song
to the beating rain

*******

stealth
words
to the mark.
gone before you know
how they will echo in your heart

Back to the banjo

While I've been playing over the last few weeks, I haven't been taking lessons since the middle of December - there's just been too much going on for both my instructor and myself. But I sat down, and played, and played pretty well, I think, though I did make a couple "typos" from not really having warmed up.

And now, I'm looking at some "grown up" songs: "Pretty Polly", "Fair and Tender Ladies", and "Man of Constant Sorrow" (And looking at getting a songbook! Woot!)

A year ago, I had never even held a banjo. Now, I can tune one, replace the strings, play the g scale and a handful of songs. I can even sort of "noodle tunefully" which I would never have believed last April as I tried to figure out exactly how to get both of my hands to cooperate in making the notes. The nails on my left hand are all short now, sacrificed to the need to catch the strings going straight down for clear fretting. I've figured out how to hold a banjo and a small child *at the same time*. I even sort of fudged up an accompaniment for a friend's kid when she wanted to sing a sad song. Basically, it was just a minor and e minor trading off with each other, but she seemed to like it.

Yeah, I'm hooked.

5-string goodness

Woot! A couple weeks ago, I managed "Skip to My Lou" as a duet, but figured it would be a while yet on "Polly Wolly Doodle". Last night, I clumsily made it though a duet of "Polly Wolly Doodle" as well as another of "Skip to My Lou". *Happy dance*

And I have a new song to run my finger through the music as I repeat the sounds to myself - I can't remember not being able to read and learning, but I'm beginning to get an inkling of how hard that process sometimes can be (Wait, no, that's a B and this is a G... B, B, G... Oops, no, A... Wait, is this an F sharp here?) I'm still working out what the notes *are*, never mind trying to say this is a half and this is a quarter and this is a dotted eighth. I was proud of myself last night for catching my own mistakes by saying "that doesn't look right for that note" and figuring it out. Not, mind you, proud because I read it well, but because I did it at all.

And now, I have "Oh, Suzannah", or at least the first few bars to work out on the banjo.

One Deep Breath: Grandparents

Work hard hands
Hold granddaughter on tractor
Corn tassels below

Player piano
Deep bass and chirped child's voice
"How Great Thou Art"
Family gathers around
Evening crickets sing along

Tobacco and earth
Granddaddy takes his rest
Bird dogs nap outside

Dusty overalls
Day's work done, nap
Granny makes dinner.

Silver hair, sharp eyes
"Get away from that road!
Big ole truck'll run you down."
Oh, sweet forbidden berries
Down by red clay dust.

Potato harvest,
Plaid shirts and runaway mules,
Granny tells stories,
Magic words carry me back
Before I was born.

Last breath failing,
He held her hand tight.
Final goodbye
Long years, ten children, a farm
He crossed Jordan first.

Granny writes
Poems from the mountains.
Sometimes, so do I.

From wartime Europe,
Seeking safe harbor, to live,
Oma und Opa came,
Kristallnacht still in nightmares,
Starting all over again.

Faded letters, photos
Family killed, broken, scattered,
But she survives.

"My darling, come here."
Eyes fading, but mind swift, sharp
Joy: grandson's visit.
"Just a little kaffe, kuchen..."
A feast in peace, freedom.

The first poems concern my grandparents and great-grandparents on my dad's side. I used to live for trips back to the farm - rides on Grandpa's tractor, time in the kitchen with Granny, visiting the birddogs with Granddaddy, smelling of his tobacco, and Grandma, who had eyes in the back of her head and just knew when we kids were headed for the blackberry bushes near the road.

The last few concern my husband's currently surviving grandmother who came to America after getting her husband back following a Yom Kippur raid on their synagogue. Only a few members of their family survived.

Banjo adventures update

The banjo lessons have resumed after a break for my instructor to go on his summer vacation, and I've improved tremendously during the break. "Skip to My Lou" is playing smoothly and I managed to keep good enough time on it to do a duet with my instructor of "Skip to my Lou" on banjo and guitar. Woot! "Polly Wolly Doodle" is where "Skip to My Lou" was before the break - I've got the notes and the note values, now I need to work on smooth transitions and steady timing. Chord transitions are going better, too, enough so that I'm learning 2 more chords in preparation for learning "Oh, Susannah" perhaps as early as next week. And another chord or two, "just because".

And some of the "tricks" I've been learning as "breaks" from actually concentrating on getting those chord transitions perfect are really shaping up, too. I've got this cool blues slide that I've learned how to do on the banjo, but no song to put it in, which is a serious pity as it sounds so nifty that it's hard to believe that *I* made that happen. And the new chords are minor chords, so I got some musical theory thown into this lesson, which has made practicing my strumming that much more interesting. (And given me a couple of variations on the chords I already knew to play around with. Just messing around with open G can be more entertaining than I'd ever have believed when I first tried strumming out a song.)

The only bad part is that it is really hard to put the banjo down some mornings and get myself to work. I'm really looking forward to this weekend's camping with the banjo along. If the weather is nice, I'll be hiking and paddling about with a cheap pair of binoculars along for wildlife watching. And if we get confined to the lovely new tent, I'll be sitting in the vestibule, watching the rain and playing the banjo.

Just writing that last bit reminded me of the one and only time I've ever been to New Orleans. It was over 10 years ago, and I went there with my mom and my sister, visiting my dad who was on a nearby base. While I am so not a morning person, my sister is and so we found ourselves up and moving rather earlier than I might have chosen by myself. We decided to grab some breakfast at the Cafe du Monde (Menu: coffee, beignets - a sort of flat donutish pastry, and fresh orange juice. Mmmm.)

When we got there, the river was still covered in morning mist and the city wasn't really awake, but the great thing about the Cafe du Monde is that it is basically an open pavillion where you can people watch or whatever, so we sipped our chicory coffee and juice, ate pastries, and watched the French Quarter wake up. About halfway though, rain started to fall. It went from a few tentative drops to a deluge in about 10 seconds, and the next thing we knew, there was a sax player taking refuge under the overhang. And he was *good*. The rain was his personal rhythm section, and he played music that dodged between the raindrops, climbed to the clouds, fell to the ground, and became the mist wrapping us each about. He played the river and the city, the heat and the cool mist, the rain and the warm coffee. When the rain passed again, he began to gather up his case and his hat, but we made sure to get out there in time to leave our contribution to this artist.

Part of me, though, has ever since heard a sax playing bluesy jazz in every good rain storm.

Evening: One Deep Breath

Canoe glides softly
Into evening eddies
Tired.

Last bird calls echo
Crickets begin to sing
Evening in the hills

Mosquito lands
Ripples of water
Trout's dinner

Deck in the woods
Banjo in my hands
Evening whispers

This weekend, I went back to the hills to visit my parents and canoe down the same river I canoed down countless times as a child. I brought my sketchbook, but somehow just didn't even open it, preferring to sit out on the deck with my banjo, sometimes playing softly, but more often just watching the life of the woods around me.

On Saturday, we debated on whether to give up on the canoeing expedition and just go for a walk in the woods, but recommitted to the 7 mile paddle and headed off to the canoe livery, not getting there until the afternoon, and finding ourselves waiting. No problem: we watched the goats in a nearby pen wiggling through to get to the feedbox until our name was called, then headed upriver with a trailer of canoes.

Then we decided to explore a rock formation on public lands partway down the river, and lazily drifted for some of the trip. When we arrived near the end of the trip, I was exhausted, but happy. After my shower, as everyone else got ready for dinner, I again sat with my banjo in the gathering dusk.

Banjo progress

In the meantime, I've been working away at learning the banjo. Pretty much I've got the melody lines down for "Skip to My Lou" and "Polly Wolly Doodle" and am working on the chords for accompaniment. *sigh* "Skip to My Lou" is coming along, and would probably come along better if I could sing that song anywhere close to where my banjo is playing. "Polly Wolly Doodle" is kind of chugging along behind.

On the other hand, I've practiced so much that I've worn out my strings, so I learned how to replace them. Woot! It was oddly gratifying to see the wear spots, including a place where I'd basically worn through the winding wire on the low D string. I left the used strings with my instructor, who has been known to use old musical strings in craft projects and other reuses. And the next night realized I wanted the old strings because I spotted a repair project I could have used one in. So it goes.

This weekend, I'm taking the banjo with me when I visit my folks. The place we're staying is pretty isolated, so I can feel reasonably confident that I'm not disturbing anyone when I take the banjo out on the porch to practice those darn chords. And next week, it can come camping.

It's gotten to be a very relaxing thing I do - just pull out the banjo, feel the comfortable feel of the neck in my hand, the light weight resting on my lap, the brackets pressing into my arm, the strap keeping everything in place. Tune. Okay, now tune again. Run a couple scales up and down. Hmmm. Play with the chords a bit. Double check that tuning. (The tuning was better for a while, but new strings need constant tuning, as I am rapidly discovering.) Play with "Skip to My Lou"... Now, the chords. Okay, "Polly Wolly Doodle" melody. (I love doing the "Fare thee well, Fare thee well, Fare thee well, my fairy fay" bit*.) Play around a bit. Chords, right, I should be practicing chords. "Skip to My Lou" chords. Play around a bit... and so forth.

*And I just realized that that's a bit that freaked me out less than a month ago - convinced I wouldn't get the timing or the change to the A note easily. But I did. And now, it's my favorite part of the whole song. There's probably something really deep in that. And the whole "Polly wolly doodle all the day" bit is a lot easier than it looks, too.

Steve Martin is right. It is just about impossible to be totally depressed while playing the banjo. There's something cheering about that ringing sound, even if it does want tuning every 20 minutes.

Banjo progress

Learning the banjo comes with a lot of lessons that have absolutely nothing to do with where to put your left thumb to give the ring finger leverage on the strings, or how precisely to pick or strum with the right. Nor even how to grin properly while picking. One of the nifty neat-o things you learn is *who else* plays the banjo. Steve Martin plays the banjo - yes, the comedian. And he plays it well, too.

One of Steve Martin's sayings about the banjo is that it's impossible to be unhappy while the banjo is playing, which is one of the other things you learn. Joking aside, people like to listen to the banjo - it has that lovely light sparking sound. (Speaking of which, there's more music over at Quiet Paths. Woot!) Only a few months into my journey with the banjo, I've seen for myself that this is true. Despite my limited ability and songlist (Wild Thing, Skip to My Lou, and about half of Polly Wolly Doodle, at this point - and rapidly moving to all of Polly Wolly Doodle. Woot! Rise Up Singing, here I come!), my husband seems to like listening to me play the banjo.

When I went to my dad's welcome home party, someone found out I had a banjo, and I had to haul it out to play. Someone was actually tapping their foot and singing along as I played Skip to My Lou. I certainly didn't expect that anyone would want to do that when all I could play was 2 songs with any degree of comfort! That's another thing you learn: if someone finds out you have a banjo, they will frequently ask to hear you actually play. Even if you warn them that you don't play well, and are just learning. Let me tell you something: when I was learning to play the flute, mentioning this tended not to garner requests for performance. ("Oh, dear. Look at the time! So sorry - I need to... iron my socks... yeah, that's the ticket!" To be fair to the flute, though, when others would mention learning brass instruments, people would suddenly remember trips they needed to take to the next state.)

And another thing: progress may go in fits and starts, but the skills do transfer over, even if it doesn't immediately show. It took me *months* to learn Skip to My Lou. Polly Wolly Doodle, on the other hand, seems to be just flowing into my fingers after a short period of struggle. Wha? Where did that smooth transition come from? I know it wasn't there the last time I practiced, and now, I can hear a *song* when I play. It's going to be time for that songbook soon now, I think.

Learning music as an adult

Picking out "Skip to My Lou" gets ever smoother as I struggle to learn "Polly Wolly Doodle," returning to the easier song every time the going gets too rough. Even harder is practicing the strumming part - in large part because I'm still nervous about singing if there's any chance that another person might hear me (and where, exactly, can I go in my small apartment where noone can? I can hear the folks next door change their minds.) But to practice strumming the chords to the music, I need a melody line - traditionally provided by singing along. I've seriously considered buying a children's sing-along tape, just to have the melody line for the songs I'll be learning. Or maybe finding a way to get my computer to play the melody line so I don't have to sing where someone could possibly hear me. I've already tried to record me playing the melody, but recording music onto the computer is harder than you might think.

*sigh* Somehow, I've managed to convince my inner critic that banjo playing is okay. I'm allowed to produce music and it's not that bad and getting better every day. But the minute I open my mouth to sing, the internal chorus provides way too much dissonance. Maybe if I get that children's tape, I can sing and play along and that will be enough to silence the criticism from inside.

Singin' Polly Wolly Doodle all the day...

No, I haven't given up on learning the banjo, but it's been slow, incremental learning. My scales are now much better, and I can play "Skip to My Lou" both by picking out single notes and by playing the chords (though the chord changes are still a little slow, especially between D and C). But so far, "Skip to My Lou" and "Wild Thing" have been it. My instructor's computer had been upgraded, and so he could not immediately make me the music sheets.

So when I looked at the notation for "Polly Wolly Doodle" tonight, my heart fell. All those eighth notes! Yikes! Help! This is obviously music for people who know what they're doing, not music for me! And yet...

"Just ignore the rest of it, and play the first few notes for me."



Um, okay. I pull out an extra pick and use it to mark off the notes I'm going to play from those I will ignore. Okay... GABBG. Hey! That wasn't so bad. My timing was off, but the notes were easy... And wait, that second phrase is the same as the first... I still don't have the timing, but I can figure out the notes... And that really intimidating 3rd phrase isn't really so very bad...

Hey! I can sorta play something like this song! *Happy dance* And "Skip to My Lou" is sounding really good... Wow.

Banjo happy dance

My banjo instructor and I have both had a pretty hectic last two weeks, and last week, I didn't get a lesson in, nor did I do much practice, because... well, I've been wiped. So I basically went one week with only a little bit of practice and a second week where there was no practice. Yikes, I figured. I'm going to go back and discover that I can't do anything with the banjo and have to start practically all over again.

I was wrong. Not that I plan to regularly not practice, but I managed to pull off the smoothest g scale I've done yet, pretty much right off the bat. Where the heck did that come from? Admittedly, this was after I spent 15 minutes tuning. Banjos prefer attention, thank you, and leaving them untouched for more than a week leaves you with a banjo that not only is untuned, but that doesn't care to get into tune right away, thank you very much.

And I started practicing scales in different time signatures. And next week, when we both have our act together, and maybe even some actual sleep, I will be ready for a new song. (And I also got a glimpse of future possibilities tonight: my instructor played Strauss' "Blue Danube" on the banjo, then played it again, only in a 3 finger picking style. Whoa!)

Musical progress

It felt for the last week as though I were getting nowhere. The same 8 bars of music, over and over again, trying to smooth out the fingerings and the timing. And again... no, let's try those last 4 bars again, now all eight... And again...

And it began to come together. So today, I sat down with my instructor and tried to play, but tripped over my own fingers at the end. The second time, however, it worked - it actually sounded like a song. And then, on to the new: two new chords, 3 new timing drills, and, oh by the way, how are those G scales going? Whoof.

And a further admonition: work with what goes well, and take note of what's hard to master. And to add to the whole thing, I'm headed back home this weekend, so I'll have to squeeze in my practice where I can. My reward? A new song next week.

And the difficulties of learning the banjo

Anybody know how to get my hand to widen by, oh, say at least half an inch? It would be terribly helpful in playing the banjo. As it is, my hand simply cannot fret for both the A and the low F sharp at the same time without some pain, so my hands are kind of skipping over the neck of the banjo a bit. This is *not* in accord with my banjo instructor's dictum that we are trying to be lazy about this. I'm getting smoother, but my hand has to move somewhat more to get the same fingerings.

On the other hand, I remind myself that it's like sewing. I have sewed at least a portion of my clothing ever since I was 12, so I tend to "get" patterns, and have been known to ignore the directions that come with them. (We will not, at this moment, discuss the alterations I have had to make in a pattern I worked on this weekend.) But it's not magic. It's practice. More than 20 years worth. It's that jumper I sewed in 8th grade where I couldn't get the buttons to sit right, and the series of identical dresses I helped make for my sister when she went on mission (along with a set for me to take to college). It's the experience of designing and sewing from a young age. And those skills take a while to learn.

So, well, I figure I'm still working on the equivalent of the coverup I made at age 12 that had only two pattern pieces. It'll be a while yet before I can make the musical equivalent of a button-down top, but I'm learning.

Music and inspiration.

I've spent a little of this evening continuing to practice - I have a new variation on the scales to practice and I'm trying to figure out exactly how to contort my left hand to reliably get the notes in the harder bits of "Skip to My Lou." And it's good.

As I came home from work, I realized it was time to turn off the radio again and return to listening to music from a CD. Luckily, I had the perfect music to calm and soothe - Earthpassage by the good folks over at Quiet Paths. And it was marvellous - serene, wearing like the water in the recording at my my stiffness, the tension from listening to the words of people who claim to care about our soldiers while insisting that they can't be brought back, or even guaranteed to be sent with appropriate training and equipment. Wait a second, now remind me of who it is that doesn't support our troops...

But the falling waters, the intricate melodies weaving themselves around the natural sounds... ah. I have now gotten the chance to hear them all, and they are all very good. And so I got home to find that Christine had posted some really incredible thoughts on the nature of inspiration and the sacred. Wow. Check it out, folks.

Tuesday is music night

I and my newly acquired "Skip to My Lou" skills will be headed for banjo lessons tonight, where I hope to learn the next couple of bars, and possibly the end bars. (The 3rd set of 2 bars is the same as the first.) Over the weekend, once again, my family got to share some long distance music - this time my three chords and the beginning of "Skip to My Lou", which I hope to have mastered by the time Dad comes home. (He has his travel orders to come home. Woot!)

UPDATE: Well, I did it. Played it through, though now I've got to get the hard parts on the same rhythm as the easy bits.

Music

I've done it - all three chords, smooth transitions, on rhythm. *happy dance* And now I'm working on making it happen each time. Lots of practice this weekend.

Along with seed catalogs. Am I the only one to love seed catalogs? Hmmm. Yeah, there are flowers, but look! There's a heritage variety of tomatoes... and golden raspberries... and we're far enough south for peaches and pecans, but far enough north for the blueberries... never mind that I live in a tiny apartment with a balcony in partial shade (we do get a couple hours of sun in the late afternoon.)

I don't want a big house, but I do want an orchard and a garden. And an outdoor sheltered kitchen for processing the lot of it. Unfortunately, there were no jobs for me or my husband where we could have afforded the land for that, and here there are jobs, but no land. So I get a seed catalog and try one more time to get some radishes and thumbelina carrots to grow in a windowbox on the balcony.

More progress

The rhythm is sounding better still today, and the G chord is working well, but something about my fingering isn't quite right, so the C and D sound muffled unless I sit there and work at my fingering, which means that the rhythm is gone. *sigh* So I've been picking up the banjo, trying to get it until I get frustrated, then putting it down and walking away for a bit. Then trying again.

But in the arts I'm more familiar with - well, I have a temporary banjo strap in place. (Once the current project is off my loom, I intend to warp it with a threaded in crow's foot/triangle pattern that will make a nice wide and strong strap.) What's currently on is an old inkle strap that I used to use as a belt. And I modified the bag at the back of Pete Seeger's banjo book to work a little better for me and sewed one up out of some really ugly blue paisley cotton upholstery fabric I once found at a yard sale. All I need to finish it is a long zipper. (The longest one in my sewing basket was a mere 22 inches and fell about 6 inches short.)

And then I heard about the milk chocolate Jesus from Don over at Country Contemplative. An artist created a sculpture of Jesus on the cross from 200 pounds of milk chocolate. The sculpture portrays him naked and anatomically correct. Predictably, some folks pitched a fit, at least one calling it "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever" and the show was cancelled. Interestingly, when I visited the BBC site, one of the most viewed stories there concerned the suffering of lepers in India. I would have thought that that would be more engaging than a chocolate sculpture, especially given that there are already chocolate crosses for Easter, and a Jesus pan that looks like you'd maybe get a month's use out of it before the nonstick coating began to flake off. Perhaps they never saw the kick balls with crosses on them. Or the cross shaped suckers available for $4.95 a dozen. (Not to mention the kind with swirls or the ones with popping candy you can dip the cross into.) Oh, and I did find a chocolate crucifix, by the way, along with chocolate images of Jesus and Mary. And, oddly enough, a chocolate Torah. Wha?

Or maybe the problem is the nudity. Please. The Romans were hardly known for their touchy-feely, bleeding heart lovingkindness toward convicts. I mean, they'd already sentenced him to die by torture, a little exposure wasn't going to bother them even a tiny bit, especially since the local culture had far stricter modesty taboos, which would only make the punishment that much worse. And I can't imagine that this is the first such depiction, though probably the first in 200 pounds of milk chocolate. Actually, there are tons of pictures of naked baby jesus from the Renaissance. And frankly folks, I just don't see a little nudity as worse than genocide in Darfur, war in Iraq, or even than pollution in the Chesapeake. For pity's sake, can we take that outrage and channel it toward making this world a little better?

So I found myself proposing crucifixion scenes:

Jesus dressed in an orange jumpsuit with bandaged eyes. The soldiers below playing electronic poker. The whole thing surrounded by loose loops of barbed wire.

Jesus dressed in battle fatigues, possibly with one leg missing.

Jesus dressed in a bag over his head, with electrodes attached to the sites of the 5 wounds. I’d make this one interactive, with a button below it. Possibly the button would start a sound recording with the “Eli, Eli…” said not in Aramaic, but in English and Arabic.

No, they’re not pretty, and no, they’re not traditional. They’re not meant to be. I’d be very tempted to put an image of a hammer and nails on the gallery handout, were I to do this as a show.

For the record, this isn’t even close to the type of art I make, but if I were going to do a crucifixion piece, this is how I’d do it. Who are we crucifying today?

My banjo on my knee

One important thing I've learned: I need to stop by a hardware store and pick up a couple swivel clips, which I can then sew one of my handwoven straps to - it's easier to play the banjo when you're not having to think about holding it up quite so much. (And sewing up a gig bag looks like a project for soon. Much more compact and easier to cope with than a big cardboard box, plus I can sew in pockets for music and picks. I think I've found a use for the upholstery fabric in my fabric stash.)

Second important thing I've learned: strumming is not as easy as it looks. Seriously. I'm going to be practicing just strumming (with three easy chords) all week. GG CCC DD CCC. By the time I've got them down, I don't think anyone around me will ever want to hear "Wild Thing" ever again. So it's good that I've been promised "Oh, Suzannah" for next week, isn't it?

Thirdly, um, wow. I can tune a banjo. And produce a chord. Mostly.

Neat lessons. Now for a week and a half's worth of practice. GG CCC DD CCC...

The Post Office delivers!

Dad's got his blanket and I've got my banjo! Woot.

I'd been expecting it to take longer than it did for the blanket to arrive, but it's there. Happy dance.

And my banjo... Well, I got to my friends' house last night and they asked me - did I see the big box in the entryway? Why, no, I hadn't. From Deering Banjo, to me. Whoo hoo! My banjo!

Like a kid at Christmas, I tore open the outer box and reached in, to find a second box. This one had cool Art Nouveau decorations all over it and was shaped like... surprise! a banjo case. Happy dance. So now I am the happy possessor of an out of tune banjo. Saturday's plans include a stop by my local music shop for a tuning doohickey (the kind that is electronic since I have exactly no musical confidence*) and maybe some hardware for a strap. (I plan to weave my own strap, since I can and even know what pattern I'd like to weave for it - and because I have plenty of handwoven straps around that aren't quite what I want, but will do as a placeholder.) After I have the tuning doohickey, plans include playing with the banjo until I'm told to cut it out, for heaven's sake. And I plan to ask at the shop about an instructor for getting me actually started.

* I was once told by the choir director at the church I attended at the time that God didn't need to hear my singing, in large part because my voice didn't blend with the others. I couldn't know at the time that my voice didn't blend because I was beginning puberty and my voice was beginning to lower into the sort of tenor that many female blues singers have. It took me years to discover that singing didn't have to hurt, after she'd had me singing in a really awful falsetto. On the plus side, I did become a reader at a younger age than the church usually allowed, with her full support, and I also did liturgical dance. That deeper voice was an advantage when it came to reading from the prophets, and I had the coordination to do modern dance and ballet before some of my classmates. On the minus side, I spent years ashamed of singing, even by myself.

As an adult, I've been challenging myself to reclaim music. I sing along to music in the car. I belt out spirituals and labor songs when I'm by myself. I've even done some sacred harp singing. Actually owning my own musical instrument is a little intimidating, but also freeing. Hah! She didn't like my singing? How about singing *and* banjo?