More Music

Given his age and level of experience, I didn't expect any hitches in adding the tenor sax player to the almost-weekly funk/swing/bebop/bossa jam. I guess my apprehension had more to do with how he would perceive Lukas (the upright bass player) and I. As with most anxiety I've felt in the past few months, this turned out to be baseless - it was just a jam, nothing less: trading licks and grooving on bass lines without pretense. I really only engaged the funkier numbers, but I never expected myself to swing during my current effort to consume less caffeine.

Right after we played the last chart, my phone rang. It was an invitation to Martinsbräu, a microbrewery downtown, and everybody involved was already there. Not inclined to keep my friends waiting, I decided my instrument was portable enough to take with me.

We sat and talked over the drone of the open kitchen and chatting patrons while a swarm of vociferous tree people set up in the center of the room. I noticed they openly carried brass instruments. I looked at my horn case. I considered my options.

Then things got ridiculous.



"Wow!" you might say. "What kind of new and enchanting musical form is this? I am entertained but also intruiged!"

And then I might say that you should stop talking like that because nobody has ever talked like that ever. Goodness.

While I love the principles behind this cultural phenomenon known as Guggenmusik and will tell you why I love it in just a moment, I should probably deal with the reader's first impressions; namely that the performance was an example of excellent musicianship in the same way the Ford Pinto was a stellar example of ethical risk management. To their credit, the trumpets generally kept it together but I counted about -1 correct notes from the 'bone section. It wasn't frustrating to play along with, but rather fascinating - through that wall of quintuple-forte came a different note from every bell, and every note was somewhere above or below what I assumed the correct notes were supposed to be; the overall auditory effect was a weird sort of harmonic sleeve around the correct frequencies with a profound sense of nothingness in the middle.

Unfortunately they weren't playing "Wormhole in Pi Flat," they were playing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and blasting it loud enough to appall the dead, which is actually the whole point of the thing. It's a 400-year-old tradition of the Halloween formula: evil spirits bring disease and bad weather, and the good citizens scare them away with garish costumes, silly music, and huge parties. In order to effectively drive the spirits away, the music has to be as insane as the costumes and festivities. A correct interpretation of Guggenmusik requires its own special brass technique, described by Wikipedia as "false playing," in which the melody and rhythm are correctly played but all other parts are fair game for unrestrained blastissimo trombone nonsense.

What I'm saying is that the tree people up there were doing it right. The way the instruments are played and the emphasis on loud loud LOUD percussion results in a fast, comical, and ultimately fun type of parade music that can under no circumstances take itself seriously.

While I don't think I would buy a Guggenmusik album, I appreciate the principle behind its appeal: it is pure spastic fun distilled into sound. People can and will dance to it regardless of technicality or even coherence.

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The aforementioned American musicians with whom I play (see last post) are huge bluegrass fans, and so they were naturally pretty excited when a local banjo player invited us to a bluegrass jam session outside of town. It was the ultimate idealization of a bluegrass jam: a dimly lit room with a bunch of old guys and a few younger guys just throwing suggestions into the circle of guitars, banjos, mandolins and washboards. The four in our party were welcomed and we played some of the pieces we knew while the old-timers played along. The atmosphere had no tension that I could detect. There were no assumptions or pretensions, other than one mandolin player's guess that I'd rather solo over a blues, which was a relief. I guess the word I'm looking for is "chill." It was a chill acoustic jam of the highest order.

I had my first German board game experience today, which I will discuss once I understand the rules, which I suspect will be never.

Cheers,
-Jared